Discipline: The Function of Fear in our Everyday Life

One of the topics that I research and write about is how fear operates in our lives. In a Baptist Press News piece this morning, an article entitled: "Fear and Confidence?" It is a short article that discusses the Biblical verse: “In the fear of the Lord one has strong confidence and His children have a refuge” (Proverbs 14:26). The author relates her fear of the lord to her fear of her father and how both fears help create a sense of confidence and security in her life. The relationship between fears and fathers comes together most clearly when she writes, " Yet I still can truthfully say that I had the kind of healthy “fear” of him [her father] that is like the kind we need to have concerning our Creator."

If we abstract back a bit and think about the logic of her argument and its implications, then we start to see the function of "fear" in her life--it helps produce a sense of security and confidence, but more than that, it produces a disciplined child/believer.

The evangelizing of fear plays a prominent role in local church operations and federal politics. Talking fear keeps Godly believers and citizens alike under control and within the limits set and maintained by the community--be it a congregational community or a national community.

Fear, in this sense, is a friend of the familiar--laws, elites, institutions, authorities--and a consort of the conventional.

What if we began to question what we were told to fear? What if we question our church leaders and political leaders about what they tell us to fear? What if we strive to have a different kind of relationship with God and the federal government that isn't based on fear?

I'm sure that a questioning gaze would be met by unquestioning resolve and certainty. For, it is much easier for those hierarchically above us to speak with confidence and authority to those lower down the ladder.

But watch. Try to discern how "fear" functions? What does "fear" promise? Does it make sense? Should we try to force it to be nonsensical? Should we try to make the standard use of "fear" to look strange to us? To do so, I think, can be the point of new possibilities.