Is It Sinful to Fear?

While I am planning to do a series on Contemporary Trinitarianism this week, I nonetheless heard something tonight that caught my attention. It is something I have heard before in several sermons at my own church and I think my disagreement with it should be mentioned. This topic deserves much more depth than I shall give to it here, nonetheless I think there is a clear need to rebut the idea that having fear is sinful. To have fear, it is conjectured, is to not be faithful in God's ability, His promises, His plan, the Resurrection, and so forth, or so the story goes. Without belaboring the point however I should like to cite what I believe to be the most damning case against it: the fear of Christ. In the Garden before crucifixion, we are told not only that Christ asks for "this cup" to pass from Him, but he also, in the Lukan account, sweats blood. Though hematidrosis (blood sweat) is rare, it is a condition that can, for example, be triggered by severe anxiety and is most often seen in soldiers before battle, or before execution, as recorded for example by Leonardo DaVinci. The tradition, of course, knows quite well of Christ's fear in the garden, yet simultaneously maintained fervently (it has been, perhaps, one of the few doctrines relatively undisputed) of Christ's sinlessness. His sinlessness or imbeccabilitas is simultaneous with his fear. (Theo)logically, it seems to follow, that fear in and of itself is not sinful, lest one wants to be consistent and simply discard the idea of Christ's perfection.

I think this is important because believing otherwise leads to a false form of bravado and calls it a virtue. More importantly I think understanding fear as a sin in this way leads to more fear (and guilt). Certainly we need not fear, but fear itself is no sin. Yet so too we must be careful not to merely accept it wholesale: there are times when fear is sinful. But when? We should note regarding the story of Gethsemane that though Christ feared he did not waver from his mission, or fail to complete it. In a certain sense here we see the old addage: courage is not fearlessness, it is often being afraid but accomplishing your task anyway. St. Maximus the Confessor wrote of fear and its relation to Christ: “[where] he put off the principalities and powers at the moment of his death on the cross, when he remained impervious to his sufferings and, what is more, manifested the (natural human) fear of death, thereby driving from our nature the passion associated with pain.” (Ad Thal. 21.112) What was taken away was not fear per se according to Maximus, but fear (in this case, of death) which led to pathos by which he means a hesitation or denial of action.

Our natural reaction to pain, is to cease what inflicts it upon us. So too when we see a difficult road which bears many omens of future suffering in the service of God, we can shy away from it. What Maximus says we see in Christ is not the removal of fear, but a redirection of it: fear doesnt cease to exist but he has, to use an appropriate term, made fear irrational. That is, fear is a response indicative of a cause-effect relationship. We fear things which lead to death because death is the end. Fear is a rational response because it attempts to keep us safe. But Christ nonetheless, in his fear died for the mission of the Father--and was resurrected. The natural "rational" end of pain, death, is no longer the end. Fear can now be a response to a great enemy who has nonetheless been defeated. This does not mean, this side of the second coming, the absence of fear or pain, but that what they "normally" signal is no longer valid. Far from fear denying faith, it now, because of Christ, often affirms faith: it accepts that pain and death are grave enemies, that pain and death are not desirable, that they are unnatural to humanity so to speak, but which have been overcome by Christ. Maximus writes elsewhere if fear had simply been erased we would have had no appreciation for the torment of Christ's sacrifice. On the other hand fear could not remain as it was, because it led to suffering and often inaction.

So when is fear a sin? Augustine wrote that the ultimate root of sin is man "curved in upon himself," that is, self-love, rather than openness, love, and obedience to God. Much later Kierkegaard adopts the Augustinian concept of sin as this perversion of the structure of our nature as creatures (that is, as creatures we are to love God, and as Bernard of Clairvaux wrote in On Loving God we only love ourselves for God's sake). In The Sickness Unto Death Kierkegaard alters the terms a bit and says that the essential structure of sin is the finite not acknowledging its identity as given over by the Infinite and Eternal. It tries to constitute itself through its own means. The result is the desperate character of all our strivings for self-fulfillment on the basis of our finite existence. This sickness unto death is what Kierkegaard calls despair. According to Kierkegaard, an individual is "in despair" if s/he does not align himself with God or God's plan for the self. In this way s/he loses themselves. While humans are inherently reflective and self-conscious beings, to become a true self one must not only be conscious of the self but also be conscious of being aligned with a higher purpose, vis a vis God's plan for the Self. When one either denies this Self or the power that creates and sustains this Self, one is in despair. In this sense we can equate the moment fear becomes sinful with Kierkegaard's "Augustinian" concept of despair: fear is sinful if it leads either, as in Maximus, to retreat from the tasks at hand in line with the will of God, or, as Kierkegaard notes, if it leads us into an endless quest for control of everything in order that in the calculability to which we as finite selves strive, we might no longer fear. In both cases the self has been elevated beyond its natural creaturely relation to God, and longs for self preservation and autonomy.

