There is that within human beings which believes-in a god of fear - a god who, in some sense "rules" the human world, and who demands sacrifice, propitiation, worship and absolute obedience...
I mean that god who is a characteristic underpinning and default of much monotheism, including that of many Christians (of many kinds) throughout history.
Because this is indeed a god of fear; people are afraid to give up their habitual attitude of sacrifice, propitiation, worship, obedience.
Such fear as The ruling passion is very evident when interacting with many Christians - whatever lip-service they pay to God being our loving Father.
Such Christians do not really trust God, because they are afraid of God; and they are afraid of God because their mental image of God - their understanding of God - is of an all powerful, all-knowing, yet incomprehensible and ultimately alien entity.
As I said, this image of a god of fear seems natural and instinctive to humans - but, despite nearly 2000 years of confusion and conflation - this image is not the Christian Creator God as revealed by Jesus Christ.
The God revealed by Jesus does Not demand sacrifice, propitiation, worship, or obedience; but instead "love" - or rather, Christ's God does not "demand" love, but is the God for those who recognize His love, and who love Him, and Fellow Men.
Such is the revelation - yet we need not depend on revelation to know the Good and Loving Christian God - because this loving creator God is implied by reality.
For there to be creation, there must be love. (If you really think about it...!) Only a loving God would create.
And we (you and me, as individuals) could only know this, if that loving God loved us (you and me, as individuals).
To put it the other way around - the god of fear is a real god - which is why he is universally recognized and responded to. But he is not the creator God; he is not the primary god.
The primary god (call him "God") must be the creator, and the creator must be loving, else he would not create - and must love us as individuals, else we could not know anything.
The god of fear is a secondary god; one who hates creation, who uses creation for self-gratification instead of love, who inverts creation against itself.
Therefore the reality of that god of fear implies the god of love as primary creator.
But this argument that the god of fear implies that the God of Love is creator is not a logical entailment; it is an argument about persons.
To accept my argument entails that we already, personally, value love above all. If we do not already value love as primary, as our highest aspiration; then we can just as easily accept the inversions of the god of fear.
So, you can see how much of being a Christian hinges upon the fact that god is Not incomprehensible*.
Knowing about God is not the same as knowing God - just as knowing-about some human being is not the same as knowing-him.
Or, properly expressed, how vital it is to being-Christian that we each know God! - and know God as we might know other people such as close family or a deep friend - experiential knowing of an individual.
Unless we know God we cannot love God; and this means we must be capable of such love.
And if we do know God: when we are-knowing God, we know His love for us, and ours for Him - and then we will Not fear Him.
(Although; in this mortal life we cannot always be in this state of knowing, nor even most of the time - and then we must be faithful to our memory of knowing. Thus the need for faith.)
*Note added: To clarify. If God is allowed (by metaphysical assumption) to be incomprehensible, and if it is allowed for us to assume that God had no personal motivation for creation (because God is assumed to be an entity "without passions" an entity that therefore cannot be motivated); then the reality of a god of fear doesn't imply a primary loving creator God. In other words, if the creator god is assumed to be incomprehensible in His motivations, then we cannot exclude that the god of fear is the primary god. This is why those Christians whose faith is shaped by a core belief in god's incomprehensibility, posit a god whose characteristics seem to be essentially the same as those of god as understood and described by the pure monotheisms.
18 comments:
Very well put. "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom," but it must be taken to its natural conclusion.
@Wm - Thanks!
"The God revealed by Jesus does Not demand sacrifice, propitiation, worship, or obedience; but instead "love" - "
Spot on. Would probably do many people a great deal of good to reflect upon that.
I've never understood the injunction to fear. I've heard various "experts" qualify the word as *actually* meaning reverence, devotion, admiration, etc., but that always strikes me as hot air. Needless word games to qualify the unqualifiable.
The problem with fear is that it paralyzes the spirit and inhibits one's capacity to love. The post reminded me of one of Berdyaev's best quotes, "“Fear is never a good counselor and victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.”
I'm not sure if fear is truly the first spiritual duty, but it also strikes me that fear would severely impair any other spiritual motivation or duty...so there's that.
@Frank - There is no injunction to "fear God" in the Fourth Gospel, quite the opposite (fear is only mentioned five times in the King James version, and mainly referencing "fear of the Jews").
