God has a funny way of reminding me of how blessed I am to be married to my McKenna. Recently he did it through a bit of an imbroglio I got into online. As happens from time to time, some mis-communications occurred in a conversation and, in my wife’s opinion, the other dude said some hurtful and unfair things about me—things that she thought were wrong and unrighteous. Although typically the one calming me down, she was so bent out of shape about it she wanted to say something to the guy and was frustrated to the point of tears when I told her it’d be best to leave it to the Lord. (She is little, but fierce.) Her deep love for me and sense of justice led to great indignation at the perceived slight on my character and it moved her to want correct it, to right the wrong–essentially, it provoked her to wrath on my behalf.
Aside from feeling deeply loved and very humbled, this incident reminded me of an important, but little-considered insight into the problem of the wrath of God–the God of the Bible is gloriously triune. Before we see what light that sheds on things, we have to first consider the problem.
The Problem of Self-Regarding Wrath- To be perfectly blunt, the biblical doctrine of the wrath of God is one of the most troubling and confusing doctrines for contemporary Christians to deal with. Let’s be honest, it’s never really been a popular one, but in our modern times, there is a particular animosity towards the idea of God being some angry deity, a jealous God who says “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.” (Ex 20:7); one whose wrath has anything to do with concern about his own glory, his own name, and not simply the good of his people. (Ezek 20:13) The idea that God’s wrath might flow out of what Walter Brueggemann has called, “Yahweh’s colossal self-regard” is incomprehensible to many of us. Even when it’s affirmed or confessed, most people still don’t know what to do with it.
A lot of us can deal with the idea that God gets angry out of love for people. When we see Isaiah or Amos proclaiming God’s indignation at the oppression of the poor, and the violence against the weak, we understand that. That other-regarding kind of anger in God is acceptable to us because it is aimed at human good. We get that for God not to be wrathful against the human evil we perpetrate against each other would be wicked. God can’t look at racism, rape, genocide, and televangelists and just shrug his shoulders. In the face of such evil there ought to be real indignation, anger, and moral opposition–in a word, wrath.
Still, when it comes to indignation flowing from any kind of Divine self-regard, an offended holiness, or anything like that, the charge comes up that this is the picture of some primitive deity, an insecure, tyrannical, emotionally unstable character with obvious self-esteem issues. We read texts like “A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear? says the LORD of hosts to you, O priests, who despise my name “(Mal 1:6), and we shudder. We ask, “I mean, shouldn’t God be above that sort of thing? Shouldn’t he be able to brush that off? I thought a God of love wouldn’t be that petty and narcissistic?”
Divine Self-Regard and Truth The first question that comes to my mind when I hear these sorts of objections is, “What kind of ‘love’ is it? Is God’s love the kind that’s concerned with truth?” If so, then it must be a love that hates lies. (Rom 12:9) The God who is perfectly true loves truth and hates lies. For that reason he must hate the lies that we tell about him. He must hate blasphemy, idolatry, and all the different ways that we deny God his godness. In fact, that’s exactly what the Bible says he does. (Rom 1:18-24) On the one hand, yes, he hates it because it distorts our understanding of him and hurts us, but the Bible is clear that he also hates it simply because it is a lie about Him, the Truth Himself.
Think about it, the reason self-regard is so putrid in humans is because it is usually based on a lie, an arrogant over-estimation of one’s value or characteristics. Self-regard in God is not a lie, though. It is truth. When he demands regard, it’s because He himself is the ultimate in beauty, glory, majesty, love, compassion, strength, justice, holiness, and loving-kindness. For God to have great regard himself is just an accurate estimation of what is the case. It is righteous, holy, and ‘impartial’ , which is one of the many ways that God’s self-regard is unique and unlike ours.
Put it another way, one of the attitudes encouraged in the Scriptures is zeal for God’s Name—we should feel affronted when God’s Name is trampled, not just because it hurts people but because God is beautiful and righteous—He Himself is worth the indignation. (Ps 69:9) Now, would it be wrong for God to command us to have zeal for his Name if he didn’t have it? Am I to love God, praise his name, be concerned for its trampling before people just for the sake of others or is it also right for God’s own sake? In that case, isn’t it appropriate for God to think he’s worth it?
