« Back | Home | Next »

 

Fear and fear

[Bible - NT - 1 John | Link | Print]

Perfect love casts out fear, John says. But the Bible repeatedly exhorts us to fear God. There's fear, then there's fear. How do we tell the difference?

The difference is in the direction our fear moves us.

Adam feared God, and hid in the garden. Wrong fear drives us away from God's presence. Right fear draws us closer; it is awed fascination with the God who is a consuming fire. It's the fear we have when we see something so utterly fearsome that we just have to get a closer look.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, January 20, 2007 at 12:00 PM

Go home!

RECENT ENTRIES
- Celebrity
- Obama's faith
- The Gaze
- Sacrifice and death
- Derrida the theologian
- Miriam's leprosy
- Prematurely white
- Gift of the Text
- Calvin, Milbank, and Gifts
- Derrida on Gifts
- Ontology of Personhood
- Knowing God Twice
- Unity or Revelation
- Engaging Barth
- Eucharistic exhortation
- Exhortation
- Unread books
- Vestiges of Perichoresis
- Hooray for Hollywood
- Augustine on the web
CATEGORY ARCHIVES
LINKS
- Biblical Horizons
- Covenant Worldview Institute
- Theologia
SYNDICATE

XML  |   RDF

CONTACT

Comments:
leithart@leithart.com

Problems:
webmaster@leithart.com