Xenophobia is “fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.”
And we should have more of it in our churches.
Wait, let me explain.
In chapter 3 of The Holiness of God, R. C. Sproul says that “God is the ultimate object of our xenophobia. He is the ultimate stranger. He is the ultimate foreigner. He is holy and we are not.”
In that chapter, Sproul is at pains to remind us that “holy” primarily means “separate” not “pure.” When we say “God is holy” we are first and foremost communicating His difference to us. As Sproul says, He is “a cut apart…transcendent…above and beyond us…exalted loftiness…an infinite cut above everything else…so far above and beyond us that He seems almost totally foreign to us.”
Mysterium Tremendum
Sproul commends Rudolf Otto’s special term for the holy, a term Otto devised after studying people’s reactions to the holy. He labelled it “the mysterium tremendum” or “the awful mystery.” He called it “awful” because of the fear and dread with which the holy fills us, overwhelming and overpowering us with a sense of our creatureliness. He called it “mystery” because of its strange attraction. We run from it and run to it. It repulses us and attracts us. “We can’t live with it and we can’t live without it.”
This is an appropriate and rational xenophobia. It is an understandable reaction for sinners before such a God of consuming fire, especially for sinners without a mediator between God and men.
Xenophobic Churches
To come back to my opening words, we need more of this kind of xenophobia in our churches. Our worship, prayers, and sermons should at times provoke and reveal a fear and even hatred of God, especially among unbelievers who don’t know Christ. There should be times when such hearers are acutely aware of God’s otherness, that He is the ultimate foreigner, that He is the mysterious stranger, that He is holy and we are not.
As Sproul says, although death is scary and reminds us we are creatures, “Yet, as fearsome as death is, it is nothing compared with meeting a holy God.”
God With Us
But we don’t stop there; because God has not stopped there. He saw the distance, the contrast, the difference between us and Him; and He bridged it by becoming us. He took human flesh and blood, a human mind, a human will, a human soul, a human conscience, a human existence, human suffering, and even a human death.
Through Christ, He is no longer God above us, but Immanuel, God with us. From transcendent to immanent. From the ultimate foreigner to the ultimate friend. From Creator to creature. From infinite to finite. Not only “God with us” but “God like us.”
And that’s an even more awesome mystery than Otto discovered.
It’s also the cure for all the other xenophobias that traumatize our world.