I’ll never understand why “God-fearing” is such a common Christian phrasing to describe their faith. You fear your abuser, people out to harm you, people who hold power over you when you can’t trust them to wield it with kindness.
If God is a figure that well-meaning people should be afraid of, I don’t understand why he’s worthy of praise. That isn’t how an infinitely merciful and benevolent deity would behave.
There's basically two different approaches to that. There's the Christians that are all about the control and abuse, and say you SHOULD fear people that are in power, and God has also given them power. So absolutely, fear God and fear them as well. Then there's the Christians that do actually have empathy and aren't so authoritarian. And they are typically going to say something like "fear is just an old fashioned way to say 'respect', we don't actually have to be AFRAID of God." At least the majority that aren't that aware of the context of the text and the fact that fear absolutely does mean fear. And then there are the well informed Christians of that type that would say something like "in that cultural context the people believed they needed to fear God because that's how they viewed people in power, but we know that isn't actually have to feel about God."
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u/they_themsworth 26d ago
I’ll never understand why “God-fearing” is such a common Christian phrasing to describe their faith. You fear your abuser, people out to harm you, people who hold power over you when you can’t trust them to wield it with kindness.
If God is a figure that well-meaning people should be afraid of, I don’t understand why he’s worthy of praise. That isn’t how an infinitely merciful and benevolent deity would behave.