“Her faith isn’t serving her well right now.”
My sister Beth reaches for my hand as she sobs. Our sister Joy holds us both. Mom’s well into her 97th year. Now she’s slipping away. Her body is slowing. Her mind is fading. And sometimes her faith is wavering.
Now understand. Mom’s not your garden variety Christian. She’s a Superhero. Raised in a Christian home. Teen summers working at a Bible conference. Educated at Bible college. Chorister for a Billy Graham crusade. Twenty years a missionary in Nigeria with my dad. Raised five kids who “love the Lord.” Pastor’s wife who taught Sunday School. Played piano. Spoke at women’s meetings. All carried out with kindness and compassion.
John of the Cross says that “in the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.” Gold medal for mom. Well done, good and faithful servant.
That’s why her confession is heartbreaking. “I know I’m at the end of my journey,” mom tells us. She hesitates. Finds her words. “I love God.” Another pause. “But I’m afraid of him.”
I love God but I’m afraid of God.
Joy, Beth, and I burst out crying. We’re upset at mom’s distress. And we’re indignant at a faith that’s left her high and dry. By teaching her that, when all is said and done, she’s just a sinner in the hands of an angry God.
Now again, understand. There’s a proper “fear of the Lord.” It’s the beginning of knowledge (Proverbs 1:7). It prompts us to walk in God’s ways (Deuteronomy 10:12). It motivates moral integrity and holy living (2 Corinthians 7:1). The Hebrew and Greek words don’t mean being frightened. Or terrified. Instead, they indicate respect and awe. Humility and devotion.
But mom’s afraid. Scared. Of judgment. Eternal separation from God. Now that the chips are down, panic bubbles up from some subterranean pit in her soul.
So why is a faithful Christian woman afraid of God at the moment she needs to know she’s safe? Because, alongside the truth of God’s love, she absorbed the message that God is furious and waiting to pounce.
Christian tradition revolves around heaven and hell. Reward and punishment. Love and judgment. It’s in the hymns mom sang. “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling” carries a subtext—exclusion if you don’t accept. It’s in the Bible she read. John 3:16, which announces good news of eternal life, is premised on a threat of everlasting destruction. It’s in the sermons she heard. Hellfire-and-brimstone altar calls to get right with God—or else! It’s in the liturgy she practiced. Warnings not to eat or drink Communion unworthily, lest she bring damnation on herself (1 Corinthians 11:28-29).
The dangerous God is everywhere in traditional Christianity. Maybe that’s why mom’s chaplain says it’s often the most devout who struggle with fear and uncertainty at life’s end.
Wrath, hell, damnation, being forever lost, were the warp and woof of mom’s conservative faith. It’s why she went to Africa. To “rescue the perishing,” as the old missionary hymn has it. Because Jesus loves the little children of the world, but he’ll torture them eternally if they don’t hear about and believe in him.
While mom questioned this contradictory theology at times, it soaked deep into her consciousness. The antithetical notions, to paraphrase Brian McLaren, that “God loves you, but will fry your butt in hell if you don’t think and do exactly the right things.”
Mom’s faith served her well during her life. She showed unconditional love during my divorce. When an unmarried granddaughter got pregnant, when others came out, when one transitioned. But it isn’t serving her well in her last days, when she longs for the “eternal security” her Baptist creed promises. Instead, she’s victim of a theological system that can torment as well as comfort. Afflict as well as soothe.
We remind mom that nothing can separate her from God’s love (Romans 8:38-39). That God has called her by name; that she is precious and honored in God’s sight (Isaiah 43:1-4). That God rejoices over her with singing (Zephaniah 3:17). We pray St. Patrick’s Lorica: “Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left.” We sing “I love to tell the story. . .to tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love.”
Mom, who knows that story best, hungers and thirsts to hear it unpolluted by fear. Purified of threat. Purged of a wrathful God peering from behind a welcoming one.
Mom’s end-of-life crisis of faith indicts Christian tradition. Because she’s not the only one. The toxic doctrines of wrath, judgment, and hell have caused psychological and spiritual trauma for centuries. Some people simply walk away, scarred. Others carry deep pain and long-term depression. Even those, like mom, who stay in the church, are damaged. “Their nagging fear that God may turn out to be less than good or kind of loving in the end,” McLaren says, “makes their heart uneasy, their worship forced and fake, and their commitment conflicted.”
Now once more, understand. God is righteously angry at human sin. N.T. Wright puts it well: “throughout the Bible, God’s coming judgment is a good thing, something longed for. In a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence and oppression, the thought that there might come a day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be.” Agreed—Trump’s atrocities prove that.
But we mustn’t separate God’s justice from God’s love. And we can’t make them equal, since love is more primordial than justice. As Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli state, “God’s mercy and justice are not distinct attributes that push God in opposite directions. God has but one moral attribute and that is loving-kindness—mercy and justice are different expressions of the one attribute.” Judgment isn’t vengeful punishment. It’s corrective discipline. Hosea’s (11:5-9) God isn’t a harsh judge, but a parent who can’t let go of a wayward child. Having pronounced sentence, God draws back. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? . . .My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger.” Love, to borrow a concept from Nicholas Wolterstorff, is the “control belief” that must determine how we understand wrath.