Divine Self-Regard and the Trinity While these questions about self-regard and truth are necessary and important, often-times we stop there, and fail think through to the deeply Triune shape of God’s Divine self-regard. In Jesus’ high-priestly prayer we are given a small glimpse into the beautiful life of the Triune God:
“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.”
(Jn 17:1-5)
Before the creation of the world, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have been in a perfect, harmonious love relationship of mutual love, admiration, and glorification. Here the Scriptures show this dynamic most clearly in the love relationship between the Father and the Son. From all eternity, the Son has been with the Father, and has always been the object of the Father’s delight and heart, the only-begotten, beloved Son in whom he is “well-pleased”(Jn 1:1, 17; 3:16; 17:23-24; Mk 1:11) The Son has always delighted in the infinite goodness, the righteousness, the holiness, and unimaginable beauty of his Father, and it his will to make his Father known (Jn 17:26) His deep love for his Abba (Mk 14:36), causes him to be obedient and do only what his Father is doing. (Jn 5:19) Their mutual indwelling means an identification between the persons such that “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.” (Jn 14:7)
Trinitarian Self-Regarding Wrath At this point it becomes clear why my wife’s indignation reminded me of God’s own self-regarding indignation and wrath. When we love someone, we are absolutely opposed towards anything that wrongly brings shame on their name or dishonors them. My wife’s love for me is such that any defamation of my character frustrates her, concerns her, is hateful to her. For it to be otherwise would imply a deficiency in her love for me. Here I’m tapping into a very Aristotelian point to say that virtue at times requires certain emotions and certain reactions, and the ability to feel them at the right time and the right place. The very best, most virtuous people are the people who know precisely why and when to be angry, or happy, or sad. I think that holds true maximally of God. Now, again, we need to keep in mind God’s Impassibility, the fact that his emotions and judgments are in very important ways not like ours, subject to the limitations and defects humans suffer. So any analogy between human love and wrath needs to be seriously qualified.
Still, given the great, eternal, burning, over-flowing love that flows between the persons of the Trinity, should we think that the Father would have any less concern about the glory of his beautiful Son? Should the Son be angered at blasphemy and defiance of His gracious Father? Are the Father and the Son being narcissistic in their indignation at the distressing of the Holy Spirit?
In fact, when we look at the New Testament, at Jesus, God in the flesh, this is exactly what we see. Jesus’ most violent moment, when his indignation at sin and evil is most on display, is in his clearing of the Temple at the Passover. (Jn 2) In overturning the vendors’ stalls and the money-changers’ tables he enacts a symbolic judgment on the sin that has corrupted the holiness of God’s house. Jesus’ actions in the Temple flow from his anger, his wrath that his Father’s house was being defiled, that his Name was being profaned by the money-lenders. (Jn 2:16) In fact, at that point, “His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’” (Jn 2:17)
We see clearly then that Jesus’ wrath has a Trinitarian shape—the Son is concerned with the great Name of his Father. When you put things in a Trinitarian perspective it all the more, shows that it is perfectly reasonable, right, and even biblical for God to be concerned about God’s Name–that his indignation, his wrath should be self-regarding in that way. It is precisely because of the perfection of God’s Triune love that God has self-regarding wrath, not any deficiency or lack in it. It is not narcissistic or petty, but beautiful and honorable for God to care about his Name; it is glorious for the Son to love the Father and the Spirit, and the Father to love the Son and the Spirit, and the Spirit to love the Son and the Father with such a great, burning passion that any affront, any lie, any blasphemy of any of the persons is a source of great indignation to the others, that it provokes wrath and anger, holy concern.
