The Wrath of God

A number of our lectionary readings, particularly those near Advent, have much to say about God’s judgment: “He will separate them as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats;” “Watch, therefore, for you do not know when the master of the house will come;” “Prepare the way of the Lord!” The Bible says that when the Lord Jesus returns, he will assemble the nations before himself and judge every individual. To some he will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” To others he will say, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” God is a God of justice, and there will be a day when all wrongs are ended and everything will be put right.

The judgment of God flows out of the wrath of God. We often focus on the love of God, and remember his compassion to the troubled and his mercy to the guilty who turn to him for forgiveness. It is easy to think that God’s love means that he has set aside his wrath, as though God has decided that since he cannot scare us into being good he should try to “schmooze” us into acting as we should. Most angry people we meet are people who seethe with anger most of the time, or who can erupt into a fit of anger at a moment’s notice. It is very hard for us to think that both wrath and love can exist in the same person at the same time.

That, however, is exactly what the Bible says is true of God. His wrath and his love are both present at all times. Even more, the wrath of God is part of his love. If you are a parent, you can understand this. It is not just that you love your child even when you are angry with her or him. Think about threats to your child: what do you think of leukemia? What do you think of a bully who would make the life of your child miserable? What do you think of a drug dealer who would lure your child into dependency simply for the sake of his own financial profit?

You would resist each of these things with all the power you had, because each is capable of doing harm to your child and preventing your child from being what he or she can and should be. That is what the wrath of God is – a resisting of what is harmful to his creatures and to creation at large.

Human anger can be diffuse and spread over onto elements of life that do not deserve judgment. Indeed, human anger can be entirely misdirected and have no basis at all. The wrath of God, however, is always accurate, aimed at what is harmful and not what is good. God is never “in a bad mood,” when it would be dangerous for anyone to approach him. He always hates sin and the light of his holiness cannot tolerate the stain of sin for an instant. However, he always loves the sinner, and seeks what is best for him or her. God always wants and seeks the best for all of his creatures.
I am dealing with a complex subject and trying to do so as clearly and concisely as I possibly can. I will not be able to answer all the questions you might have, but want to deal with the heart of the matter as best I understand it from Scripture. God hates sin because it harms his creation, particularly that part of his creation that was created in his own image, the human race.

That is good news for us. Sin hurts us. Indeed, it would destroy us if left to work its complete results upon us. Consider the recent economic upheavals: the meltdown of the credit system of the last few months came about through a combination of several things – the desire of Congress to increase the percentage of home ownership in the population, which led to loans being offered to people who would never be able to repay them; the huge increase in “bundling” mortgages into investment instruments; the practice of selling and re-selling these bundles for a fee; and the invention of the “default credit swap.” Any one of these might have caused some trouble if it went sour, but they all went sour together and financial corporations that held much of their assets in mortgages became untrustworthy. No one would lend them money because they had unreliable assets. That lack of trust spread, and credit dried up – and our economy is so credit-dependent that has come to a crashing halt.
For the last several decades, creative people were making new investment instruments that promised large returns. Other people were reaching for “the American dream” of owning their own home. Real estate values were appreciating very rapidly, and many people tapped into the rising equity of their homes, and were able to buy things – some important, some simply pleasant – that they had long hoped for. Everything seemed very positive in many ways. But there were some greedy people in the midst do all this and we now see a painful halt to what had been an expanding economy and increasing wealth for many.

Greed is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and greed has been at work to build a house of cards and then to knock it down. It is hard to know how many people who were not in any way involved in the activities that led to the credit collapse who have nevertheless been hurt by it – lost homes, lost jobs, perhaps even marriages that collapsed under the financial pressure. Sin hurts us. That is why God hates sin. At any given time, we may think that something God calls sin is really God being a spoilsport – the thing seems pleasant and we do not see how anyone would be hurt. We, however, are ignorant of the ramifications of the particular activity. An addict may have a few good experiences with a drug and think that he can use it as he pleases and stop any time he wants, yet the reality is that he is on the way to slavery. God created us and he knows what is helpful and what is harmful, even though as we see things they may appear exactly the opposite.

