A Case for The Fear and Love of God in the Face of Rising Religious Nationalisms and the Decline of Traditional Religious Institutions All the While The Earth Burns

A Bit of An Introduction

There is so much spiritual life activity, both in organized religious institutions and in personal lives that eschew the institutions, that is misguided and a waste of time and personally damaging to folks (there is this constant striving for a perfection which includes, ironically, the popular stated notion that perfection is not possible but progress of course is the goal. Endlessly!) Then, add to this the corruption of this religious life by tying it to civic nationalism (American, Iranian, you name it and pick your faith, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Other) and you have not just personal damage but national and international hegemony.

With all this devolution because of religious faith that needs to be called out I want to see if we can’t save the baby as we throw out the bath water. I want to talk about how there is an actual kind of Christian faith that is redemptive, that is to say helpful and lifegiving by putting an end to religious striving and opening hearts and minds to taking care of neighbors, near and far, without regard to payback or reward.

I’m striving here, in this piece “On Fearing and Loving God” to describe how really bad things are for us and how so very good things are for us in life, amidst life, both at the same time. As I do this I want to also describe how being a person of faith in Jesus Christ, what I call a “religionless Christian,” is actually being a person who, because of faith, lives in and cares deeply about the world’s pain and joy and is committed to alleviating that pain and elevating that joy without judgement or moral superiority.

Then there is this. I this week read Adam Tooze’s (a Professor at Columbia University) sobering review of Malcolm Harris’ new book What’s Left: Three Path’s Through the Planetary Crisis. I happen to be of the bent that our environmental crisis, led by carbon emissions and arable land and natural habitat loss by human sprawl is the epicenter of humanity’s and the earth’s concern. I also know that we can hardly pay attention to this because of the demolition of democracy that is Trumpism that is causing us to advocate and protest and act in a hundred different directions, from Measles to Medicaid to Illegal Arrests, Detentions and Deportations. I hear all this in what Tooze writes regarding Harris’ attempt at describing the radical steps we need to take in environmental care: “Whatever the world was in which it was possible to imagine American policy approaches to global problems – a world in which we debated the relative merits of Bidenomics versus Indigenous revolution – it is no longer ours.” (New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2025).

While we are running around having to work at putting out hundreds of democracy and policy fires all at the same time we necessarily take our eyes off of the global ecological crisis. And with all that, I here seemingly take us even further afield by talking extensively about a minor and parochial religious topic like “On Fearing and Loving God”?

Seemingly, but not actually. I would argue that a warped and wrong-headed religiousity is not only a driving and motivating force for many power-brokers like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and others but also across the popular American religious landscape people who call themselves Christian live within a religious legalism that defames and demerits those who don’t follow their tenets as well as keeps them focused on some kind of eternal next life instead of the very real hurt and condition of their neighbor in this life.

All of that said, I am simply struck by just what faith is and how in its true form as passive trust and not active spirituality it is not only the center of personal liberation but the catalyst of social, economic and ecological justice.

So, about this faith.

On Fearing and Loving God

From Spiritual To Religion-Less

The very being, essence, of God is a threat to us, somebody with whom we compete at best or go to war with at worst. And why? I think simply because we are not God. Instead, we live tragically and sorrowfully at the mercy of fate. Not even our correct decisions and behaviors will save us. Religion in general, including the Christian religion, is the attempt to thwart this reality, this truth. In religious life, God is not anymore God Who Decides (“Elects”) amorally (An Outlaw: without regard for the Law) but is rather God Who Explains what we Do Not Know and Helps with what We Cannot Do, and does all this with regard, special attention, to morality. And all we need do with the Explainer and Helper is make some effort (starting with, fundamentally, saying we are Sorry. It is, of course, the Right Thing, the moral, thing to do), however humbly (the more humble the better), call it spirituality, to meet God half-way, or even quarter way. Or even 0.0001% of the way. Even if that infinitesimal effort is to ask the question or state the obvious: we don’t know and we need help. We at least need to be humble and appreciative, don’t we? Something!

The answer is no. We need do nothing. Zero. We are religion-less.

Being Told to “Fear and Love God” is Not Calling for A Spirituality

But, but, we seem at every turn to be told by spiritual leaders that we need to be spiritual. We need to connect with God. We need to get our life together, step into a relationship with God.

