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The Nuances To Martin Luther's Fear Of God

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For Luther true worship of God is summed up in fear of God. However simple this may seem there are some particular nuances to this fear that can be seen throughout Luther’s lectures on the psalms that help illustrate his theological position.
In the small catechism of 1529 Luther said of the first commandment that we should fear, love, and trust God above all things. If in other places, e.g., the Large Catechism, we fulfill the first commandment by faith along, here fear, love, and trust are all three involved. We find the three again in the Large Catechism in the introduction to the fourth commandment, which looks back to the first three and says that it is a requirement of the first that we should wholeheartedly trust, fear, and love in the whole of our lives. However, in the psalms …show more content…

“We lay hold on the heart of God by fearing Him, standing in awe of Him and honoring Him in all things. We fear because He sees all we do, and we think of nothing else than the fact that his eyes rest on us.” By one recognizing the former in humility one will be open to hear God’s Word Moreover, love, too, for Luther, recognizes God in God’s fullness, letting God be God. The act of trust in God presupposes both recognizing God as the Divine Being, in which God is infinitely superior to humanity It is important here to note the dualistic character that Luther attributes to God that informs one’s existence under God. Hence trust in the God of promise necessarily includes recognition of God’s truthfulness and goodness, which Luther in his Liberty of the Christian called a matter of faith. In Luther fear of God and love of God are inseparably related to faith’s trust in

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As Luther is fighting the corrupt Papacy he writes this, “Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favor it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.” Luther writes this to show what true religion is, to show what a truly faithful person should do, believe in their God and give him every bit of faith from someone's person. The Papacy hates Luther not because he is wrong, but because he is right, which means if Luther was right and the masses believed him all the power that was held by the church would crumble into nothing; most importantly though the Papacy members personal power would crumble into nothing. During the early phases of the Reformation, Luther wrote the 95 Theses, which described everything he found wrong with the church at this time. The Theses was the catalyst, which set off the ticking time bomb of corruption and irreverence.

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For example, when Vaca was with the People of the Figs, he was asked to help them with their daily tasks but he would look forward to doing one specific task, scraping skins and tanning them. He looked forward to this task because he would gain food from it. This shows that Cabeza De Vaca is religiously weak internally as his faithfulness in God is lacking. As a good Christian, Vaca should want to perform all tasks he is assigned as a good Christian is a “dutiful servant to all”(FoTC 1). In doing this, Vaca would become a servant of God and thus a good religious figure in Luther’s eyes.

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