The fear of God

By Tyler Tankersley

I recently had coffee with a man who has been visiting our church. We each held our hands around our mugs and shared with one another the way we had been raised and how it helped shape our views of God.

At one point I asked him, "Did you ever hear someone tell you that God loves you?" His eyes darted away from mine, their corners filled with tears, and he said, "Never. Never. We were constantly told that we were totally depraved and that we were to cower before God in fear and terror. We were told that God hated us."

Hearing this broke my heart, but I have to realize that this man is not alone. Other people have grown up hearing a similar picture of God. They hear preachers tell them that they are nothing but "sinners in the hands of an angry God." They are told the only proper posture before God is to fear God in dismay and abject terror.

I find myself frustrated when I hear of preachers using scare tactics to try to convince people into a life of faith. Those scare tactics arise from an ignorant understanding of what it means to "fear God." In the book "The Problem of Pain," C.S. Lewis writes that the fear we are supposed to have toward God is not the same kind of terror we would feel in the presence of a raging tiger or ghostly specter. Rather, the "fear of God" is a sensation of utter awe in which we feel "wonder and a certain shrinking" and a "sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant of or prostration before it." However, many pastors do not make such a distinction in their preaching, and they attempt to terrify parishioners by appealing to their sense of dread.

While I have beloved ministry colleagues who do, I do not subscribe to a theological paradigm that believes humans are utterly and totally depraved. Do not misunderstand me, I do think that we human beings need to hear that we too often think of ourselves more highly than we ought to, but I also think that we sometimes run the risk of thinking of ourselves less highly than we ought. As Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim said, "To speak less highly of the human is to diminish the quality of God's own work." The creation stories in Genesis remind us that each and every human being is crafted in the Imago Dei (image of God). Anytime we portray any humans as worthless, we are degrading that image of God imprinted upon their souls.

That's what I told the man on that day in the coffee shop. I told him about a God who loves him. I told him about a God who loved him enough to put on flesh and blood and allowed himself to be crucified. As the Apostle Paul wrote: "God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).