Fear of Death. A Theological Perspective

• Published in: Teologia Vol. 93; no. 4; pp. 89 - 110
• Main Author: Vlad, Vasile
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editura Universității Aurel Vlaicu 2022; Aurel Vlaicu University Publishing House
• Subjects: Existentialism; Sociology of Religion; Theology and Religion; pathological fear; saving fear; cowardly or irrational fear; fear of losing the world
• ISSN: 2247-4382

Fear belongs to God’s creative act and, according to the biblical reference, if God made everything “very good”, it means that the fear of non-existence is good! For Adam, who was not alienated from God, fear meant the structural capacity of the soul to cling to life, to want to be; through fear Adam identified life in relation to God, he clung to God, considering Him the Source of his life, the Centre of his life. Fear manifests itself as the fundamental concern not to be cut off from God, as the fear of losing God. In this sense fear, as a tendency to cling, to communion and relationship with God, was the same as love of God, perfect love of God, because it was love and union with Life. Love of God was felt by Adam as fear of losing God as the Life of his life! In the act of sinning and after sinning, man no longer perceived God as the Source, the Centre, the content and the meaning of his life. Man’s existence became an existence of hiding from God and a gradual replacement of God by the world. In such an existence man’s nature has come under the dominion and then the mastery of pathological fear. From the power of nature, fear (which until the fall meant orientation towards God and the fear of not losing Him as the partner of love) was transformed into a state of restlessness, of pathological insecurity, of weakness, of powerlessness, a state concretized in a movement of man’s alienation from the finite material values which he invested with the status of the source of life!