This is Good News To make it clear then, both in his other-regarding and his self-regarding indignation, God’s wrath is not opposed to his perfect love but flows from its perfect fullness. I want to make it clear that in no way am I denying God’s utter goodness towards humans, or his basic, self-giving concern and care for them in all that he does. I simply want to fill in the picture a bit to show the fittingness, the rightness, and beauty of God’s own self-regarding indignation. In fact, I think that when properly considered, God’s concern for his own Name should be a great comfort to believers when they reflect on the good news that through Jesus Christ, we are invited into that love, into the fullness of the life of the Triune God.
In his high-priestly prayer Jesus prayed to his Father, “I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (Jn 17:26) Jesus made his Father’s name known so that through him, that same love with which the Father loves the Son is the love that is lavished upon us and poured out into our hearts through the Spirit. (Rom. 5:5) This means that through Christ the same concern with which God is concerned for his own Name, is the concern he places on you!
Ironically enough, it is precisely this passionate, holy, self-regarding love which enables Paul to proclaim with great assurance that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”(Rom 8:38-39)
Praise be to the great and glorious love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Soli Deo Gloria
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Absolutely AWESOME blog. Your wife is a keeper…give her an extra hug tonight for all the wives who have felt the righteous indignation on behalf of our beloved husbands and children.
I’ll definitely do that! Thanks for stopping by and engaging on this one.
What’s really interesting is that I just wrote the first song that I’ve written in two years and the opening two lines are: “I hate whatever disrespects your name; I hate whatever brings your kingdom shame.” I think when you decouple God’s wrath from always being talked about in the ludicrous context of speculating about eternal conscious torment, then it becomes a completely different conversation.
I know God is filled with wrath because He fills me with it; I just hadn’t understood that’s what was going on. He filled up two prophetic raps that I wrote over the last two days with it. Why in the world should a white yuppie from northern Virginia give a damn about what happens in Israel and Palestine? I should be focused on honing my son’s soccer skills. I seriously have trouble falling asleep when I think about it. It’s not reducible to social justice though that’s a part of it. What I hate is the farce that we have made of divine election by having the audacity to make our own Caesar-financed version of it (it’s way more disrespectful than David counting his fighting men). I am filled with rage at the disrespect that is shown to God’s name by the way that Christian Zionism turns “other nations will be blessed because of you” into “Jesus will come back if we start Armageddon through you,” or if that’s too cynical, then at the very least, “Here’s a way that we can prove that we’re fans of the right team.”
God’s wrath fills me when I see Pulpit Freedom Sunday and all the emails I get from right-wing preachers promoting birtherism and Muslim conspiracy theories involving Obama. I’m not angry out of solidarity with Obama. He actually annoys the crap out of me with his spinelessness when I cut through all the mockery with which he’s been treated by people who purport to be Christian. I’m angry out of solidarity with God and out of shame for the way that His name has been thoroughly compromised because what these preachers are doing is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. I don’t think blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is reducible to simply “saying no to salvation.” It’s willfully putting sewage in the same spring that dares to proclaim, “Thus saith the Lord.” That’s why Jesus says to get yourself a millstone necklace if you’re going to do that kind of shit.
Now here’s a wrench for your Trinitarian account of wrath. It doesn’t work with the popular penal substitution account where the Father turns His wrath against His own Son on the cross as the means of atonement (which has very dubious Biblical support anyway). We can say that Jesus wasn’t just quoting the Psalm and there was an absence of His Father’s face when He said, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” If the “turning away” is what we’re calling wrath (which is still completely speculative), then okay, but it impugns God’s name to make the Father into some kind of weird schizophrenic who suddenly rages against His Son when it was Caesar’s nails that were driven into His flesh. I honestly think that the reason this perverse account is created is in order to “protect” Jesus’ crucifixion from having any component of solidarity with the oppressed who are crucified by Caesar and not by God.