I regard the idea Christians ought to *fear* God as a falsehood retrospectively introduced by trying to conflate Jesus's new religion, with the Judaism of the Torah/ Old Testament. (Trying to make Jesus "backwards compatible" as it were.)
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."
"Work out your salvation with fear and trembling."
There is a place for fear in the life of men and Christians. We should fear for our immortal souls and not for our physical bodies, as our Lord admonished Peter for his lack of faith on the water. The Saints become less fearful as they draw closer to God.
Given that we live in possibly the worst society in all of history (as you have repeatedly pointed out, Bruce), then some fear is appropriate. Our minds have been steeped in wickedness from the cradle, and this wickedness is reinforced upon us every minute of our lives. We struggle against our weak and susceptible nature, and may not prevail in the end, as many do not.
"I've never understood the injunction to fear. I've heard various "experts" qualify the word as *actually* meaning reverence, devotion, admiration, etc., but that always strikes me as hot air. Needless word games to qualify the unqualifiable."
There's the power of the solid old Saxon word "fear" against the voluptuous, flowery Latinate derivatives. Yes, FEAR God -- you feel that in your gut, and there is no misunderstanding it.
@Nathan - I've written a fair bit that fear is a sin - indeed a besetting sin of The west, now, because so many people regard it as a virtue.
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/search?q=sin+fear
Even for someone (not me) who regards the whole Bible as equally authoritative, there are scores of injunctions in various words to "fear not" - so that fear is a problem was apparently well known.
You say "Yes, FEAR God -- you feel that in your gut, and there is no misunderstanding it."
Yes, that is exactly "the god of fear" - common to many, perhaps most, religions throughout history and still today - the god who demands sacrifice, propitiation, worship, obedience...
But that "god in your gut" is Not the Christian God, who is the God in your Heart; the God who Jesus taught, and the creator whom anyone can know who is capable of love - and wants to know.
i'm afraid (pun) that, for many people, fear (of God, and hell) may be the only way to live a half decent life, instead of whatever they are doing now. of course this is not ideal, but still, while the many cannot graduate to love, some fear of God might not be the worst thing in the world, or at least for the world.
@Laeth - Yes, that was - at any rate - the case in the past - in the classical-medieval era. I think that is why so many people have observed that "all religions converge" - what this really means is that all *religions* converge in terms of being an institutional basis for social organization. In other words, traditional societies are controlled by military and priestly power, and both have significant elements of fear as incentives for cohesion.
Some "repent" out of fear. Some "repent" out of guilt. Neither of these are enough.
The most indelible effects come from repenting out of love.
Often it begins with fear and guilt, but your salvation, your relationship with God, never catalyzes until you learn to love.
Great article. I've always had an issue with the term 'God-fearing Christian"...
I'm not sure if you've addressed it elsewhere but do you agree with the view that the God of the old and new testament are in fact two different Gods? One, this 'God of Fear' or Demiurge - the other the 'God of Love' / Heavenly Father?
@NN - You speak of God, and what you say is probably correct as far as God-minus-Jesu is concerned - i.e. that people repent (which is to recognize and acknowledge sin) from various motives including fear.
But to follow Jesus is a different matter, and what distinguishes Christianity. If we follow Jesus is must be from love and nothing else, because Heaven is a place and state where love is always primary.
Those who are ruled by fear may want eschew sin and to avoid Hell; but that is a double negative (rejecting evil) and of itself that seems to lead to the desire for annihilation of the self, the ego, and consciousness - so that we become "incapable" of sin.
The Christian ideal - brought by Jesus Christ - is a "second creation"; the new world of Heaven which is a positive ideal of eternal resurrected life, of ourselves as persons but transformed so that we live by love. No place for fear as a long-term existential motivation.
@Michael C - "do you agree with the view that the God of the old and new testament are in fact two different Gods? One, this 'God of Fear' or Demiurge - the other the 'God of Love' / Heavenly Father?"
Yes, at least these two, and probably more than two.
The point I would emphasize is that God the prime creator can/ could only get us "so far" - no matter how such a God is conceptualized.
All monotheisms (whether absolute, or relative) therefore seem to share quite a lot of characteristics - to some extent they are several Gods, or perhaps focused on different aspects of the primary creator in context of this "entropic" world,
Jesus Christ was *necessary* to enable resurrection to eternal Heavenly life (that is, in resurrection we stay ourselves, our essential selves, free agents and capable of participating in creation - but motivated only by love, having left behind all sin/ all motivations that are opposed to divine creation).
