Guilt

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Timothy Keller:

Franz Kafka saw all this coming long ago. In his book The Trial, Josef K. is living a normal life, and on his thirtieth birthday he’s arrested. He is indicted and put under house arrest and interrogated and given hearing after hearing, but he never learns what he’s accused of. At first he thinks it’s all a mistake and he can easily clear it up. But as time goes on, he begins to look at his life and he realizes that there were bad things he did that just might be the reason for all this. He begins to doubt himself. But he cannot get to the bottom of it. Does he deserve to be arrested or not? Is he guilty or not?

     In the end, he never finds out. His jail warden brings him outside and stabs him to death. And the story ends. Many college students who are required to read The Trial find it frustrating in the extreme. It seems to be a dark, hard-to-follow story that in the end has no resolution. There seems to be no point. But as John Updike wrote, “Kafka epitomizes . . . the modern mind-set: a sensation of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated.”

     Modern culture has done everything to say: “We don’t believe in God. We don’t believe in heaven. We don’t believe in hell. We don’t believe in moral categories.” Kafka says it hasn’t helped. If anything, it has made it worse—because our guilt now can’t be eradicated. We can say, “I don’t believe in sin, I don’t believe in guilt,” and yet there’s a voice in us that calls us cowards, calls us fools, makes us ashamed, makes us say we’re not living up. There’s something going on. What is it? Secular culture has no definitive answer.

(Timothy Keller, Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? [New York: Viking, 2022], p. 124.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria