Fear and Worship Me, Or Else
This sort of approach doesn’t exactly work as inspiration for me. Quite the opposite, really. I was reminded of Gary Numan’s Exile CD….
“In his mercy
He will make pain eternal…”
June 28th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
This sort of approach doesn’t exactly work as inspiration for me. Quite the opposite, really. I was reminded of Gary Numan’s Exile CD….
“In his mercy
He will make pain eternal…”
Some church signs are certainly ill worded, and some are hilarious, like, “Don’t let worries kill you, let the church help.”
The key to understanding the Camden Avenue Baptist one shown, which probably comes from one of the Psalms, is to determine what the original language meant. There is not always a one to one meaning correspondence between Hebrew and English. So I dug out my Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible and checked. There are about 15 different Hebrew words all translated to the English word fear in the King James translation of the Bible. The Hebrew word used in the phrase “The fear of the Lord”, which appears several times in Psalms and Proverbs carries the meaning of reverential awe.
Another Hebrew word, like the one used in Proverbs 20:2 “The fear of a king…”, carries the meaning of terror.
All of which is probably more than you wanted to know… 🙂
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:20 pmI understand and appreciate the challenges and subtleties of translation… But I remain unimpressed by the choice of using those specific English words to represent your church to the rest of the world.
On the other hand, there was the Cool Lutheran Church (in the town of Cool) we saw after GW6…
Neil Peart writes about several interesting church signs in his Roadshow book, from the fiery wrath of God variety, to clever and compelling ones. Two memorable examples:
“What’s mussing from CH_ _CH?”
“U R”
and my favorite…
“To Err is Human, But it Can Be Overdone.”
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:33 pm