God hates sin because sin hurts us. Our sins may hurt only ourselves, or they may hurt others as well – but sin brings pain and decreases our joy – indeed, I would say that sin decreases our humanity, for, whether we sin against others or are sinned against, we become other than, and less than, what God created us to be.
God’s wrath is not an indiscriminate anger that boils over without explanation or warning. It is a hatred of sin and of all that sin does to hurt us. Of course, if we decide that we prefer the way of sin to the way of God, we will wind up clinging to the object of God’s wrath and experience that wrath ourselves. That indeed is the human dilemma: we were created to enjoy unbroken fellowship with God, but ever since humanity rebelled against God in the Garden and lost that fellowship, we have been trapped in rebellion – wanting to be on our own, and yet aware that something vital was missing. Left to ourselves, we do cling to sin – and so we are slated to experience the wrath of God, if nothing is done.

God hates sin, but he loves us. He wanted to break our attachment to sin and restore us to fellowship with himself, so that we will move from being hurt by sin to being joyful in his presence. He cannot ignore sin because the painful results of sin will last forever unless sin is dealt with. God the Father, in his love for us, sent God the Son to us. At Christmas we celebrate the reality that the Son of God entered his own creation as a human being to experience it from the inside. God hates sin because sin hurts us – and sin hurt him when he walked among us. Jesus did not experience the ill-effects of his own sin, for he committed no sins – but he certainly experienced the ill-effects of the sins of others: the pain of betrayal by his own friend, the angry opposition by those whose pride he revealed, the injustice of a ruler for whom peace was worth more than a human life – all these and more Jesus experienced in his flesh. He knew the pain of sin’s results.

But the Son did not enter the world simply to share with us the pains of living in a broken world. It is enormously encouraging to know that God the Son knows what life is like not only from observation but from direct experience. But Jesus did far more than experience the pains of life in a world filled with sin and brokenness.

Jesus was born in great humility, so poor that he was housed in a stable and put to bed in an animal feeding trough. The humility of God the Son in coming to earth is so amazing and so touching that we rightly wonder at such humility, and we worship and rejoice. The taking on of human nature by the very Son of God is a weighty and joyful thing. God was not compelled to enter his own creation; that he did so when we had become sinful is staggering.

What is even more staggering is that he not only took human flesh and experienced the results of humanity’s sinfulness as the results of human sins came upon him, but he also experienced the spiritual results of sin: spiritual death. Over the manger hung the shadow of the cross, for he was born to die. Jesus, of all human beings, deserved to live forever – his life was everything it should have been. Jesus, however, had not come primarily to teach us and to show us how to live a life that honors and pleases God. Jesus had come to endure what sin deserves, the wrath of God. Since he deserved no such wrath himself, when he bore the wrath of God, he took what we deserve, so that we would not need to experience such wrath.

In Jesus Christ, the love of God and the wrath of God meet. God hates sin and its dreadful effects upon us. He cannot let go of his wrath – if he did, there could be no justice, and the ills of this world would continue on forever. In his love, he must deal with sin and drive it away from his beloved creation. Jesus came to earth and on the cross experienced the fullness of the results of sin – suffering from the sinful acts of others who condemned him, and suffering the spiritual results of sin as though he had sinned himself. He did not sin at all – but he received what we deserve so that we can receive what he deserved in his utter obedience: the joy of being with God forever.

We do not like to consider the wrath of God. It sounds too negative, and too angry. God’s wrath, however, is not the same as human anger, but the response of a loving creator to that which harms his creation. Because of the wrath of God, we have hope of a better life – for God’s wrath will do away with all that harms and distorts his creation – and all that harms and distorts us. As sinful people, we will either experience God’s wrath, if we cling to sin, or the presence of God, if we cling to Jesus, thanking God that his wrath passed over us and came upon Jesus for us.

Those who take refuge in the mercy of God have no fear of the wrath of God. They know that his perfect justice has been satisfied, and that his wrath will pass over them. It has already fallen on "Christ our Passover." The door of reconciliation is open and the perfect relationship between God and his people, for which he created humanity, has been restored. Because the perfect justice of God has been satisfied, no one who looks to Jesus ever need to worry about experiencing God's wrath. His perfect love, which includes his hatred of sin, has brought about a perfect reconciliation.

Progressives and Conservatives - In the Same Ball Park?

