The Online Treasury of the Divine Riches of the Oriental Orthodox Church.

My beloved son, I thank and praise God with all my heart, for the Great Redeemer and Saviour is always compassionate with us; He does not…punish us on account of our trespasses.[1]

The great Syrian Luminary, Mar Gregorios Bar Hebraeus, found[3] the conception of an angry God to be incompatible with the philosophical presuppositions concerning the Nature of God that have been universally affirmed by the Church since time immemorial: the immutability and impassibility of God. A few centuries earlier, the Coptic star of the desert, St Antony the Great, followed suit with this line of thought, stating that:

…God neither rejoices nor grows angry, for to rejoice and to be offended are passions...It is not right to imagine that God feels pleasure or displeasure in a human way.[4]

It cannot be denied, however, that the Scriptures and writings of the Fathers are nevertheless replete with references to the wrath of God and the consequent punishments He inflicts upon the sinners. The relevant verses and incidents that would seem to suggest an angry and vengeful God are often trumpeted by anti-Christian skeptics in the face of the Church’s emphatic presentation of God as the One who ‘so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son’ (Jn. 3:16) and whose very being is defined by love (1 Jn. 4:8). An examination of the Church’s conception (based, as always, on that which has been revealed to her) of the essential nature of God, the nature of Divine Revelation, the nature of man’s experience of God, and the nature of anger itself, proves, in the final analysis, that the contradiction is only apparent.

The long-established answer of the Church to the apparent tension between her theological axioms regarding the immutability and impassibility of the Divine Essence on the one hand, and the attribution of mutable and passible properties, activities, and passions (such as anger and vengeance) on the other hand, is quite simply that the latter do not reflect literal representations of God. Rather, such human-like depictions serve as literary devices aimed at communicating certain incomprehensible truths about God in terms we as humans can in some sense relate to for the purpose of allowing us to grasp, to an extent (which is inevitably a significantly limited extent at that), certain realities pertaining to the Divine. Accordingly, St Gregory the Theologian illumines Scriptural depictions of an angry God as follows:

According to the Scriptures God…grows angry…Something is presented here, which does not exist in reality. In accordance with our own understanding, we have given names to the characteristics of God, which are derived from ourselves...[5]

The primary and apparent difficulty associated with the ascription of emotions, such as anger, to the Divine stems from consideration of certain traits common to the human experience of such emotions and the incompatibility of such traits with our core theological presuppositions regarding the immutability and impassibility of God. Emotions would seem to challenge the immutability of God in that they often come and go like the wind; they would seem to undermine the impassibility of God in that their coming and going is often impulsive--the consequence of uncontrolled provocation or arousal induced by external factors. Lastly, the very Righteousness of God would seem to be at stake given that many emotions—of which anger is an exemplary example—are often provoked and encouraged by ungodly concerns, motives, or impulses.

Focusing more specifically on human anger, we find that it is often experienced as a destabilising, volatile and controlling force that is often provoked and encouraged by want of vengeance, spite, envy or hatred. However, it should not be inferred from the legitimate ascription of anger to God to be found in revelation that it thus follows that such common traits of human anger are to be legitimately attributed to Him also.

The consistent thread woven throughout all testimonies to the wrath of God in Scripture and Church history is His universal and loving invitation to the Kingdom of Heaven. The term ‘anger’ can be understood to approximate the nature of this invitation when we consider the fact that such an invitation is driven by an aim to rouse the sinner to repentance. To effectively evoke in the sinner the requisite spiritual reform in the relevant circumstances, God’s invitation to salvation manifests itself with an impact and harshness that the sinner, based on his personal human experience, best correlates with the emotion of anger. Accordingly, St Gregory the Theologian continues his discourse on the literary intent of Scriptural anthropormorphisms by explaining the nature of God’s anger as follows:

…He chastises, and for this, we have made it out that He is “angry” because chastisement among us is with anger...[6]

Whilst chastisement amongst us is indeed with anger, the Scriptures quite clearly qualify the chastisements of God as being driven by loving concern:

3 For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls. 4 You have not yet resisted to bloodshed, striving against sin. 5 And you have forgotten the exhortation which speaks to you as to sons: “My son, do not despise the chastening of the LORD, Nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by Him; 6 For whom the LORD loves He chastens, And scourges every son whom He receives.” 7 If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom a father does not chasten? 8 But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons. 9 Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? 10 For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed best to them, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness (Hebrews 12:1-11).

Thus, the anger of God as an essentially chastising anger driven by perfect love and steered by perfect wisdom, differs from the flawed and often sinful anger experienced by man, which, on the contrary, is often manifest as a retributive anger driven by ill-will and steered by unruly impulse.

But even the chastisement of God needs to be qualified, for it is not, regardless of how benevolently characterised, a positive act of God in the first instance. Recalling the words of Pope Kyrillos VI as quoted at the beginning of this work, ‘[God]…does not punish us.’ St Antony the Great explains how such a sentiment is to be understood when he insists that:

…[God]…only bestows blessings and never does harm, remaining always the same. We men, on the other hand, if we remain good through resembling God, are united to Him; but if we become evil through not resembling God, we are separated from Him...It is not that He grows angry towards us in an arbitrary way, but it is our own sins that prevent God from shining within us, and expose us to the demons who punish us. And if through prayer and acts of compassion we gain release from our sins, this does not mean that we have won God over or made Him change, but that through our actions and our turning to God we have cured our wickedness and so once more have enjoyment of God's goodness. Thus to say that God turns away from the wicked is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind.[7]

Thus, the anger and vengefulness of God, rather than reflecting the reality of Who God is and how He deals with us, reflect, rather, the ways in which we relatively perceive Him when we betray His unconditional love. It is more appropriate to regard the anger of God as that which we impute on Him according to our own anger against God Himself as provoked by the feeling that He has departed from us even though it is in fact we who have departed from Him and are unable to recognise the reality as such on account of our own ignorance, pride and anger.

[7] Sherard op. cit..