Fear And Charity Study Guide

2.1. Fear as a Prerequisite for Charity Charity, which Christians are called to, stems from the attitude of awe (fear) towards God. The effort to understand the connection of “fear” and “charity” can be undertaken on the basis of some judgment concerning Israel’s core religious tradition from the Old Testament times. As stated above, the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom is the foundation of Proverbs. It is also key to understanding the Old Testament theology, for it is at the core of Israel’s religious tradition. Recognizing the significance of Proverbs 9:10 to Israel’s tradition, Walter Harrelson observed that “not everything that the ancient Israelites passed along orally or in writing was felt to be of such significance” (17).

The Shema, which captures Israel’s belief in God, can be summarized thus: you shall love the Lord your God with your whole being. How then does fear of the Lord relate to love? According to the Catholic Biblical Encyclopedia, the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament often translated the Hebrew word “aheb” with the Greek verb “philein” as “love” and employed it in the religious sense of the love of divine wisdom for those who seek her (398). This same encyclopedia explains that the love of divine wisdom rather than being a search of what God might do, is a feeling of reverence and awe of who God is (361). Reverence and awe of God as seen in the previous chapter is in the Old Testament times synonymous with fear of the Lord. It is a natural inclination that when one has a feeling of awe towards something good, one tends to yearn to know more about the thing. So too, the reverence and awe of God draws one closer to him, and motivates one towards action. Thus, the feeling of reverence and awe (fear of the Lord) is a divine gift vested upon the human person to know God and particularly to submit one’s will to the observance of God’s commandments; the greatest commandment being none other than love. For John Laurence, the idea of submitting one’s will to God is synonymous with obedience to God’s will and route to participating in the reality Christ himself (18). In other words, the awareness of who God is leads to acts of