It is not uncommon to hear reassurances — sometimes in the face of Scriptural witness to the contrary — that God is not an angry God. God the Father, revealed to us in Christ, is a loving and merciful God. Sometimes this even takes the form of Marcionism, an ancient heresy that taught that the God revealed by Jesus was not the same God as the Jewish God. In this version, the God of the Old Testament might have been angry, or at least misperceived as such by the Scriptural authors, but Jesus reveals to us the true face of God, the face of love.
While it is true that Jesus does reveal God’s love in a final and irrevocable way, it is not the case that he reveals a different God. Marcionism will not do. In addition to going against the constant witness of the Church, it is also a dangerous step on the road to antisemitism. Positing two different Gods, or even two different conceptions of God, will not square this circle. Moreover, this solution imagines that all the references to God’s anger in Scripture are found in the Old Testament. But this is simply not the case; as we know, Jesus himself gets angry.
Anger isn’t the opposite of love
I suspect that at the root of this problem is the false idea that love and anger are opposites that cannot coexist. If God is angry, he is not loving, and if he is loving, he is not angry. But a moment’s reflection should disabuse us of this notion. The people in our lives who anger us the most are those we love the most. Now, sometimes those people make us angry because we have faults that their particular qualities rub up against in the wrong way. This is not a good analogy for God’s anger. But sometimes they make us angry because their choices hurt them and those around them and we want better for them. This gets us closer to the mark.
Anger is not an evil in itself. If Jesus could be angry and overturn the tables of the moneychangers, then it is possible to, as St. Paul instructs the Ephesians (4:26), “be angry, but do not sin.” In itself, anger is an energy to fight injustice, to correct wrongs, to pursue the good with vigor. Anger is the drive for love to overcome evil.
The problem is not with anger in itself; the problem is that anger is exceptionally difficult to manage well. For our fallen race, at least, even fully justified anger can be a real occasion of sin. We may be angry with our children out of love. But the real question is how we act on that anger. Will sinfulness make our anger destructive, or can we use our anger well?
Once we see things in this frame, the question of God’s anger is much easier to resolve. While we might become angry for reasons that have more to do with our own bruised egos than for righting injustice, God is not similarly tempted. And while we may act poorly even when our anger is warranted, piling injustice upon injustice, God never does.
God does not arbitrarily punish in a fit of egoism. God responds to injustice in full freedom with proportionate anger that is ordered towards the good of both the victims and the transgressors. Any parent who has mediated between fighting children understands the balance necessary here. That balance can be tricky for us. Not so for God.
The justice of anger
We don’t need to explain away Scripture, which insists that anger is a category appropriate to God. We need to revisit our own sense of the relationship between anger and sin, justice and mercy. An angry God is not the opposite of a just and merciful God. Anger, done well, is an appropriate response to sin. It is also an expression of both justice and mercy.
And here’s the thing: we actually want an angry God. Imagine you are the victim of some great injustice — most of us have been at some point or other. And now imagine telling your spouse or close friend or parent about the situation. How do you want them to respond?
Certainly, you are not looking for them to have a tantrum on your behalf. You actually desire their stability and moderation in a moment when you yourself can easily be thrown off kilter. But neither do you want them to be placid in the face of your difficulty. You want them to be angry. And if they aren’t, you wonder if they either have not fully understood the situation or if, perhaps, they just don’t care.
But if God can be angry, then God understands and God cares. That is good news. And, what is more, we can more easily order our own anger well when we know and believe this, when we know we are not in the battle alone. If “vengeance belongs to the Lord,” as Scripture teaches, it doesn’t belong to us. Given our own track record with vengeance, this is also very good news.