Even the king of total reliance on God, Martin Luther himself, seems to be urging us to get our life with God together! Look at Luther’s Small Catechism and his explanations to the Ten Commandments, for a significant example: we are to fear and love God!

But, when Luther writes, in the explaining each of the 10 Commandments one by one, that “we are to fear and love God,” he is not saying we are to take action to do this fearing and loving. Regarding the “fear,” he is not telling us to invent or conjure up a spirituality or even a foundational spiritual practice that we don’t already know and live. Regarding the “love” he is not telling us to develop an affection that we should have but don’t have. In both the “fear” and the “love” we have no agency to affect or develop either. Fear happens naturally and love happens naturally as well, but only after the natural hate we have for God is defeated, put to death, by God’s insistence that our absence of agency (that agency that lives by the Law and strives always to fulfill that Law and knows only a peace if we are striving hard enough in the Law) is not bad news but good news. It’s God’s insistence that the modus operandi of the universe is not Law but Grace. It’s God’s insistence that knowing God is not about being enlightened enough to get the Law right and so silence it’s demand but rather about suffering the personal insult of having no Lawful way of making any claims on God (Martin Luther stated that the only way to know God is through suffering and death! Instead of meaning what we normally take that to mean, that it is our active witness that brings personal sacrifice that allows us to see and know God (martyrdom, on whatever level), he means this: our passive inaction that can only wait for Someone to intervene is what does the deed. When Jesus, on the cross, moaned “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” you get the picture).

By the way, and not incidentally, when we insist that “justification is by faith and not by works of the law” we are saying what I’ve been saying in all of the above: the natural hate we have for God for not putting us in the lineup to play the salvation game but rather benching us and watching God play and have all the fun is replaced by the grand realization that though we are on the bench we are on the Team and have the cool uniform and when the championship is won we get the champagne too and the ring as well.  This “grand realization” is called “faith.” Its rather like an “aha moment” that comes to us and is done to us. That “love” I talked about does not happen until there is first this “faith.” When I say that this love comes then “naturally” I mean it happens de facto. We cannot not look around and say “what do I do now that I don’t have to do anything!?” In baseball terms this means we do anything it takes to help the Team even though we never take the field. More on this “love part” in a bit.

Let’s go back to the “fear part” and add a little about the wrath of God. 

God, without intention but simply because God can’t help but be God, alarms and terrifies us. And not so much because God can and does bad things to us but because we can’t fight back. We have no recourse. We don’t have a say, or anything to do, about our eternal destiny. Worse, or at least as worse, the same thing happens in our temporal day to day: all we can do is live by probabilities and try to mitigate. For example, I can drive my car as defensively as possible but I simply cannot bring to zero the chance that that guy driving in the opposite direction is drunk and could at the last second swerve and take me out. All of this is the “fear” part. And we don’t have to make this up. We don’t have to fabricate it or create it. We are afraid by virtue of being alive.

Religious life works hard to teach us that this fear is bad and that God’s wrath at our stupidities (we can up our chances at getting hurt when we lie, cheat, steal and kill) is not real or is not God, or at the very least is not something we can’t avoid. One significant thing the Religious Life does, if it’s not the essence of the Religious Life, is tell us we need to look more deeply and intensely at the essence, the heart, of God to there see that really God is not Wrath but is rather Love. We just need a spirituality to see this. We simply need to get with the program and we will eventually see that God doesn’t accuse us, doesn’t Stand Over Against Us, and that God is not really angry at all. Maybe disappointed, okay. But angry? Wrathful? Come now, religion teaches us better than that. What about Love? Where’s the Love?

Speaking of “love,” let’s look again for a moment not at God’s love (where is it?!) but our love. It’s that “love” part of the “we are to fear and love God.” If we don’t have to fake the fear or say it’s not real or invent a spirituality with which to counteract it, what about the love? Isn’t that something we need to conjure up if not for its own sake but then to be fear’s antidote? Well, no. We can’t rev up a loving feeling for God. We try. We work hard at loving God because we think it’s only fair or only right. But we will not and cannot love God on our own. We don’t love God, we hate God and it’s all because we are not God. In the Christian faith we hate Christ because we want to be the one who calls the shots, by the rules of the law, by fairness, and not let God call the shots by mercy.

