Page 56 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Philosophy 29

is found through the engagement of one’s own person; it only
reveals itself as one takes part in its revelation.

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All religious reality begins with what Biblical religion calls the
“fear of God.” It comes when our existence between birth and
death becomes incomprehensible and uncanny, when all secu-
rity is shattered through the mystery. This is not the relative
mystery of that which is inaccessible only to the present state
of human knowledge and is hence in principle discoverable. It
is the essential mystery, the inscrutableness of which belongs
to its very nature; it is the unknowable. Through this dark gate
(which is only a gate and not, as some theologians believe,
a dwelling) the believing man steps forth into the everyday
which is henceforth hallowed as the place in which he has to
live with the mystery. He steps forth directed and assigned
to the concrete, contextual situations of his existence. That he
henceforth accepts the situation as given him by the Giver is
what Biblical religion calls the “fear of God.”
An important philosopher of our day, Whitehead, asks how
the Old Testament saying that the fear of God is the beginning
of wisdom is to be reconciled with the New Testament saying
that God is love. Whitehead has not fully grasped the mean-
ing of the word “beginning.” He who begins with the love of
God without having previously experienced the fear of God,
loves an idol which he himself has made, a god whom it is easy
enough to love. He does not love the real God who is, to begin
with, dreadful and incomprehensible. Consequently, if he then
perceives, as Job and Ivan Karamazov perceive, that God is
dreadful and incomprehensible, he is terrified. He despairs of
God and the world if God does not take pity on him, as He did