“Jesus loves me, this I know.” Joy, Beth, and I sing along with mom. The simple words extract the poison of fear. Drown out the voice of judgment. We sing softly through the gloom, as her heart for mercy craves.
Perhaps John of the Cross also meant that “in the evening of life, we will be judged by Love alone” because—as Beth says—there’s only one truth that brings peace: the Father is waiting on the porch with the light on, unable to hold back his excitement to welcome mom home.
10 Responses
Thank you for this! Your intimate reflection on your experience of your devout mother’s fear of God’s wrath at the end of her life as well as your insightfyl exposition on the origin of the same in the ambivalent and antithetical theological tradition in which she was formed helpfully illuminate my own devout mother’s fear of God’s wrath and judgment near her death as well as my attempts to assure her of the primordial and ultimate tender compassion of the Trinity.
Hi James, Here’s a couple of end-of-life experiences from my time volunteering in a seniors’ residence. I hope they encourage you and your readers. Blessings, Maureen Brown
https://emotionallyrich.wordpress.com/2023/06/09/your-kingdom-come/
Hello again! I think that this post about my father’s death could also be relevant to the discussion:
https://emotionallyrich.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/what-does-it-mean-to-have-joy-day-10/
Blessings, Maureen Brown
Thank you, James, I appreciate the personal accounting and the descriptive title.
Thank you for sharing the fear your mother expressed at her mortal end, a fear that can slide it’s way into our consciousness so quickly; am I doing enough, living without blemish, praying enough, spending time in the Word, helping others? Is the door going to be shut because I didn’t? Some would say that we have gone too far towards the love of Jesus, watering down the fear factor, but I’ll take grace over fear. Not cheap grace, but grace that reminds us, over and over again, that we are the beloved of our Father and he will be running toward us when we face that final door.
If there is a mathematical formula with a threshold dictating how much faith and how little sin we must have in order to enter “the gates,” we are ALL in trouble. ALL!
Sola Scriptura is a confusing stumbling block in that some verses are troubling. But the prophets and bible-authors, Jesus included, are not warning the meek, those who mourn, or the poor-in-spirit. These warnings are to the exclusively arrogant and powerful, the spiritual and political bullies. “If you were truly blind, you would not be guilty, but since you say you can see….”
Thanks for this excellent reflection, James! It makes us sad, but we need to recognize a harmful “gospel.” I prefer to think we are not saved FROM hell. We are saved FOR communion with God. John 3: 16 must always be recited with John 3:17.
James, this is a beautiful, tender family story. Thank you. It’s also a good articulation of the ’emotional incoherence’ at the core of much Christianity: A Father-God who asks for our vulnerable intimacy yet threatens us with hellfire. Of course our hearts are confused!
What I’d like from theologians or historians is a more precise exploration of where this emotional incoherence came from. Is it intrinsic to scripture? To Western and Orthodox Christianity alike? To Protestantism or Calvinism specifically? What’s the origin story?
Thank you, James. I too have experienced devout loved ones’ fears as they near death. As a product of a Roman Catholic education, I can attest that the seeds of a judgmental God at the Pearly Gates are planted early in children’s minds so it is not surprising that as people near death and the filters go that those seeds sprout. It is difficult for our aged population to change their thinking as death nears, but we would do well to ensure that our children’s Christian Education focuses on an understanding and loving God.
Thanks for sharing this experience, James. I find that our faith often does not serve us well. It’s notoriously weak, distracted, fearful, probably with some bad theology in the mix. I do not know how well my own faith will hold up emotionally when I die, so I’m glad that when faith is weak, God is graciously strong to save anyway. Faith is what we call our side of the relational link between us and God. God’s side of that link holds strong even when our side is fragile. I seem to recall that the character of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress was also filled with fear and panic when he crossed the River of Death. It’s not uncommon. When the Lord says “Do not fear,” it may be in the form of a command, but it’s not like a moral command for which God punishes us if we fear. It’s what I call a comforting-command. It’s an assurance from God in the grammatical form of a command.
O James, such a timely reminder of the convergence of justice and mercy. God’s wrath because of God’s overriding love for all God has made good, for flourishing. Even if we do become faithless, God remains faithful. God cannot deny God’s own character: to bless, to be good, to resurrect us from death and Hell. There may be discipline in the life to come (purgatory), but it is to correct, purify and refine us; not to destroy, annihilate or forever torment us.
We love God, not because we fear Hell, or desire “Heaven,” but because we have come to believe and know his dying (and undying) love for us.
I too, as a pastor, have known giants of faith, who at the end, were filled with fear. Singing “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know” is/was just the antidote. Thank you.