Can we serve God and fear?

The ambiguous title of this post was inspired by a recent article by the self-professed evangelical Brian McLaren (http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/15/my-take-its-time-for-islamophobic-evangelicals-to-choose/?hpt=hp_c1). There is much to fault McLaren on here—as elsewhere—and this present criticism of his views follows but one path among many viable critiques. In truth, I find fault with the entire thrust of his article, but the following quotation is a good place to start. He says:

"Islamophobic evangelical Christians—and the neo-conservative Catholics and even some Jewish folks who are their unlikely political bedfellows of late—must choose. Will they press on in their current path, letting Islamophobia spread even further amongst them? Or will they stop, rethink and seek to a more charitable approach to our Muslim neighbors? Will they realize that evangelical religious identity is under assault…by forces within the evangelical community that infect that religious identity with hostility?"

McLaren continues with an important message: “The greatest threat to evangelicalism is evangelicals who tolerate hate and who promote hate camouflaged as piety. No one can serve two masters. You can’t serve God and greed, nor can you serve God and fear, nor God and hate.” This seems like a well-meaning observation, packaged for quick, uncritical acceptance.

Now, it has long seemed disingenuous to me to add “-phobic” to a view one’s opponent disagrees with. It’s popularly done in the homosexual arena, and is done by McLaren here, too. I am opposed to gay “marriage.” I am also opposed to homosexual activity of any sort. This is not out of some hidden fear of homosexuality, but out of the biblical worldview and Christ-loyalty I value unflinchingly. Calling an opponent “homophobic” is a cheap, tasteless trick, although I fear the word has now become common parlance so that it is often used without any special intent. Calling an opponent “Islamophobic” is much the same. Neither term is really, as popularly used, about fear. Rather, they are about ideological disagreement.

Admittedly, there is a slight difference between so-called “homophobia” and “islamophobia”: Islam does give some reasons for fear. McLaren criticizes an evangelical convert from Islam for speaking out against his former religion (this, instead of celebrating the freedom of a person McLaren should call a brother and welcome with open arms). This man may well have cause to fear Islam—a religion whose legal codes, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Islam, “agree on the death penalty (traditionally by the sword) for an adult male in full possession of his faculties who has renounced Islam voluntarily.” On the same note, I think back to a former imam, converted not so long ago, who attended my church at Oxford. He spoke of ordering people stoned—not out of hate but, as he stated, out of a misguided love for God.

Such converts, at the very least, have some grounds for fearing Islam. Yet it is not a phobia; it is no irrational, crippling fear. Is it traffic-phobia to look both ways before crossing the street? Acknowledging causes for fear can be the first step towards courage as readily as it can be a step towards some “phobia.” Converts from Islam fall more accurately in the first category than the second. The grounds they have for fearing Islam are far from paralyzing, however. They have found something greater than fear of persecution or execution. It may be more accurate to say Someone greater has found them. For all that Islam gives some reasons to fear it—if you are a convert, an “infidel,” a woman, one who speaks out against their false prophet, etc.—we evangelicals have no cause for worry. He that is in us is greater than he that is in Islam. And so McLaren is partially right: there should be no evangelical fear of Islam, for its threats cannot challenge our foundation. Nonetheless, I am unpersuaded that there are really that many truly “Islamophobic evangelical Christians” out there. If there are many such—those who fear in spite of Christ, and those who hate the sinner rather than the sin that enslaves the sinner—they ought to remember who Christ tells us are our neighbors (everyone) and how to treat our enemies (with love). It is against powers and principalities, not people, that we wage war.

But disapproval of McLaren’s uncritical use of “islamophobia” is not my main point. I actually agree with him about at least one thing, namely that “evangelical religious identity is under assault…by forces within the evangelical community.” However, it is writers like McLaren who represent this threat. It’s also true, as he points out, that you can’t serve God and something else. You can’t serve God and Mohammed, for example—a statement that would no doubt get one stoned in certain places around the world. Likewise, one cannot (properly) serve God and the sort of relativistic, emasculate, hyper-tolerance that McLaren preaches.