I think the way God’s wrath is revealed on the cross is more analogous to the way it was revealed when the photo of the little naked girl in Vietnam covered in napalm was circulated around the US. The analogy to simple human emotions that are directed from one person to another fails at this point. We have to always remember that we’re talking about someone who created us in His image and not someone who we can create in OUR image. He is infinite; we are finite; so human emotions are a helpful analogy but NOT His reality. God’s wrath is what convicts the Jews who listen to Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 and are “cut to the heart.” The blood not only pays; it also convicts; that is a powerful and important function of orge theou. This is why Abelard’s moral influence theory should not be ridiculed as much as it has been by people who read everything theologically through the Augustine/Pelagius dichotomy. We need Anselm and Abelard both.
Now the other thing is Jesus’ scandalous kenosis on the cross should not be canceled out by making the Father “in control” of the situation and the primary agent of the violence committed against His Son. I really think that some of what’s going on when this move is made does not have to do with God’s impassibility but rather an unwillingness to embrace and emulate a vulnerable, rejected savior. Jesus’ radical vulnerability is the greatest revelation of God’s nature; you take away from that vulnerability when you use perichoresis to cancel it out instead of recognizing it as something that God wills perichoretically.
All this is just to say that I think God’s choice to be “weak” is actually the primary way that His wrath is activated in His people. It makes me think of Jacob staying silent after Dinah was raped until his sons got home from the fields so that they could enact their father’s wrath on Shechem. Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote a fascinating essay theorizing that mob rage is an expression of divine violence. I think God puts anguish into our consciousness when He is being mocked. I don’t think it’s possible for us to channel God’s wrath perfectly, but angry people who sin are channeling God’s wrath even though God is not sinning when they do so and they are. Jesus says if no one will proclaim his name (which is truth), the rocks will cry out (Luke 19:40). Rocks cry out when they explode. I realize that’s a very midrashic reading but Paul did the same thing with the rock Moses hit in the desert. Peace.
Morgan, as always, you can easily write a response to my piece nearly as long as my piece and do it off the top of your head. I don’t know how you do it. On your comments:
1. Morgan, you have more righteous wrath against God-shaming sin than most people I know. Your zeal is great.
2. I think the use of Psalm 22 has been a trouble spot for a while. There is a great piece by a Wesleyan theologian, Thomas McCall called “Forsaken” that takes on the Broken Trinity interpretation of the Cross, a la Moltmann. It strongly affirms penal substitution, minus the unhelpful, speculative add-ons. I think though, that one thing that must be kept in focus in the Cross is that the suffering was that of the Son in his humanity. I also think that there was real abandonment (you can’t get more abandoned than dead), even though Triune communion at the eternal, ontological level was always unbroken. I’m still working that out in my head, but that’s where I’m at so far.
3. I also think that we have to take into account the fact that it is not only the Father who has wrath, but the whole Trinity, so somehow the execution of judgment in the Son is also the judgment of the Son and the Spirit. I think. It also needs to be remembered that the Son gives himself up freely. Nobody takes his life from him, he lays it down willingly. This isn’t the Father forcing the Son out of anger to take the hit. This is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working together to accomplish their loving triune will.
4. As for the last bit…maybe. I mean, for me, I see God’s hand in scripture using sinner and righteous to do both his proper work of redemption (Cyrus), and wrath (Babylon). So, Benjamin could be right. We probably shouldn’t volunteer for the job, though!
Blessings man!
1. Yeah I think I have to own it as wrath that He’s sowing in me, which is kind of scary and presumptuous but at the same time He won’t let me see it as my bad attitude or rebelliousness anymore. We have to hold our fellow brothers and sisters more accountable than the “Gentiles and tax collectors.” If Bill Maher mocks God, what is that to me? If Rick Warren mocks God, I obviously need to be very discerning and careful in how I interpret and respond but it is going to fill me with a lot more wrath than Maher.
2. You shared about Thomas McCall before. Is it a book or an article?
3. Here’s where I have a problem (maybe). I don’t think the Trinity should be opposed to one another. It’s not that the Father and Son gang up on the Son. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all share the same will to judge sin on the cross. The Son allows His body to be the site where that judgment takes place but that doesn’t indicate that the Father got temporarily pissed off at Him which is an abominable analogy. The wrath is against the sin, not against the Son, though the real abandonment is part of the infinitely far-reaching embrace by which we are swept into the Father’s arms through the Son’s descent into Hades (if not Gehenna).
