If someone asks me to give a one-sentence answer to the question, “What is God like?” I might just turn to the famous words of John the Apostle: “God is love” (Greek, agape, 1 John 4.8). In my opinion, just about everything essential to know about God and our relationship with God can be traced back to this one statement. (Notice that I say “everything essential to know,” not “everything.”) Let me explain.
What is “Love” (Agape)?
Love properly understood is the desire for the well-being of a person. Love is thus a motivation, a good will, not an emotional sensation. God is the creator whose every action is motivated by the desire for the well-being, the flourishing, the wholeness, of the created ones, individually and collectively.
How does God’s Justice Relate to God’s Love?
The answer is, God’s justice flows directly out of God’s love. So what is “justice”? Justice describes patterns of relationship in which all the participants relate to one another on the basis of agape love. Because of this, justice is better evoked by the open-ended notion of mutual service than by the limiting notion of equality. An illustration of this can be seen in the preaching of John the Baptist. In warning people that divine judgment (i.e. God’s public testing of human justice) was coming, John described a perfect micro-example of justice: “Let the person with two shirts share with the person with none, and let the person with food do likewise” (Lk 3.11). The biblical command to “love your neighbor as yourself” is behind this advice by the Baptist, implying that I should act out of the same motivation to see the well-being of another person as I have to ensure my own well-being.
How does God’s Anger Relate to God’s Love?
Again the answer is, God’s anger flows directly out of God’s love. A lot of people would flatly deny that a loving God could indulge in anger. Even people who firmly believe that God gets angry may have an uneasy feeling that these two attitudes (love and anger) are incompatible. Remember, I said that agape love is a motivation towards acting on behalf of the well being of the loved one. Love is not a passive feeling or an emotional sensation. The key to straightening out our confusion about anger is to recognize that anger, as it applies to God, is also a motivation, not an attitude of ill will or a desire for someone’s harm. In the final analysis anger will become recognizable as a direct manifestation of God’s love, provided that it is understood wisely. Consider this definition of anger:
Anger is Akin to Pain
Anger is a kind of pain or discomfort that drives the one who loves to protect the beloved from unjust suffering. Bear with me as I unpack this statement.
Pain Protects from Harm
In an almost uncountable variety of ways, pain subtly guides me and keeps me out of trouble. For example, if I reach for something hot enough to burn me, I am immediately and forcefully motivated to draw my hand away by pain. If I respond to pain’s motivating power rather than ignoring it, I am in nearly all cases protected from injury. Thus, as I adjust my position or activity so as to remove the threat of injury, the pain goes away, signaling me that I am safe again. The wonderful nature of pain is thus its wisdom. You don”t have to think about what to do when you experience pain: in most cases your body knows exactly what needs to be done and you do it. Sometimes this is so subtle that you don”t even notice it. For example, you will continuously but unconsciously adjust the way you walk on a long hike, and this will protect you from blisters and from ankle, knee or hip strain. (A deeply helpful book on this subject of pain as a positive thing is Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, by the famous Christian surgeon and Hanson’s disease expert Paul Brand.) Some pain, of course, seems not to be helpful, but that issue cannot be addressed here.
Anger is a Form of Social Pain—Distinguishable from Aggravation
The difficulty here is that so much other stuff goes under the name of anger, and that obscures the picture. For example, suppose someone inconveniences me by mistake by spilling a cup of warm coffee down my front. I may get irritated or aggravated at them, and say that I am angry, but being irritated and unhappy at some inconvenience (and perhaps even finding a way of “blaming” the person who has inconvenienced me) is not anger in the sense that is useful for theological purposes. Again, suppose I am trying to fix some appliance, and I can”t find the tool I need. I will possibly get totally upset and agitated, but that is aggravation or exasperation that grows out of frustrated effort or powerlessness, and not anger.
Genuine, positive anger, which is attributable to God as well as to human beings, is the pain that arises when someone I love is hurt, or is under threat of being hurt, unjustly. For example, suppose I see my two children arguing, and I realize that one is putting the other down or tormenting her over and over. If I love my children, then I will get angry. When I experience this pain, I say I am angry “at” the one who is doing or threatening the injury to the other. This pain, rather than motivating me to remove myself from the threat of injury, instead motivates me to intervene towards a person in such a way as to stop them from continuing a process that leads to the injury of another. Just as our bodies often know exactly what action is necessary to avoid injury to ourselves (I called this “the wisdom of pain”), so anger based on love has its wisdom. Now unhappily, so much unloving and self-centered stuff gets mixed into everyone’s experience of people’s anger that we don’t normally associate anger with love.
The God-given wisdom of our social pain is much undermined by unwise responses of various kinds, just as the wisdom of our bodily pain often gets obscured by harmful addictions and chronic self-destructive behaviors. Nonetheless, the wisdom of loving anger is that it motivates me to intervene in such a way as to stop the hurtful process without in turn harming the perpetrator. In other words, in the scene mentioned above, my love for both my children is equal, and my anger does not in any way change my love towards the one who is doing some injustice against the other. I oppose the one I love, but I do so by instinct in such a way as to bring their harmful behavior to a stop without injuring them. For example, I may say “stop that!” in a sharp voice, or I may even shout or grab my child by the arm and pull her away from her sister, depending on the level of danger I sense in the confrontation that I am intervening into. What I won”t do is call my child a name that tears down her self-esteem, nor will I physically injure her—that would be to join in the process of harm rather than stopping it.
