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The Wrath of a Loving God: Unraveling a Biblical Conundrum
The portrait of an angry God, quick to condemn, that many people claim to find in the pages of the Bible is undoubtedly one of the greatest obstacles to faith. The modern tendency to efface all traces of anger from our image of God is therefore comprehensible. But might this procedure not risk mutilating the authentic character of the biblical God? Could the theme of divine wrath, properly understood, rather than being a primitive vestige or an aberration, perhaps offer a key to understanding a love “as fierce as death,” an approach to the mystery of our redemption in Christ? That is the challenge that this book attempts to take up.
“In giving a new starting point on interpreting God’s anger in the Bible, this book shows a bigger play is at stake: authentic existence for humankind. God is the God of life; his anger is his refusal to see darkness and evil consume his creation. In Jesus, everything finds liberation. Sharing company with figures like Julian of Norwich and Richard Rohr, this book is a testimony that all God can do is love ‘as fierce as death.’ So, the theme of divine wrath, properly understood, rather than being primitive or an aberration, offers a key to understanding the mystery of our redemption in Jesus Christ.”
John Sentamu, Archbishop of York
“In this insightful, nuanced, and readable study, Brother John takes the biblical perspectives on God’s anger and wrath with utmost seriousness. But he persuasively shows that divine anger and wrath express God’s love, compassion, and sorrow at humanity’s rejection of God’s life-giving ways. Culminating in Jesus, God’s ‘no’ to humanity’s ‘no’ to God is actually God’s ‘yes’ to us! This is an important book, on a critical topic, by an extraordinary interpreter of Scripture and Christian theology.”
Michael J. Gorman, Raymond E. Brown Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology, St. Mary’s Seminary & University, Baltimore, Maryland
“Brother John willingly enters in where angels fear to tread, especially fallen angels. He explores some of the most difficult passages of both the Old and New Testament, paying careful attention to both the texts and their contexts, so that in the midst of texts of terror the love of God does not disappear.”
James L. Heft, SM, Alton Brooks Professor of Religion, President, Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, University of Southern California
A native of Philadelphia, Brother John has been a member of the Taizé Community since 1974. He spends much of his time speaking about the Bible to participants in the international meetings held in Taizé, France. For part of each year he travels to the United States and Italy for meetings and retreats. He has written some ten books on biblical topics translated into a dozen languages.
“In giving a new starting point on interpreting God’s anger in the Bible, this book shows a bigger play is at stake: authentic existence for humankind. God is the God of life; his anger is his refusal to see darkness and evil consume his creation. In Jesus, everything finds liberation. Sharing company with figures like Julian of Norwich and Richard Rohr, this book is a testimony that all God can do is love ‘as fierce as death.’ So, the theme of divine wrath, properly understood, rather than being primitive or an aberration, offers a key to understanding the mystery of our redemption in Jesus Christ.”
John Sentamu, Archbishop of York
“In this insightful, nuanced, and readable study, Brother John takes the biblical perspectives on God’s anger and wrath with utmost seriousness. But he persuasively shows that divine anger and wrath express God’s love, compassion, and sorrow at humanity’s rejection of God’s life-giving ways. Culminating in Jesus, God’s ‘no’ to humanity’s ‘no’ to God is actually God’s ‘yes’ to us! This is an important book, on a critical topic, by an extraordinary interpreter of Scripture and Christian theology.”
Michael J. Gorman, Raymond E. Brown Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology, St. Mary’s Seminary & University, Baltimore, Maryland
“Brother John willingly enters in where angels fear to tread, especially fallen angels. He explores some of the most difficult passages of both the Old and New Testament, paying careful attention to both the texts and their contexts, so that in the midst of texts of terror the love of God does not disappear.”
James L. Heft, SM, Alton Brooks Professor of Religion, President, Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, University of Southern California
A native of Philadelphia, Brother John has been a member of the Taizé Community since 1974. He spends much of his time speaking about the Bible to participants in the international meetings held in Taizé, France. For part of each year he travels to the United States and Italy for meetings and retreats. He has written some ten books on biblical topics translated into a dozen languages.
144 pages, Paperback
Published October 28, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 11, 2020
Good introduction to one of the perennial questions of the Christian faith: can a loving God be wrathful? Brother John frames divine anger as God’s no to injustice and evil in the world. God cannot but love, but God cannot love evil. Thus, divine wrath is a temporary response to the evil of the world, while always saying Yes to God’s people, urging forgiveness and love amongst them. It’s certainly not a perfect book, though with a topic like this it’s unsurprising to find something lacking, but it gives a good—albeit brief—dive through the Scriptures to uncover different theologies about God’s anger.
February 24, 2024
This leans a bit more on the philosophical side than the biblical-expository side, but there is a good amount of the latter in there. It’s reasonings reveal that there is much more to the question, “What does it mean for God to be angry” than we often think. In what sense is this anthropomorphic, or God taking something understandable to humans to convey something of himself.
The book traces the development of the theme/idea of God’s anger throughout Scripture. The author sees much of the OT conveying God’s anger as a human interpretation of God’s actions within history, whether through outcomes of war or powerful natural events. He says, “we must always keep in mind that the notion of divine anger is not a simple, direct observation…In other words, it is not a fact but an interpretation” (11).
