Fear & Love

One of the books that has intrigued me the most in the past few months has been Doug Frank’s book, A Gentler God: Breaking Free of the Almighty in the company of the human Jesus. In this passage Frank talks about fear and love in a way that I believe cuts to the core of who and what we are about as humanity and contrasts it with who and what Jesus is about.

If Jesus was fully human-“like his brothers and sisters in every respect” (Heb. 2:17)-then to some unknown degree he must have shared the propensity of human beings to be governed by fear. If his experience in the river turned him completely around, it had to speak to his fears. It had to alter, in a surprising, life-changing way, the deep human anxiety that we are not good enough for God; that God is not absolutely and unremittingly good enough to be called, “love”; and that this love will not be sufficient to meet our needs in times of trouble.

Fear-of emotional even more than physical danger-seems to be the engine of our millennia-long survival as a biological species on a dangerous planet. A keen attunement to fear has stimulated our species’ remarkable creativity; in large part, we have our fears to thank for most of the material, technological and social developments that we associate with “civilization.”

Our fear sensors have thus evolved into finely-tuned instruments. Pangs of fear, great and small, too familiar to notice and too numerous to name, daily, hourly, nudge each human being toward one or another internal or external protective device and the safety that it promises. The most basic fear, I would suggest, beneath every other, is the fear that we are alone and unloved.

The opposite of fear is trust-the deep sense that we are not alone, and we are loved. I suspect that these two “existential” states are the bedrock of our human condition, the two basic orientations toward the world from which all others derive. Once we have named fear and trust, we may have inadvertently named every primary interior state that it is possible for a person to experience [Frank, 237].

This is another way of looking at our two basic feelings, fear and love. The way of the world is fear and the way of the spirit is love. Breuggemann picks up on this with his writings about the scarcity myth vs. the abundance of God. How do we live our lives? Do we live out of fear or do we live out of trust which leads to love?

Bearing Witness to God

I came across this quote in Dale Rosenberger’s book, Outreach and Mission for Vital Congregations, and could not stop thinking about it. He said,

“The question is not whether Christ-like acts finally do any real good or make any real difference. The questions is whether we believe in Christ enough to step out and participate in his victory when all of the countervailing evidence in the war between good and evil seems to suggest that perhaps God does not ultimately have the final word over our human destiny… In truth, God is the primary and permanent actor on the world stage of redemption and reconciliation, and we are merely God’s instrument and agents, taking our turn in our own passing generation. (83)”

I have been pondering recently what it means for the two primary human emotions to be Love and Fear. If I look at this quote from Rosenberger with these emotions in mind, then to ask what difference I make is a question out of fear focused on me and what I might loose by acting and what I might not gain by acting. To trust in Christ would then be to act in love toward others regardless of the risk to my self. This is interesting because the command given more than any other in the First and Second Testaments is, “Do not be Afraid.” And Jesus sums up all of God’s commands in two, “Love God with all that you are, and love your neighbor as your self.” Paul echoes the importance of love when he says all that remain are faith, hope, and love and the greatest of these is love.

Faith then is not about us saving the world but rather about us bearing witness to God as God is in the process of redeeming and reconciling the world to God. We are not here to convince people of something about God but rather to live and name where we see God moving and acting in the world around us. The former can easily collapse into an act of fear and the later hopefully will become an act of love. The later also requires us to step out of ourselves and care about others. This makes sense if our Savior is one who was willing to die for us all on the cross. If Jesus was willing to loose his life, then maybe we might need to loose ours as well?

One of my favorite definitions of love comes from a guy named Baer who said that imitation love is, “I like how you make me feel.” And real love is, “I care about your well-being regardless of what I get out of it.” Baer argues that all relationships start out with imitation love but if they are to last and mature they need to transition into real love. Imitation love is an act of fear that we do not see or name as such. We act toward another person and they respond by patting us on the back. The affirmation quiets our fear of being alone and lonely so we act in more ways for the pat on the back. We feel in love but what is really happening is that we are being affirmed in ways that hide our inner fears. When we stop performing for the pat on the back and the affirmation stops coming we feel like love has left us. Real love comes when someone does something for us without expecting anything in return.