The Consultation, a coalition of 13 or so "Progressive" groups in ECUSA, recently published their platform for General Convention, 2009. One aspect of Progressive thinking that was both openly advocated and was also an assumption for several planks in the platform is the idea that humanity is inherently good. We do sin, but our sins are errors due to ignorance, faulty judgment, difficult upbringing, etc, etc. Sin is "falling short of the mark," but it is not an inborn part of human nature. If God pronounced all creation, including humankind, "very good," then human beings are indeed "very good."

I made a comment in Susan Russell's blog about Genesis 3 being overlooked in the thinking of Progressives. We may have been "very good" at creation, but we turned away from God early on, and became rebels. Our sin is a refusal to trust, and thus to obey, the living God. My comment engendered several others, criticizing me for being so negative, and so encouraging a low and wretched view of humanity, which keeps us prisoners of gloom and doom.

I later wrote a note on how the ideas of original sin and of total depravity are helpful to a positive attitude and to hope for the future. That comment (made to a posting on Original Blessing, a day or so later than the one on the platform) is posted below.

As I reflect on this still further, however, I am sure that the difference of opinion has its roots in a difference of assumptions. Conservative and Progressives do theology from an entirely different set of presuppositions. I argued for one major meaning to a passage of Scripture, if words are useful for communicating at all. But, Progressives believe (on the whole) two different things about Scripture and about interpreting Scripture.

For conservatives, Scripture is revealed by God. We believe that God spoke by the Holy Spirit through the authors of the Bible. The authors have their own perspective, style, etc, but the Spirit coordinated them all to produce the message he wanted. Conservatives also believe that God, who created the world by his power, also can act within this world miraculously, so that the miracles recorded were actual events. When we interpret Scripture, we do so convinced that our task is possible, for God has a meaning that he intended, and we can, through careful reading, ascertain that reading with a reasonable conviction of accuracy. We also believe that the task of theology is to take what Scripture says in various places and to produce a coherent, logical systematic of the Scriptural teachings of the books of the Bible. The Bible, God’s Word, deals with subjects that are larger than the mind can comprehend, so we are not going to be able to understand God completely, nor will we get answers to all our questions, but since God inspired the human authors to tell us what we need to know about how to relate to God and how we are to live, we will have a clear understanding of many things, or at the very least, a range with boundaries.

Progressives, on the other hand, do not think that the Bible is inspired, at least not in the sense that what the words say was directed by God. From the Progressive point of view, ancient people had spiritual experiences, reflected on them, and then wrote about them. Their encounter with the divine was real, but their interpretation of what that experience meant is not necessarily connected to what God intended. The Bible is to be respected and to be used to develop ideas, for it 1) has primacy in time, and 2) it has been used by the Church since it began. For most Progressives, the Bible also must be respected because it contains the words and teachings of Jesus (although some would say that not all of these are genuine, but many are). Some Progressives consider the miracles to be mere legend, others consider them to have a kernel of truth, but with a much more science-based understanding that can explain the event. On the whole, the supernatural is ruled out and even when it is not, it is minimized.

Since the Bible is not reliably from God, we do not need to take all parts of it seriously. We can take what is useful, or find major concepts and themes, and then develop those concepts without needing to heed what the rest of Scripture says. In addition, thoughts from later times may also be incorporated. In her first sermon as Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori spoke of “our mother Jesus,” using the words of a 12th (?) century mystic. She and other Progressives were astonished that conservatives were horrified at the use of such terms – the mystic had had her own experience of God, as authentic as any prophet, so why were her insights not as valuable? (Or so I think the thinking goes.)

In addition, there seems to be a different understanding of who God is. To conservatives, God is a personal being, incapable od being fully understood, but still knowable because he has revealed himself in creation and in history, and especially in his Word and in his incarnate Son. To Progressives, God is beyond knowing, and all religions have touched upon, somehow, the Divine, and each has its own perspective. Progressives vary on whether Christianity may be more true than other religions, but no Progressive seems willing to say that a particular religion is wrong or that it cannot be a way to truly know (insofar as any religion can be) the divinity.

I do not know exactly what the methodology of Progressive theology is, but it seems to be far more philosophically based than conservative theology. Most of the recent schools of theology (Liberation, feminist, womanist, etc, etc) seem to be theology done from a particular philosophical basis, or at least heavily influenced by a philosophy; Liberation theology draws heavily from a Marxist understanding of history and from “Process Theology.”