And here is where the title of this response enters. Can we serve God and fear? Perhaps not, if one takes this as McLaren meant it—as two substantive alternatives to choose from. The meaning, as I understand him, is synonymous with “you can’t serve God and serve fear.” However, there’s a way of reading this question that provokes a different response. Can we serve God and fear? Yes, absolutely and necessarily (I know full well that this way of reading is not what McLaren meant; yet because it reveals a serious flaw in his philosophy, I think it worth exploring).
First, I should make clear the ambiguity in the phrase, the fact that it can be taken two ways. I am reminded, somewhat irreverently, of the Lord of the Rings. When Galadriel was tempted by the Ring, she said “All shall love me and despair.” Does she mean that all shall love her and love despair? Or does she mean that all shall love her and, loving her, despair? Clearly the latter. In the same way, I take the phrase in question to mean “Can you serve God and, serving Him, fear?” To this query I would offer my hardy assent. I would even go so far as to say fear is a healthy function of serving (or loving, or knowing) God: this is not an option, but a necessary pairing. If you serve God, you will fear.

This may sound strange to some. What cause could we possibly have for fear if we are in God’s gentle hands? This confusion is the result of an awkward and, I think, downright harmful absence in much of contemporary Christianity. We have forgotten what it means to fear God as we have obscured certain divine attributes. Is He safe? No, but He is good. Fear of God is not an “Old Testament term.” It is a Biblical term. What cause do we have for fear if we are in God’s hands? The author of Hebrews may shed some light: “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). Is it only sinners who should fear falling into the hands of the living God? I suspect not. The verse immediately before the quoted one tells us “The Lord will judge His people.” Not much earlier one finds this: “If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God” (10:26). Without entering too deeply into doctrines of salvation, I see room for fear in such a picture…at the very least, a vicarious fear for those who remain the enemies of God.

I do not mean to deny that God’s Spirit is comforting. I wish not to even detract from the truth that He is good and loving; that we are fully reconciled to Him through the Blood of His Son; that we have great cause for unbridled joy and security on account of being found in Christ; that we have a sure inheritance beyond mortal ken. The same chapter in Hebrews already mentioned also contains a reminder that “since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the Blood of Jesus…and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith.” Yet, firstly, we should remember that the work is both accomplished and unfinished: “by one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Heb. 10:14; pay special attention to the verb tenses here). There is a great mystery here. I will cautiously yet plainly assert that we have far more cause for comfort than fear.

But what cannot be ignored—and this is the central point of my critique of McLaren—is that the fear of God, whatever it weighs on the scales of our disposition towards Him, cannot be faithfully excised from Christian temperament. It must not be entirely obfuscated by revisions to the Biblical faith. It is a theme that must be confronted, even if it cannot be entirely understood, because it is a theme that weaves a common thread through Scripture. The fear of God is indispensible. If we remove it from our Christian vocabulary (or devotional life) we are rejecting His self-revelation. There are no good or safe grounds for doing so.

I am not advocating a form of Deophobia. It is fairly clear that the fear of God is not some irrational phobia, but an awareness of reality. For the wicked, it is fear of punishment and exposure. It is, even for the faithful, fear in the mode of awe and wonder. Yet for all that it is wonder, it is not at all devoid of apprehension. The “fear of God” is not a reality based solely on revelational epistemology; by all rights it should be know even apart from Scripture. For what the first chapter of Romans claims can be known of God through natural theology—His eternal power and divine nature—may create room for a natural (and proper) fear of God. Indeed, the history of world religions, particularly prior to the Enlightenment, attests to the fact that man, when considering God, finds cause for an element of fear. This is in spite of the manifold other details various religions get wrong; this pre-Enlightenment fear of God proved a common theme. No, I’m not advocating Deophobia, but an honest admission of Who God is and our status before Him. This should (must) be viewed through the crucified and risen Christ, the sine qua non of God’s self-revelation. What is revealed of God is true, however, whether found in the Old Testament or the New, and in any event an honest reading of Christ does not erase the fearful aspect of God. Among other things, “The LORD is a warrior; the LORD is His Name” (Ex. 15:3). He is a jealous God who punishes (Ex. 20:5; Num. 14:18; Deut. 5:9). He is a God who brings (Mt. 10:34; Rev. 19:15) and unambiguously even wields a sword Himself (Amos 7:9). By the very fact of His power and holiness, not to mention His mystery and magnitude, a great deal of awe-full fear is requisite when considering God. Even Moses (whom Num. 12:3 says was “more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth”), a man with whom God met and talked plainly and intimately, as with a friend—a fact that should impress even those of us washed in the Blood—was not exempt from the truth that “no one may see [God] and live.” This is a truth that the Prophet Isaiah recognized, when he lamented “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5). There are verses that add comforting truths to such passages, but they do not remove this dynamic of the Lord’s Nature.