We might broaden this analysis to the concept of anxiety. Though fear and anxiety in popular usage are often interchangeable, in theology and psychology they can have somewhat different meanings. Fear, we could say, is a response to a particular, definite thing, person, or event (I fear the bear sticking his head into my tent) while anxiety is a response to a much less tangible, more prevalent, nebulous thing. That is often why those with anxiety can locate no definite, particular thing to which they can attribute the feeling: it becomes a general quality of existence, it is the "optical frame", so to speak, through which one views all things, to use Paul Tillich's term from The Courage To Be. Wolfhart Pannenberg notes that in this sense anxiety is a generalized form of the Augustinian concept of self-fixation or self-love as the root of all sin: anxiety at the uncontrollable in general, or of death, results from our understanding of our own identity as necessarily self-produced. Thus the unknown future, the incomplete nature of our identity, and the vastness of the uncontrollable universe, all feed anxiety because they become a vast and incalculable affront to our attempts to create ourselves. Thus often, in order to counter this anxiety, we sin more. We attempt to control our life, or retreat from it. The power of sin over us is not necessarily that it is a rebellion from God (though this is one of its features) but that sin falsely promises us life but it only deceives, and through that opportunity produces death (Rom. 7:11).

Thus ultimately while fear is not sin, it can become sin when it removes us from God. If anything Christianity teaches us ultimately not to fear, but in the meantime it often teaches us how to fear properly: how to tremble before the great unknown, yet still to trust in God and step out into the abyss. Christianity is not a feel good, warm fuzzy while you walk into the slums--its not wanting to get shot but going anyway. Its not painting over death (as at so many Christian funerals) as this rosy things completely blotted out in the efflorescence of future resurrection: it is acknowledging the horror of death precisely because we know things could be and will be otherwise, and thus also rejoicing. To end, Halden at Inhabitatio Dei posted a great quote from Barth's Church Dogmatics IV/1 pp.724-725 on the nature of the Church as a mission. The first thing that struck me reading the post was how scary this kind of existence would be if we actually lived it out, but also how true it is to the message of the Gospel of Christ:

Not even in the highest conceivable sense is it a matter of their own good or ill, of their own honour, or even of the self-reposing structural importance and dignity of the work which they have to accomplish in this character. Their being and their work both point beyond themselves. Their field is the world, and they are only sowers who pass over it. They renounce any self-grounded or self-reposing rightness or importance of their distinctive being and activity. It is the special direction in which they look, to the One who has made them His and whom they have recognised as theirs, which forces them to make this renunciation....For this reason the Church can never be satisfied with what it can be and do as such. As His community it points beyond itself. At bottom it can never consider its own security, let alone its appearance. As His community it is always free from itself. In its deepest and most proper tendency it is not churchly, but worldly — the Church with open doors and great windows, behind which it does better not to close itself in upon itself again by putting in pious stained-glass windows. It is holy in its openness to the street and even the alley, in its turning to the profanity of all human life — the holiness which, according to Rom. 12:5, does not scorn to rejoice with them that do rejoice and to weep with them that weep. Its mission is not additonal to its being. It is, as it is sent and active in its mission. It builds up itself for the sake of its mission and in relation to it. It does it seriously and actively as it is aware of its mission and in the freedom from itself which this gives. If it is the apostolic Church determined by Scripture and therefore by the direction of the apostles, it cannot fail to exist in this freedom and therefore in a strict realism more especially in relation to itself. And when it does this it cannot fail to be recognisable and recognised as apostolic and therefore as the true Church."