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Acknowledgments --Saving of fear /Ann W. Astell --Fear at the foundations: Biblical and patristic --"In awe of the mighty deeds of God": the fear of God in early Christianity from the perspective of Biblical spirituality /Pieter G.R. de Villiers --Cyril of Jerusalem on learning the proper type of fear of God /Donna R. Hawk-Reinhard --Threading the needle: fear of the Lord and the incarnation in St. Augustine /John Sehorn --Fear in medieval meditation --Lips of fear kissed by mercy: expositions of Timor Dei in Cistercian commentary on the Song of Songs /Catherine Ross Cavadini --Aquinas on Christ's fear /Joseph Wawrykow --Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God and the nuancing of the fear of the Lord /Robert Boenig --Fear amongst the reformers --Reformation recovery of the wrath of God /Ralph Keen --Doctor of divine love and fear of the Lord /Wendy M. Wright --Fear of God in Pascal and his Jansenist friends /Ephraim Radner --Fear in the modern debate --Casting out fear: the logic of "God is Love" in Julian of Norwich and Friedrich Schleiermacher /Julia A. Lamm --Fear of God --Fear of God in John Henry Newman and Søren /Cyril O' Reagan --Fear on the eve of the new millennium --"Gold fillings into crocodiles' teeth": Christian, fear, politics, and imagination in Bloy, Léon (1846-1917) /Brenna Moore --Faith, hope, charity, and the fears of Fatima /Ann W. Astell --Shocked to awe: the rapture hermeneutic and holy fear /Maj-Britt Frenze --Fear of God in liberation theology /Tod Walatka --Concluding case study in spiritual direction: Father Joseph Kentenich (1885-1968) and Emilie Engel (1893-1955) /Ann W. Astell. Hailed in Sacred Scripture as the "beginning of wisdom" (Ps 111:10), the "fear of the Lord" is seldom mentioned and little understood today. A gift of the Spirit and a moral virtue or disposition, the "fear of the Lord" also frequently entails emotional experiences of differing kinds: compunction, dread, reverence, wonderment, and awe. Starting with the Bible itself, this collection of seventeen essays explores the place of holy fear in Christian spirituality from the early church to the present and argues that this fear is paradoxically linked in various ways to fear's seeming opposite, love. Indeed, the charged dynamic of love and fear accounts for different experiences and expressions of Christian life in response to changing historical circumstances and events.The writings of the theologians, mystics, philosophers, saints, and artists studied here reveal the relationship between the fear and the love of God to be profoundly challenging and mysterious, its elements paradoxically conjoined in a creative tension with each other, but also tending to oscillate back-and-forth in the history of Christian spirituality as first one, then the other, comes to the fore, sometimes to correct a perceived imbalance, sometimes at the risk of losing its companion altogether. Given this historical pattern, clearly evident in these chronologically arranged essays, the palpable absence of a discourse of holy fear from the mainstream theological landscape should give us pause and invite us to consider if and how--under what aspect, in which contexts--a holy fear, inseparable from love, might be regained or discovered anew within Christian spirituality as a remedy both for a crippling anxiety and for a presumptive recklessness. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Christian spirituality, theology, biblical studies, religious studies, and religion and literature
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