An Exploration of Spooky Words and Holiness (Part II: Horror)
In the previous article of this series, I wrote about the origins of the word tremendous, and the connections among the concepts of fear, magnitude, and holiness. I will do something similar with each article in the series, teasing out the relationships among holiness and words that relate to fear. My goal is that tracing these etymologies might help illuminate the nature of fear, as well as how fear informs our relationship to and understanding of God.
I want to make it clear though that fear, though it has its proper place, should not be a primary aspect of how a spiritually mature person experiences God. The Proverbs say that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And 1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” Love is the primary mode in which God wants us to relate to him, and when love is perfected, there will be no need for fear. At the same time, if we, as frail and sin-prone human beings, approach God from the start with no sense of fear of his magnitude, his power, his righteousness, etc., that may be a symptom of a fundamental misunderstand of who we are, who God is, or both.
With that said, the spooky word I want to explore in this article is horror. It may or may not surprise you that though the etymological roots of this word are not shared with the previous article’s word , they do share some significant overlap in their semantic histories. Just as the more emotion-oriented and abstract meaning of tremendous came from a meaning that was originally more concrete (to tremble), horror also has its roots in something quite concrete: hair. It shares its root with the word hair, as well as hirsute, urchin, abhor, arugula, and (perhaps most unexpectedly) rocket.
The modern, English noun form of horror developed from a Latin verb, horrere, which referred to the bristling of one’s body hairs. So, etymologically speaking, the word invokes the kind of fear that makes one’s hairs (most idiomatically the one’s on the back of the neck) stand up on edge.
In the Bible, the righteous man Job has just such an experience. He describes it as below:
“A word was secretly brought to me,
my ears caught a whisper of it.
Amid disquieting dreams in the night,
when deep sleep falls on people,
fear and trembling seized me
and made all my bones shake.
A spirit glided past my face,
and the hair on my body stood on end.
It stopped,
but I could not tell what it was.
A form stood before my eyes
and I heard a hushed voice:
‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God?
Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker?
If God places no trust in his servants,
if he charges his angels with error,
how much more those who live in houses of clay,
whose foundations are in the dust,
who are crushed more readily than a moth!
Between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces;
unnoticed, they perish forever.
Are not the cords of their tent pulled up,
so that they die without wisdom?’”
This passage illustrates perfectly the kind of horror that can be induced by holiness. Job is confronted by some type of spirit in the night, which causes him to tremble and to be quite literally horrified (or horripilated, if one would like a word that refers precisely to the bristling effect). But it does not seem that this is an evil spirit, as it conveys truth to Job: a profound sense of humbling smallness and frailty in the face of God. And notably, it is not primarily God’s size or strength that is the cause for Job’s experience here. That is part of it, but the greater emphasis is on God’s righteousness as the cause. The spirit reasons that if even eternal angels can be found at fault before God, how much more feeble mortals? Our nature is characterized by corruption and decay, and perhaps the line of reasoning here is that our mortality frequently tempts us to sacrifice righteousness for survival instincts.
At any rate, the important fact is that because of human error and evil, God’s righteousness can be a source of horror to us. We have an instinct to be repulsed at the light of God’s glory, which exposes our sin.
How wonderful it is then that we have the revelation of the Gospel, in which we are taught by God’s very own Son that God seeks to be our Father. He cares for us. That sense of horror — though a natural disposition when sin is confronted by holiness — is not a feeling that God desires to induce in us. In light of the Gospel’s ministry of reconciliation, we can begin to attain to the righteousness God desires for us, and shed the horror that would otherwise overcome us in his presence.