4. Using Walter Benjamin is basically “plundering the Egyptians” as Augustine would put it because he’s pretty much a culturally Jewish atheist. I just think that we have to undo Duns Scotus’ “univocity of being” that has been such a scourge to Western Christian thought in how we imagine God. He doesn’t share in the same being as us. He’s the source of our being, which means that even though it’s Biblical to talk about Him analogously with anthropological terminology, His relationship to us in terms of the relationship between His wrath or love and ours is more like a willful, intelligent energy field sweeping through a room than like an invisible enormous man who flies in from outside of the universe to intervene.
When we see the violation of mishpat, shalom, or torah, His wrath hits us and it either becomes something we channel constructively through discipleship or something that provokes us into aimlessly destructive behavior which then triggers wrath AGAINST US that we can either appropriate as discipline (which we are empowered to do by the cross) or let it build until the end of our lives to get unleashed on us as rage without any edifying purpose. Is that too new-agey a way of talking about it or can you see it? This is all experimental territory for me theologically even if I’m speaking without maybes and other qualifiers.
Morgan,
1. Yup.
2. It’s a book, but there is an article by him on the subject.http://catalystresources.org/issues/383McCall.htm
I recommend the book, though because it goes more fully into the issues.
Also, here is a review convo by another favorite author, Fred Sanders
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scriptorium/2012/10/the-broken-trinity-forsaken-pt-1/
3. Essentially agree here. I think that’s kind of what I’m going for in my own comment.
4. Totally with you on univocity, source of being, etc. Still working through that stuff, but I again seriously commend Vanhoozer’s book at this point. So helpful!!
I think we’ve reached the Hegelian synthesis of comments after thesis and antithesis. Blessings!
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Great article and comments by Morgan.
I have thought a lot about these issues also. I have come to the conclusion that one of the Son’s primary motivations in coming to earth was to defend the Father’s reputation from how he has been misrepresented. I explain my thoughts in 2 articles, “Defaming God,” and “Defending God,” on Examiner.com.
My thoughts on why both the Father and the Son will defend the Spirit is not something I’ve heard expressed elsewhere. The Spirit is more easily grieved, and Father and Son will not forgive an attack on the Spirit. This reminds me of my 3 person family. My husband and son have thicker skin in many areas. I am more easily moved to pity and compassion. Just let somebody look at me oddly and they are shooting visual arrows from behind my back.
I believe it is impossible to have a father and son unless a mother exists somewhere. Do some word studies on “Spirit,” starting with Genesis 1. Spirit is feminine.
It was Spirit who hovered over “surrogate mother” Mary, not as Father, but inplanter of what Father had begotten before time began. It is Spirit who indwells us to teach us to respond as a bride.
Spirit may also be the Shekinah, as scripture pictures a women as “the glory” of her husband. Masculine and feminine qualities are necessary to round out the full spectrum of the personality of both human and divine. We are but a poor reflection and physical and emotional “glitches” further complicate it for us at the human level, but we still need the diverse facets of madculine and feminine qualities to be whole and creative, not one sided and imbalanced (like our loopy political partisans!)
Robyn,
Thanks for the comments! I absolutely agree that one of Jesus’ main aims was to uphold the good Name of the Father, to glorify him in all he does. As for the Spirit’s grievability…I’m not sure I would say he’s more easily grieved than the Father and the Son. I mean, grieving is mentioned in connection to him, I think, particularly because of the role he plays in the economy, enlivening the hearts of sinners. And the feminine thing…again, I’ve heard that one, but, I would say that I shy away from attributing unique feminity or motherliness to the Spirit. Jesus wanted to shelter Jerusalem under his wings like a mother hen, and the Father is spoken of in motherly terms as well. I think this is, again, one of those places where role in the economy of salvation plays a role.
I’m still working things out myself, though. Thanks again for dropping in!
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