Fear The Lord: The Beginning of Wisdom

By Dr. George Meudeking

"Fear God!." It is among the most persistent and repeated themes of the Bible. One of its more consequential expressions is, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Ps.111:10) Despite its importance in Scripture, our generation has almost forcibly pushed that promise out of our religious sensibility. Our"palsy-walsy" God, who can be found just by looking inside ourselves, who is at our beck and call at any moment that we condescend to nod in His direction – which of us would "fear" that kind of Divine Being?

In my early pastor-years, I gave a catechism to a Mormon prospect and told him that preceding his membership we would use the book for instruction in the faith. When I next visited his home, he held up the book with no little consternation and disappointment. "I don't know if I want to join this church or not," he said. "Here with every Commandment it says that 'We are to fear and love God, so that we do this or don't do that." What does that mean, 'FEAR' God? I'm not afraid of any damn fellow!" Of course I weaseled out of the challenge. ! needed more members in that infant home mission church. I did just what some of our modern (politically correct) Bible translations do. I said, "O, that doesn't mean 'fear'. // means reverence or awe. You know, just the way you feel when you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and are overwhelmed by the sight. So in the catechism Luther says we should think of God with reverence and awe."

My limping explanation was good enough for him. But not fair to him, for it certainly wasn't good enough for the Bible or for its use of that contentious term. Almost invariably the first word spoken in a biblical narrative when any human is confronted by the Divine Presence is, "Fear not!" The naked face-to-face meeting with the Ail-holy is anything but casual. Every time.

Fear in the Presence

We will come closer to comprehending the feeling those encounters generated, if we accept the suggestion of Henry Guntrip, in his Psychotherapy and Religion (1957). Along with Leslie Weatherhead, he was the pioneer English bridge-builder between psychotherapy and pastoral counseling. He said that the closest we come to the experience which Bible characters have had when the angel of the Lord stands astride their path, is our feeling as we awaken from a nightmare.

The sheer terror, the virtual horror in which we try to scramble backtoward reality-consciousness, mimics the "fear of the Lord" which Bible people felt. No small part of this feeling is the wonder with which we try to retrace the dream images and marvel how little they should have been able to induce such fright.

Guntrip argues that this terror is itself the intrusion of the Supernatural into our world. We do, in those frightful and awe-full moments, become immediate with the Other-world. It has broken in upon us. The Scriptures are of a piece here. He dwells in "light unapproachable." He is one "Whom no man has ever seen or can see." "Our God is a consuming fire." To stand in the Divine Presence is no small matter.

The (W) Holy Other

World War I blasted out of existence the anticipated world of eternal progress, shaming it for the theological fantasy it was. Among those who experienced the col lapse, theologians Karl Barthand Rudolph Otto began to talk about God not only as the "Holy Other," but as the "Wholly Other." Barth insisted that only the "Word" could reveal this "Other" to us.

In his classic, The Idea of the Holy, Otto named this experience of the holiness, of the "Otherness" of God, "numinous." He pointed out that the feeling of the holy is unlike anything in our world of phenomena. It is numenal. It is the actual occurrence of the otherwise unknowable Numen, which was Immanuel Kant's postulated origin of our world of scientific phenomenal knowledge.

This experience of the holiness of God – to say nothing of its consequential sensibility as fear – is alien to our present religious culture. Were our pastors to talk seriously about "such a worm as I" as did the old hymns of the Church, they would be looking for another pastorate before the sun set on their morning sermon. We simply will not countenance any diminution of "self-esteem." Our religious establishments accept no more premier responsibility for their mission than engendering "self-esteem."

Feeling good about myself is now the standardized test for religious achievement. Feeling good about an experience in itself defines that experience as good and true. We have available in our culture no other criterion for moral integrity. In our relativistic age every absolutivity is denounced (except the one absolute requirement that a belief in absolutes is not be tolerated because it makes one a fanatic.) So if it makes me feel good, that is all I need to depend on for truth or right. No further critique is fitting, since feelings cannot be judged. They just are.

As always, we pay a price for thus ignoring the Reality of our human condition. Our price is to become slave to the secular expression of utter finiteness, slave to a pervasive and unending sense of anxiety. The famous psychotherapist Rollo May called ours, "The Age of Anxiety." For fear of God we have substituted "ontological anxiety," to use Tillich's descriptive term.

Feeling Good in the Church

Since the '60s and the Flower Children, church people have moved noticeably and uncritically into the frame of reference that if it makes me feel good, that is all we need to depend on for truth or right.

Example: I was recently approached by a retired pastorwho had just attended a funeral at his church. The keepsake obituary bulletin used atthe funeral read:

"Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there, I do not sleep, lam a thousand winds that blow; I am the diamond's gift of snow, I am the sunlight on ripened grain; I am the autumn's gentle rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush, I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there; I did not die."

That pastor was distressed because the mortician passed off this pantheistic drivel on the unsuspecting Christians in his church. With great generosity I optimistically volunteered to write the mortician and invite him to replace that message with some message like Psalm 23, or the Resurrection passages from St. John's Gospel, whenever he expected that Christian mourners would predominate.

I faxed the letter, and within five minutes of its arrival atthe mortuary, my modem was churning out his reply. It agitatedly chastised me for placing the blame on the wrong person. The Christian family mourners were the ones who had looked overall possible poetry he had submitted for that keepsake, and they had chosen this one! Further, this was one of the most frequent choices made at his mortuary, he said, so that quite obviously, I didn't know what was Christian or non-Christian any better than he did.