In addition, most Progressive theology written recently seems to be highly topical. Maybe someone has written a systematic theology from a Progressive perspective, but I have not heard of one (although that would not be surprising, as I am not an academic). Conservatives seek to have a consistent, coherent theology. Progressives seem to write things that back up a change they want to make, and do not worry about having consistency or even (it appears to me) coherence.

I also think that that many Progressives hold to a “deconstructionist” view of writing, which means that the reader brings all the meaning to the reading event, and the intent of the author has no bearing at all. Such a view means that multiple, conflicting understandings of the text are to be expected – so the Bible is merely a source of ideas. (I have often wondered why anyone who believes in deconstructionism would write anything, since the intent of the author is worthless – I could read something by the most rabid deconstuctionist and say that I was glad to hear that he upheld the idea of strict, logical interpretation. How could such a writer prove me wrong? He would have to admit that he intended a particular message and that I had gotten it wrong, thereby defeating his own thesis.)

Conservatives and Progressives come at the Bible and theology from an entirely different set of presuppositions and perspectives. We use a lot of the same words, but we do not mean the same thing. We refer to the same Bible, but understand its nature quite differently. We understand who Jesus is completely differently. It is no wonder that the Episcopal Church is fracturing, and it will be no surprise when other mainline denominations undergo the process in the next decade or so. We live in houses divided, and we cannot stand.

Post to “An Inch at a Time” on 21 March 09

Usually it is conservatives who say “either-or” and progressives who say “both-and,” but I will vary things a bit by saying we are both beloved and broken. I sometimes use an illustration: humanity is like a Rolls-Royce that has had a bad accident, where the car still runs, but the frame has been bent, the radiator pierced, the wheels are out of alignment, and so forth. You can take one look and know that it is a fine and valuable car – but you will have lots of trouble as you drive it, for many things do not work as they should.

We were formed by God in creation, and he called us “very good.” We were deformed in the Fall, so that we do not trust God to do what is right and good for us, and seek instead to live by our own lights. Those who come to Christ are transformed, so that we once again fully reflect the image of God, and come to trust him completely as we were intended to do at creation.

I am going to cite five passages of Scripture that give me hope and direction. (These are from the English Standard Version)
Mt 6:31-33, Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
This gives us our priorities, the same priorities assigned to Adam and Eve: the Kingdom of God, and a trusting confidence that God will supply what is needed, when it is needed.

Rom 5:8, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Gal 2:20, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

These two verses show me how deeply God loves me, and how far his grace goes. They mean that I have the freedom to explore the depths of my heart, and whatever I find there, no matter how dreadful, is covered by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. He already knew the worst about me, and still he chose to die for me. There is nothing I can discover about myself that will cause him to run in terror and say, “That is more than I can forgive!” Thus, I can know the worst, and not fear. And it is when you are willing to know the worst and accept it as a part of yourself that you will also discover the best about yourself, for when we put a barrier over our hearts in order not to see and admit the worst, we also place a barrier in the way of seeing the best. In addition, since evil is not a thing in itself, but rather deformed goodness, whatever ill I discover can be forgiven and its source transformed into a source of good. In my teens I was very sarcastic – but the same ability I had to “read” people and see their weaknesses and then lambast them with pointed words can now be used to understand and to offer words of acceptance, consolation, and direction.

1 Jn 1:8-9, If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

As we recognize our sins, confess them, and offer ourselves to God for transformation, we are cleansed and we become what the Father has called us in Christ: “righteous.” This is something that is recognized in Eucharistic Prayer B: “In him, you have delivered us from evil, and made us worthy to stand before you. In him, you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.”

Finally, Phil 1:6, And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

There is no need to prettify ourselves and acknowledge and recognize only the good. We can see ourselves whole, and offer it all to Jesus for the sake of his Kingdom. Luther said it very succinctly: “simul justus et peccator.” Those who believe in Christ are at one and the same time justified and sinners. And the day will come when we will be fully transformed, rescued from the penalty, the power, and the presence of sin, in God’s perfect Kingdom. The process of transformation will be complete. All who belong to Jesus Christ will fully reflect his image and will be what God had intended at creation.