Before Jesus's transformative work (the Second Creation as I have recently decided to call it), this was not possible, it was not an available option.
@Bruce,
indeed. i cannot really see a return, en masse, to that kind of organization in the West, so maybe the question is academic. at the same time, I just don't see it as a possibility that there will be a mass awakening to christian love on its own - that is, to a positive (and entirely personal) motivation. and I can quite see how positive but impersonal motivations (such as new agers have) are possibly more destructive than the fear of God of yesteryear.
I think positive personal motivation will always remain the minority - much like it was in the Gospels, too. the majority needs not only positive motivations, but negative ones, in my opinion. so that for most the question is not fear or no fear, but fear of what. and fear of something other than God/hell, seems to become, quite rapidly, envy/spite/resentment. you've documented this quite well. and on the flipside, I think the fear of eternal consequences (cause that's really what it is) is not entirely unhealthy, not in this life anyway, even for those primarily motivated by something positive.
I guess my perspective is that, at least while we're here, we need also negative feelings and motivations - a bit of fear of eternal consequences, a bit of guilt for failing to live up to the ideal, a bit of hatred for evil, and so forth. and the only question is how we balance these out with the positive feelings and motivations , and the healthy balance depends very much on the individual in question.
@Laeth - "at least while we're here, we need also negative feelings and motivations"
I think feelings of the kind you mention are in Heaven, as well as here - but not in an "existential" sense, not in terms of life motivations. Was there isn't in Heaven is the permanent and unmixed desire to oppose divine creation; but instead to contribute to it. There will still be "trial and error" because we cannot know the future.
I am less concerned about what happens in a public way than that people do not paint themselves into a corner of rejecting resurrection and Heaven so thoroughly that they are unlikely to change their mind *after death* - when the possibility of Heaven becomes a known-reality, and the decision must be made.
What I seem to see around me, especially in the West; is a very fixed and deep determination against salvation - even if it was known for sure to be a possibility. And I think that many devout Christian church members are among the worst offenders, because the "salvation" they desire is not the one offered by Jesus.
Some want blissful annihilation of the self, some want actual annihilation of all consciousness, some want a largely depersonalized monotheistic-type "Heaven" that is only one step above annihilation, and represents the desire for reversion to pre-mortal spirit life.
@Bruce,
"What I seem to see around me, especially in the West; is a very fixed and deep determination against salvation"
i very much agree, but don't believe that determination comes from fear. it seems to me to be something else entirely, more like apathy (in all those cases you mentioned - impersonality, or anihilation, or spiritism). not that i think fear of God can fix it either. at this point i don't know if anything can.
Thank you for writing your thoughts. The analogy I have found most helpful to understand the “fear of the Lord” is to think of it as an injunction to wake up to reality, to the power of God. Kind of like the fear of gravity, the fear of electricity. Not being afraid, but treating it with seriousness and respect. This seems to go along with the NT stories about Ananias and Sapphira for example - lying to the Holy Spirit. Like a shock of cold water to the face, waking up to the reality of an Ultimate Being should not be a casual affair. And this helps me see why it is the beginning of wisdom - it’s a vision of reality that cuts through the fog of boredom and distraction and mundane and ordinary - we are, here and now, in the presence of GOD. And then from there the news about the glory of God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ is compelling and absolutely overwhelmingly good. This God, the ultimate power, is Love.
This also clarifies Jesus’ teachings on “do not fear those who can kill the body, fear Him who can cast body and soul into hell.” It’s waking up to reality, to what really matters. Fear of the Lord in this sense (vision of the reality and power of the Lord) casts out all lesser fears. And when we know this God of power as the God of Love, there is no room left for fear at all.
@Kate. I think I agree. In effect, fear of the Lord is a pre-Christian/ minus-Jesus thing, and because unopposed tends to become dominant. This is transformed (or ought to be transformed) by the advent of Jesus - after which it should become "overwhelmed" by Love.
@Bruce
Yes. And in my experience it is a necessary, or at least helpful, precursor/context from which to step forward into the rapture and worship of Christ, and the God of love. Without this sense of gravity and reality, “God is love” can be reduced to banality. At least as I observe it in my own experience.
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