I think Jesus got this and calls us to not fear and to love and see how the world opens up to us when we don’t let fear guide our actions but instead risk ourselves in loving others around us, truly loving them without any expectation of a return. We don’t do what Jesus calls us to do because we have too; the truth is we don’t have to do it at all, otherwise it is fear and not love behind what we do. We live faithful to Jesus’ calling which is to live a life of love because our faith frees us to do so.

What does it mean for God to be Triune?

The passage of scripture that pushes me the most on how I think about God, especially God as the triune God is Philippians 2:6–11, the Christ hymn:

. . . who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.[1]

This passage is a key to understanding how Paul thought about God and sheds some profound insights into who God is as the triune God.

New Testament scholar David Fredrickson, in “What Difference Does Jesus Make for God?,” boldly argues that if we don’t understand how Jesus changed God in his death on the cross, we won’t understand who God is as God. He looks at this passage and sees Paul defining God in radical new ways. He argues that many of the New Testament authors asked an ontological question very different from those asked by modern theologians: what difference does Jesus make for the being of God? This question was driven by the belief that when God freely chose to respond to what Jesus did, when Jesus emptied himself and became obedient to the point of death, when Jesus was lifted up and given the title of Lord, God was fundamentally changed. Jesus is now equal with God not in substance but in participation through speech in communal decision-making. In other words, since God gave the identity of Lord to Jesus, God is no longer a hierarchical God.[2]

Fredrickson sees Paul redefining God in this passage from simply being God the Father and the Spirit of God to being a truly triune God. Jesus is now part of the conversation of God, part of the decision-making process of God. When Paul named God as Father without the understanding of Lordship, which is now in Jesus, he fundamentally changed our understanding of God through Jesus’ self-sacrificing act on behalf of humanity and God’s responding self-sacrificing act on behalf of Jesus. Paul has defined God in terms of mutual self-giving in relationship.[3]

Humanity’s voices are brought into conversation with the voices of God by Jesus enslaving himself to humans and being obedient to the point of death. In a sense, being human is now a part of who God is. God is now in relationship with humanity in a radical new way through Jesus. We are now free to participate in the equality that already exists within God through Jesus.[4]

Gary Simpson argues that when God sent the Spirit to resurrect Jesus, God made Jesus’ friendship with sinners a new part of the character of God. In other words, sinners are now friends with God, and God is now a friend to sinners. In the act sending the Spirit to resurrect Jesus because of what he did, God validated who Jesus was in his death on the cross, and that changed who God now is for us. God is now known to us through Jesus in his willingness to suffer and die out of love for us. In this reciprocal dependence of the Father and the Son through the Spirit, the crucified God is the one and only trustworthy God. This also makes God a missional God: a triune God through God as Father but not Lord, through Jesus’ slavery and obedience to death, and through the Spirit’s resurrection of Jesus and calling of the church into being.[5]

This means two key things for missional preaching. First, because it shows the triune God to be nonhierarchical, willing to enslave Godself to us and die for us, we as Christians, and especially as the Church, must not relate to the world from a power over stance. We need to embrace the world relationally, just as God is relational in God’s self. Because of who God is and what God has done and is doing, we as the Church must remain open to constantly changing in how we relate to God’s creation. Second, it means that we as the Church cannot assume that we will remain in a place of privilege or relevance. We must always go to the people around us, just as Jesus and the Spirit have come to us. The very nature of God as triune means that the church has no grounds for turning in on itself or focusing most of its energy on itself. Rather we have the lived example of God coming to us. Now God expects us to go to those around us with the same good news of God’s kingdom. Understanding God as triune frees missional preaching to be about God as God is active in our world relating to us out of love.

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[1] New Revised Standard Version. All scripture unless otherwise specified will be from this translation.

[2] David Fredrickson, “What Difference Does Jesus Make for God?” Dialog 37 (1998): 104–105.

[3] Ibid., 105–6.

[4] Ibid., 106.

[5] Gary Simpson, “No Trinity, No Mission: The Apostolic Difference of Revisioning the Trinity,” Word & World 18 (1998): 271.