Terry’s Take… Fear or Love of God? (Part IV)
So… for our final post on fearing God… let’s view this from our historical approach as Lutheran Christians.
As Lutherans we learn in confirmation class that fear and love go together, from Luther’s Small Catechism. In the first commandment, Luther explains we should “fear, love, and trust in God above all things.” In the commandments that follow, he writes “we should fear and love God,” omitting trust in commandments two through ten. In Luther’s understanding, fear and love are both necessary dispositions toward God. We fear God because He is sovereign, and we love God because He has brought us into relationship with Himself.
Furthermore, Luther also wrote, “Only the comfort of the Gospel can bring the terror [of God’s wrath] to an end” because “it delivers what God promises, forgiveness of sins, and thereby creates faith.” For Luther, fear and love go together because our love of God brought about by the Gospel brings our fear (i.e. terror) of God’s wrath to an end.
From a typical North American point of view… a person cannot both fear and love someone. While Christians do understand fear can be terror, proper fear of God is not this type of fear as terror. So there is a conflict between the North American cultural understanding of fear… and the Christian understanding of fear. While one certainly experiences fear of God’s wrath, Christians understand proper fear of God in the context of His love, even as a fear of reverence.
Our modern cultural understanding of fear is viewed in the context of adversarial relationships, whereas the Christian understanding of fearing God is in the context of His love for us.
Although many today view fear as the opposite of love, I argue with Luther that fear and love come together in the status of the person as a child of God: namely, filial fear. The Christian’s condition of justification in Christ our Lord enables the Christian to exercise filial fear, which is the fear that reorients the Christian to love God in the act of repentance as it is supported by trust (faith) in God.
So… the Christian can experience God’s love while also fearing Him. This may seem like a purely academic distinction… but it has important ramifications for our Christian life.
Christian fear is centred in Jesus Christ… and Christ reorients the Christian’s fear. Fear and love come together in filial fear as the child of God is moved to love God as a result of trusting in God’s promise, which is faith.
Resource
The following free link is a more exhaustive commentary on Fearing and Loving God: