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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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