It may have been enough to provide some simple statistics: the phrase “the fear of God” shows up in the ESV 10 times (in both Testaments); “the fear of the LORD,” 27 times. 37 occurrences of just these two phrases, excluding other occurrences of such things as “fear God,” “fears the Lord,” and “fear your God.” It is a substantial weight of evidence that this is an important reality throughout the Bible. In the New Testament, we have verses such as 1 Corinthians 7:1, “Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God,” 2 Corinthians 5:10-11, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others” (notice the suggestion of a connection between fearing God and evangelism), and Acts 9:31, “So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied." This last one is of special note, for in addition to reasserting the link between the fear of God and evangelical fruit, it reminds us that peace and comfort are not antagonistic to the fear of the Lord. They are instead intertwined with it. We cannot pretend to reject one side of this reality while claiming to properly enjoy the other.

I have spent some, though not considerable, time indicating the sort of fear that the fear of our God entails. To fully treat it might be impossible. It would certainly be beyond the scope of present purposes. For now, let this question of the character of such fear be put aside with a simple reminder: it is not in the character of a phobia.

I said above something along the lines of recognizing the necessity of the Biblical fear of God is a serious flaw to McLaren’s philosophy. I might have said “fatal” instead of “serious,” but for one fact—his philosophy still lives. But this philosophy is neither rightly Biblical nor properly evangelical. He emphasizes that “The greatest threat to evangelicalism is evangelicals who tolerate hate and who promote hate camouflaged as piety.” Here he makes a classical error. He takes the opposite of love as hate. However, it’s also the case that (from a traditional Christian perspective) the opposite of Love can be indifference (it can also be, perhaps, loving the wrong things). Hate and love are not mutually exclusive dispositions. For the God who is Love still hates (this is found in enough verses that I won’t quote any; if a reader doubts it, read the Bible). Moreover, we are—in the appropriate way—supposed to hate the things the Lord hates. “Hate what is evil; cling to what is good” (Rom. 12:9); “you have loved righteousness and hated wickedness” (Heb. 1:9).

We are also (this can’t be emphasized enough) called to love our enemies. To pray for them. To not merely tolerate their error but seek gently to correct it. To not affirm their sin as is so common nowadays by self-professed evangelicals, but to display Christ to them. We are called to confront the reality of sin for the sake of the Lost, as our Lord Jesus Christ did. This might mean boldness, or it might mean empathy, or it might mean gentleness, or it might mean firmness. Often, it means all of these. We are not supposed to hate those who disagree with us, or who disagree with the Incarnate Truth of Christ. But we are supposed to hate practices that orbit around the gravity of the fallen, sinful condition, practices we know the dreadful depth of provided we have not abandoned the discipline of self-examination and repentance. Tolerance of things such as homosexuality, false religions, and greed is not demonstrating love, but either chilling indifference or else a love reaching for social cohesion instead of eternal souls. McLaren advocates a position that treads perilously close to the hazard in James 4:4: “don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.”

Toward the end of the Bible comes the following verse. “But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate” (Rev. 2:6). There’s not much known about the Nicolaitans, but we do know it was a heresy of some sort—as, properly understood, Islam is a heresy. Christians ought to hate heresy; we ought to hate sin; we ought to hate the condition of the lost—hate this last item enough to seek to reconciliation in the true spirit of evangelicalism. We should not blithely congratulate such heresies—if they be “moderate”—as McLaren seems to do here.