With the plague of New Age Religion theologies that ooze from our media day after day, we can be sure that not only that family could not distinguish Christian truth, but that a good share of the mainline Christians of ourtime would probably also see nothing amiss. If it makes us feel good, it must be true.

Test the Spirits

St. John reminds us, however, that it is our responsibility to "test the spirits to see whether they be of God." How do we know the false prophets from the Spiritof God? Answer, "Every spiritwhich confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God." (I Jn4: 1-3).

This passage is theological to its core. The Word, Jesus Christ, took flesh and lived among us. He entered this disordered sin-driven world to rescue us from that sinful state. If any behavior or idea violates the fact that it is our sin which is being reckoned with and dealt with by the incarnation, passion and death of an incomprehensibly gracious Savior – then that behavior or idea cannot have originated with God. It is false prophesy, the extrusions of the anti-Christ, as St. John goes on to say.

Does any given behavior or idea exalt or repudiate the enfleshed Son of God as the only Savior? That John insists, is the test for doctrinal falsehood. Does "testing" the behavior/idea expose the sinfulness of the human agent and the total need for overcoming that condition? Does it at the same time convey the assurance that God Himself has acted to "reconcile the world unto Himself" by Jesus' coming to "tent among us," (John 1: 14)? If it does, we are moving within the framework of the Holy Spirit's enlightenment.

We are indebted to Martin Luther for encapsulating this process of individual testing, to see if the spirits that drive or inform the Christian are falseùor are from God. In the first of the 95 Theses that brought on the Reformation, Luther told us that Jesus Christ willed that the entire life of a Christian be "a life of repentance."

There we have it: the Christ enfleshed Himself so that the alienation we earned by our sinful choices can be recognized for what it is and does, namely, severs our relation to God. The Christ came so that our orientation should swingconstantlyawayfrom those choices toward the sacrifice Christ made in our behalf. The entire Christian life is a life of constant "attitude change," reorientation, or repentanceùall because Christ Jesus was manifested in the flesh.

Testing the Spirits in the Church

One of the more recent "testings" that has challenged the Church is last May's letter of the ELCA Conference of Bishops to the homosexual community, in it homosexualists are advised that they are unconditionally welcomed as members of ELCA congregations. A troubling number of ELCA congregations have followed the signal, and have declared themselves "Reconciled in Christ" congregations (RIC). They publicly announce that homosexuals are unconditionally accepted as unquestioned and unquestionable members of their congregations.

Intending both to be generous and to blunt the persistent complaint that ELCA churches are hostile to the homosexual life-style, the bishops and the RIC congregations have instead done immeasurable harm to the minority they aim to please. For they are in fact practicing rank discrimination against homosexuals. Apparently this fact is lost to the bishops and the RIC congregations.

The bishops and these congregations are identifying homosexual persons en masse as a minority who are completely different from the rest of us. As the bishops and the RIC congregations see it, practicing homosexualsù unlike all the rest of humanityùneed no repentance for activities which the Scriptures unreservedly and invariably characterize as a violation of God's pattern for human behavior.

Like the priest and the Levite in the Good Samaritan story, the bishops and the RIC group want us to pass by these morally wounded on the other side-unworthy of the healing attention of the Savior of sinners. It is almost as though every sexually active homosexual is beneath the attention of the Church and its witness to God's warning concern for his/her eternal welfare.

This is prejudice of the highest order directed against people for whom the Christ was manifested in the flesh. The Bishops' have given the Church a letter of dis-information. To live a life of repentance, that is, to live as if one believes that Christ Jesus was manifested in the flesh for our salvation, is to recognize that no one is ever free or unconditionally qualified to be welcomed into the Christian Church by virtue of any genetic nature or initiated actions.

Christ Jesus was manifested in the flesh to redeem us from our sins. If the bishops think that despite the Scriptures' completely clear and undeviatingly uniform assertions on the subject, homosexual behavior is sin-free (because "they were born that way"ùor whatever), then the bishops are exempting that behavior from the life of repentance that otherwise, according to Luther, is totally descriptive of the Christian life. So they are not only discriminating against the homosexual community as such, but they are themselves in danger of denying that "Christ Jesus was manifested in the flesh."

Jesus came to save sinners. To be blind to the recognition that no human action is stain-free, as the bishops' letter indicates is their assessment of the homosexual life-style when it is a "committed relationship," is to deny the very purpose and accomplishment of the incarnation of the Son of God.

Repentance/the Fear of the Lord

How shall we disabuse our Church of the heresy that if it feels good it must be right, if it feels loving, it must be loving? How shall we help the ELCA to test the spirits so that it understands the trap of idolatry that looms ahead for a church that thinks the Bible statement, "God is Love," and the media-induced culture belief that "Love is God" are the same thing? Yahweh, not Venus, is God. To excuse behavior because the feeling of "love" accompanies it, is to return to the ancient idolatries of the fertility cults from which the only Real God delivered us through His dependable Word.

It could well be that the way back to the Church's biblical foundation will be found only through a new appreciation of the Otherness, the Holiness, of the Living God. That appreciation is shown by the "life of repentance," which testifies that we are never worthy to stand in the Divine Presence.

To sense the utter need for an uninterrupted life of repentance in our lives, we may have to go back to instructing ourselves that the fear of the Lord is the pathway to wisdom. For to fear the Lord is to confess emotionally as well as rationally, that our sins have separated us from our holy God. He is different; He is totally Other. When this truth comes to rest in our hearts, we call it a life of repentance.