Response to Anathea Portier-Young

Abstract

The fear of the Lord should be understood as an emotional response to divine power (PortierYoung). Equating fear of God with worship or with obedience reduces it to a pious spirituality on the one hand or to a political-ethical agenda on the other. Both options, Portier-Young argues, have the unsettling implication that the notion ``fear of the Lord’’ loses its disturbing potential. By relocating the fear of the Lord in the semantic field of emotions, Portier-Young convincingly demonstrates that we have to reconsider a particular potentially violent side of God, namely divine power over life and death. […]