It is possible to love God. Notice I said above that “we can’t love God….on our own!” Loving God is possible, just like it is to fear God. But like fear, it comes naturally (de facto), not spiritually. Love comes naturally when we hear that though God gives laws, God is not the Law. The adoration, the love, comes from the awareness and experience of being liberated from the Law. Love comes from being taken out of the game of salvation and instead being gifted with it. In other words, love comes from, flows from, faith. Justification (being right with God) is by faith and once the Self, we, are liberated from our salvation projects, once we live by faith, there can be and there is gratitude and thanks, love, of God and for God. So, again, by saying we “naturally” love God we do not “spiritually” love God, I mean that it comes as a consequence, a natural consequence, of faith. If I am told to love God, an imperative, I will not and cannot because God by God’s very nature removes my autonomy. But when God replaces that autonomy with God-Self, Grace, that is Outlaw, that is Not The Law (which, this “replacing” is called Gospel) and is not thus by definition another pattern to live by to find or regain or restore my autonomy, something clicks, something changes, something dies (Old Self) and something rises (New Self, what the Bible calls “In Christ”) and adoration and gratitude begin.

On Coming to Faith

But, we have to hear this. We have to be told. We don’t do this on our own. We have to be told, and told time and time again. And even when we hear it, it seems too good to be true (I like to say, as you have heard me say before, it’s too good not to be true!). By the way, enter here the Preacher/Pastor. Not as one who gives good moral lessons, wisdom, as to how to believe or behave correctly so as to correlate with God’s intention and so not only fulfill a person’s personal wellness (here and hereafter) but who stops all that spiritual nonsense by announcing, week after week that Christ is the end of the Law (Romans 10).

We have to be told (there’s that Preacher/Pastor) that the universe is not run by the Legal System that rewards and punishes based on our beliefs and behaviors. We have to be told that we cannot simply flip the Demands of the Universe (God!) on their head and have them stop accusing us instead of saying they are filled with possibility and wonder (and the Demand will be silenced) in the mystical and peaceful place of complete obedience. The moment we attempt that flipping and try to make the Demands something good that we can accomplish, and therefore silence the Demand because we have accomplished, is the moment we feel accused again either because we know we could have done more or better or because, alas, there is another separate and critical Demand right there in front of us awaiting our attention, and our anxiety.

Earlier I spoke of “justification by faith” as being the “grand realization” that though we can’t save ourselves for any heavenly eternity and can’t even protect ourselves from all earthly calamity (and though, then, what this means is that the world order is not the Law and Order where you get your due, for better or for worse), someone can and does do the saving, if not the protecting. God. I’m not one, as you might be able to tell, who sees God as doing any supernatural interventions to stop that drunk driver from swerving. But eternity, destiny, whatever that may be? Yes, God does that. And when we realize this (“grand realization!”) we are liberated, freed not only from all anxiety about the Demand but also, crazily, from the Demand itself. Would, could, not chaos ensue if we have no Demand? Of course. This is actually one of the key arguments that Erasmus brought against Luther’s insistence that we have no Free Will (see their written debate in the 1520’s with Erasmus’ Free Will and Luther’s Bondage of the Will). If there is no Law to hem us in and by which we can sit up and fly right and if what I do makes no difference in how God judges me because what I do actually cannot have any say in how God judges me then couldn’t/wouldn’t there be chaos and disorder because all bets are off? The answer, of course, has to be yes. There can be chaos when all are liberated from Law. But there can also be this: a freedom to love as we never have before. Meaning, loving for love’s sake, not for personal benefit. This liberation can do what I mentioned above: “What do I have to do now that I don’t have to do anything!?”

A Summary of Sorts

So, what’s the sequence? How does this work? Perhaps this: Fear comes first, naturally. Then God steps in and stops the nonsense of living by the Legal System that has come out of that fear that says God is the Law instead of God simply being God. God brings Law but is Not The Law and brings Gospel to put an end to living as if God Is The Law. Gospel is not a word that is a fix within the Legal System and completes the Legal System so that the Legal System remains intact. Gospel is outside the law. It is Outlaw. Faith is given. It is this “grand realization” that all along and for all time God has not only our best interest in mind but our eternal destiny, everybody’s, in hand. Then, love.

Fear. Faith. Love. In that order.

The Beatles told us “all you need Is love!” Well, no. If you skip over fear and faith you end up with sentimentality and care for others that only goes as far as your self-interest. If we want to change the world with love, we need to live in fear and faith first, and always.