Leading into the NT, the author sees the Bible presenting God’s anger more as an impartial, impersonal judgment, that necessarily judges between right and wrong. He writes,
“In the New Testament writings, nowhere do we find God depicted as someone who gets angry. Often, as here, ‘the wrath’ is simply mentioned as a reality possessing its own consistency. Rather than being considered as a feeling or an attitude belonging to God, it tends to become in essence a technical term to describe the consequences of evil” (74).
As a protestant in the Reformed Baptist stream, this was a “chew the meat, spit out the bones” reading for me. At times, his view of Scripture leaves something to be desired, letting Scripture’s meaning be almost exclusively defined by “what we know about people in the time and how they would have thought.” Which is both hard to argue with (unless you’re a scholar on that time period), and erodes trust in the actual words of Scripture.
In my opinion, he sees God as a bit too passive in judgment, referring to it as evil’s self-destruction. That is a simplification of what the Bible presents.
At the same time, I found a lot of “meat” to chew on here. His lengthy discussion towards the beginning about how human anger is perceived in different kinds of societies, and how that might affect our view of God’s anger, was thought-provoking.
And I particularly enjoyed various comments on the relationship of anger to God’s essential being, though find his wording a bit problematic at points:
“In other words, although the notion of anger cannot simply be excluded from God, it is not a reflection of the divine identity. In himself God is always YES, but God is obliged as it were by the state of the world to say NO to certain things. As we have already seen, a God of love cannot say YES to anything that destroys life; God can never countenance evil. This NO, however, is not spontaneous; it is a kind of violence done to God by the absurdity of evil. In the face of sin, love turns into anger. In a word, in this ancient creed the NO is not eliminated, but it is clearly affirmed that it is in no way equivalent to the YES” (64).
As one resource among the many I am reading on a deep-dive of this topic, it had much to contribute.
The book traces the development of the theme/idea of God’s anger throughout Scripture. The author sees much of the OT conveying God’s anger as a human interpretation of God’s actions within history, whether through outcomes of war or powerful natural events. He says, “we must always keep in mind that the notion of divine anger is not a simple, direct observation…In other words, it is not a fact but an interpretation” (11).
Leading into the NT, the author sees the Bible presenting God’s anger more as an impartial, impersonal judgment, that necessarily judges between right and wrong. He writes,
“In the New Testament writings, nowhere do we find God depicted as someone who gets angry. Often, as here, ‘the wrath’ is simply mentioned as a reality possessing its own consistency. Rather than being considered as a feeling or an attitude belonging to God, it tends to become in essence a technical term to describe the consequences of evil” (74).
As a protestant in the Reformed Baptist stream, this was a “chew the meat, spit out the bones” reading for me. At times, his view of Scripture leaves something to be desired, letting Scripture’s meaning be almost exclusively defined by “what we know about people in the time and how they would have thought.” Which is both hard to argue with (unless you’re a scholar on that time period), and erodes trust in the actual words of Scripture.
In my opinion, he sees God as a bit too passive in judgment, referring to it as evil’s self-destruction. That is a simplification of what the Bible presents.
At the same time, I found a lot of “meat” to chew on here. His lengthy discussion towards the beginning about how human anger is perceived in different kinds of societies, and how that might affect our view of God’s anger, was thought-provoking.
And I particularly enjoyed various comments on the relationship of anger to God’s essential being, though find his wording a bit problematic at points:
“In other words, although the notion of anger cannot simply be excluded from God, it is not a reflection of the divine identity. In himself God is always YES, but God is obliged as it were by the state of the world to say NO to certain things. As we have already seen, a God of love cannot say YES to anything that destroys life; God can never countenance evil. This NO, however, is not spontaneous; it is a kind of violence done to God by the absurdity of evil. In the face of sin, love turns into anger. In a word, in this ancient creed the NO is not eliminated, but it is clearly affirmed that it is in no way equivalent to the YES” (64).
As one resource among the many I am reading on a deep-dive of this topic, it had much to contribute.
June 13, 2020
The premise of this book is a good one and some of the conclusions make sense. However, basic premises for the book are incredibly flawed. The author’s view of the Bible is that it is only a record of human attempts to describe God and that the history recorded is intrinsically a polemic for Hebrew and then Christian doctrine. While the biblical text does record human attempts to understand God and the history does have a spin, it is first God’s Word to humans of God’s move to save all creation. To start from the perspective of the Bible as a human invention demotes the Bible to something less than scripture and ultimately God to someone less than God. More devastatingly, this move ultimately makes humans into arbiters of what is the word of God and what is not. Thus, humanity takes the place of God. This is idolatry. Therefore, this book is fatally flawed and cannot be recommended.
February 20, 2025
John of Taize's reading of the incarnation as a gradual process, beginning in Hosea and Jeremiah and meeting its apogee in Jesus, is really extraordinary. His love and wisdom shines through his reading of the gospels.
His historicization of the Old Testament makes me nervous, but maybe it's an inevitable posture. On the other side of the gospels, I found his avoidance of the question of the reincarnation and the New Jerusalem surprising. But I suppose that wasn't the main point of the text anyway. Wonderfully thought through, and loved through.
His historicization of the Old Testament makes me nervous, but maybe it's an inevitable posture. On the other side of the gospels, I found his avoidance of the question of the reincarnation and the New Jerusalem surprising. But I suppose that wasn't the main point of the text anyway. Wonderfully thought through, and loved through.
June 3, 2024
A persuasive take on God’s sacred “no” to evil. It buried the lead as I found the most enlightening portion to be the ending coda on Revelation!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews