C4CC(13): The beginning of wisdom (3)
So if God is not wrathful in the sense of an angry pagan deity, what does the language of wrath in Scripture refer to? For it is certainly saturated throughout the Old Testament, and it is not absent from the New Testament. The answer is that Scripture testifies to a developing understanding of the nature of God and wrath. It is a theme in Paul’s writings, for example, but Paul tends to talk of “wrath” rather than “the wrath of God”. Of some 20 to 25 references to wrath, only two or three are to the wrath of God.
Julian of Norwich – who lived at the time of the Black Death and saw immense suffering in her lifetime – understood that God is not concerned with punishment. The understanding of God in Christian faith is not a pagan one, whereby we have to appease someone who is angry, or else suffer terrifying consequences, but rather that God is love above all. Julian of Norwich talks about a courteous love, that God is loving to the exclusion of all other attributes. This does not mean that what is described as the wrath of God or vengeance or punishment in the Old Testament is not describing something real. It is to say that the presentation there has more to do with how the Old Testament peoples understood wrath than it has to do with the nature of God as revealed in Christ himself. After all, a wrathful, punishing God would not get involved in this process of allowing himself to be sacrificed in order to heal. Jesus rarely refers to the Old Testament directly, but there is one passage in Hosea which He quotes twice and it is this: “Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy not sacrifice.” God is eternally consistent in acting from love.
So what is a properly Christian understanding of wrath? Wrath is when we experience the consequences of our own sin. In medieval theology it was accepted that there were two ways of understanding God – there was the book of nature (creation) and there was the book of revelation (the Bible) – and both books allowed the reader to discern the nature of God. In particular, contemplating the creation can lead you to affirm the Creator. It cannot lead you to affirm Christ for that is the realm of revelation, but you can through natural reason come to the conclusion that God exists. Corresponding to this, there are two ways to understand wrath, one referring to a natural process, one referring to a human process.
As Christians we understand that the world is made through Christ, that the world is consistent, that it can be understood, and that is what we call the logos (John 1.1). Incidentally, this is one of the foundations for the development of science in the Western world: because we can trust the maker of the world to be consistent, therefore we can apply the apathistic stance to discern truth. This depends upon prior theological assumptions, for where there is a panoply of gods intervening arbitrarily then it is impossible to obtain consistent, reliable and repeatable data.
So natural theology perceives that the world is consistent and bound by laws that we can see and understand, and these laws reveal the nature of the Creator. If the world is consistent and bound by laws then that means that the transgression of those laws has particular consequences. If you put your hand in fire, you will get burnt. There is no monitoring entity saying, “you've broken the rules by putting your hand in the fire! Now I've got to punish you by burning your hand!” No, there is simply a hand being placed in the fire and being burnt as a result. This is the first sense in which the language of wrath can be applied: wrath is when we experience the consequences of our actions.
Another sense in which wrath can be described is in human terms. In the ritual from the Day of Atonement there was a role for a scapegoat – upon which all the sins of the nation were laid. A human society – if it isn’t rooted in God, in right worship, in right relationships with self and neighbour, and thereby enabled to become fully human – will fixate on to something else around which to form an identity. This will become an idol, and then this idol will require sacrifices in the pagan sense in order to keep the society together. The perfect example is 1930s Germany and the scapegoating of the Jews. A society which was under tremendous stress sought to preserve a sense of identity by worshipping the idol of racial purity; this meant picking upon a scapegoat, and there was then a unity amongst the majority through denying and expelling the minority. This is a law of human nature. If we are not centred on God then we will be centred on something else and that something else becomes an idol. If the governing idol is Mammon, then the scapegoated minority will be the poor, who will be described as deserving their poverty due to some moral failing, such as laziness. If the governing idol is sexuality then the scapegoated minority will be the fat and the ugly, who will be described as deserving their unhappiness due to some moral failing, such as a lack of self-control. This scapegoating process, always present, becomes dominant during times of crisis. In our time it is no longer the Jews who are most vulnerable to being rejected in the West; now it is the Muslim community. We are still unredeemed, and we are therefore prone to violence and anger and slaughter and sacrifice. This is a path that can only end in war. In such circumstances there is still a sense of pagan sacrifice, there is still a dynamic whereby there is an angry deity present – but the angry deity is not God. We are the angry deity. What the ritual of the Day of Atonement shows us is God acting to try and overcome our wrath. To reveal it to us and to set us free from it. We are the ones being revealed as the pagans who require sacrifice in order to maintain our sense of identity and social processes. We are the angry ones.
This, then is the second way in which the language of wrath can be used. Wrath is first and foremost about when we go against the natural order and suffer as a consequence, but it is also about the nature of who we are as a human society when we are fallen. If we do not focus our human society on the living God then we will end up having this process of scapegoating and sacrifice repeating itself for ever.