He abandons the “us-them thinking” (his phrase) inherent in the Gospel, while maintaining the open invitation aspect of the Gospel. This leads to the sort of cheap grace that Bonheoffer spoke against, for when it’s all “us,” what Good News is the Gospel? The Gospel is impotent when there is no “them”…more, it is burdensome and reviled. Why would one ever accept Christ if He is not needed to reconcile some real divide between two distinct positions? For the Good News of Christ makes demands on us, demands of the highest sort. In the words of that same Bonheoffer, words vivified by his deeds, “when Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

McLaren does not forget Christ. He merely changes Him. McLaren continues: “There is a better way, the way of Christ who, when reviled, did not revile in return, who when insulted, did not insult in return, and who taught his followers to love even those who define themselves as enemies.” This is a partial truth that is used here to lead astray. Insofar as it advocates forgiveness and keeping oneself focused on the central mission of Christ, it serves a good purpose. Yet we cannot properly preach the forgiveness of Christ without acknowledging the sin which leads to death, judgment, and punishment. The verse following the passage McLaren refers to (1 Pet. 2:23) is apt: “He Himself bore our sins in his body on the Tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Pet. 2:24). We must die to sin before we begin to live to righteousness. Living Christ-like does not mean turning a blind eye to sin.

Broadly speaking, McLaren’s argument tends to make Christ into an absolute advocate of nonviolence—it subtly impugns the idea of redemptive violence, among other things. This introduces a big topic, somewhat outside present concerns, so I won’t spend much time on it. However, I will say that McLaren’s appeal to Christ obscures, in this context, the “either-or” state of following Christ—the fact that there is a vibrant antagonism inextricably woven into the Christian Story. Throughout his article, McLaren appears to identify as much with moderate Muslims as he does with radical Christians (where exactly McLaren gets the virtue of religious moderation from the Bible, I honestly do not know).

Jesus did not and does not have tolerance for other religions; He hates other religions, but nevertheless reaches out to deliver their practitioners at precious cost. He did not have tolerance for sin; He conquered it by His own Sacrifice. The wording McLaren uses—“those who define themselves as enemies”—obscures the fact that (as Jesus said) there are indeed such enemies, real enemies, not confused allies who mistakenly define themselves as enemies. McLaren forgets that a spiritual war is our present reality, that the battle-lines are drawn clearly, and that there are no innocent bystanders. The same Christ Who went meekly to the Cross will return in a somewhat different aspect; at the end, the “wrath of the Lamb” (Rev. 6:16) will be known. In the meantime, we ought to strive to divert people from His wrath in the only way that is possible: surrendering to Him while they still live. Christ’s unwillingness to revile, or insult, while on earth is not a rejection of “us-them thinking,” as McLaren has it, but the result of a longsuffering, loving patience that seeks to heal—not ignore!—that Us-Them divide.

What does McLaren’s perspective have to do with the fear of God? For one thing, McLaren’s Christ seems to give little cause for fear; he robs the Lamb of His simultaneous identity as Lion. For another, his wish to include everyone in some hyper-tolerant “us” is the result of blurring lines of practice, belief, and destination that God has drawn. Also, it avoids the cause for fear that the ungodly and idolaters ought to rightly possess—and would possess, if not for their suppression of the Truth. Shame on us for aiding in that suppression. But I do not speak primarily of the fear that the Lost should have for God. To ignore the place that the fear of the Lord should have in our own Christian faith is biblically scandalous. It leads to such things as relativism, universalism, syncretism, and the tolerance of clearly unbiblical practices and positions. More pressingly, it clouds our view of God as graciously revealed in His Word. That’s the critical question: is the sort of God invoked and evoked by the sort of watered-down evangelicalism of McLaren and others similar to him (Rob Bell, for example) the sort of God we can serve and rightly fear? If not, something is dreadfully wrong, and we’d best be afraid.