Love, says the apostle Paul, “endures all in patience” (1 Corinthians 13.7), and wise anger does the same because it is a direct manifestation of love. Note the counter-example: suppose I don”t love my children, and I see one tormenting the other. Unless this inconveniences me in some way (such as being too loud or distracting) or offends my ego (I don”t want to think of myself as a person with badly behaved children), I might not get angry at all. I might be totally unconcerned and tune it out, or I might even laugh at it. People actually watch animals and humans injuring one another for entertainment—as in dog fights and cockfights, boxing, cage fighting, fantasy “wrestling,” and even violent police arrests and shoot-outs as a prime-time television product. I should add here media spectacles such as “Temptation Island” and certain “reality shows” and daytime “talk shows” that are covertly designed to entertain by offering views of people doing one another emotional injury. That such things should be presented for entertainment is only possible because the neither the presenters nor the audience have love for the ones attempting to injure one another. To love human beings or other created beings is to experience anger and grief when one encounters such unnecessary injury being encouraged.
A Loving God is an Angry God
Given the understanding that I have just expressed, I must believe that God is angry, since I know very well that this world is full of injustices. I assert the complementary principle no less: a God who was not angry in our unjust world would not be a loving God, and would not deserve my worship. If we don’t believe that God is motivated in his deepest nature to act against injustice on behalf of the oppressed, then it is surely empty to say that God loves the poor. But this assertion immediately raises “the problem of evil,” which is expressed in the question, “Why, if God loves all people, and is angry about injustice, is so much injustice allowed to go on?”
The Harmfulness of Injustice is Inescapable
If human perversity and human interdependence are both facts of life, then there is literally no solution to the problem of injustice that avoids injury to all parties. Allow me to return to the simplified model of my two children fighting. In my experience, one or both of my children can get so hostile towards one another that there is no convincing them in the moment to stop attacking. In that situation the only response available is to separate them. For example, I may send the one I perceive to be the perpetrator to her room. Perversity, or the persistence of unjust motivation, is a fact of human life. But so is the interdependence of humans with one another. Sooner or later, in other words, a loving parent has to let the offending sister out of her room, even if there is every chance that a fresh offense will occur. For to leave her isolated indefinitely would be to give up on her and rule out even the possibility of a positive breakthrough. If you think about it, this would amount to a kind of earthly model of hell. If God is going to allow freedom even among creatures that have chosen to live without love, then God’s relationship with the world cannot simply be protective, it also has to be restorative. Harm is inescapable if you assume both sin and freedom.
What is the Wrath of God?
I think that “rage” would be a more recognized synonym for this obsolescent word in contemporary English. Wrath/rage is more than intensified anger. In human terms, wrath/rage is what happens when an angry or aggravated person “loses their temper,” and becomes dangerous and potentially destructive. The concept of “temper” comes from the fact that steel has a certain resiliency, called temper, which allows it to bend and spring back without breaking. When a person loses their temper, what is bent beyond the breaking point is their patience, their ability or willingness to negotiate in a non-harmful way with whatever is angering or aggravating them. The wrathful or enraged person lashes out to strike what is angering or aggravating them.
I have argued that aggravation is a human response and that God does not share. Nonetheless, there is very definitely a point at which God’s anger, truly defined as a manifestation of love, can become wrathful. By this, of course, I don’t mean selfishly out of control and converted from reasonableness to an irrational desire to do harm. On the contrary, I mean anger made dangerous to the perpetrator of harm despite and even because of its basis in love. For although anger seeks to protect all the beloved, not just the beloved being harmed, it is not at always possible to protect the one being harmed without harming the one doing the injury. For example, when Hitler began in earnest to take over Europe in 1939, was it any more possible time to respond appropriately in love toward all parties, and, at the same, to protect the German people—including their soldiers—from harm? The answer is no, despite all one’s love goodwill towards the German people. Similarly, consider a hostage situation, where a gunman has made it clear through action that he intends to kill each hostage one by one. The gunman might be the police chief’s own son, yet the only possible course could still resolve to sending in a SWAT team. The concept of wrath exposes the grievous truth that love is not always able to avoid harming the beloved. Such is the cost to God of bringing truly personal and free beings into the world.
The Problem of Evil—Some Meditations
To the above statements one may want to reply, “Yes, but surely God can do better at protecting the victims of injustice than the present world shows evidence of.” I reply by suggesting that one agree, as a thought experiment, with the notion that the present world is so unjust that it rules out the possibility that a loving God exists. In that case, no God is on hand to accept the blame for mismanagement of the world, and no other source can be found for all the human evil we see beyond simple human perversity. Take a hard look at the level of perversity that is in evidence in the world, with no God to blame, but only ourselves. If you assume that no God exists, then what you see is that the human race as we experience it on earth at this moment in history is of such a powerful destructiveness that it is capable (and threatens to continue acting out of that capability) not only of horrendous exploitation and injustice, but of making its very own environment unlivable for itself within less than five generations. If there is no God, then it is safe to say that human beings have proven themselves to be almost inconceivably volatile and perverse agents of harm to themselves and other living creatures.
Faith Senses the Presence of Hidden Protective Factors in the World
Suppose, then, that we entertain the thought that there exists, within or behind the overall pattern of human history, a certain unknown “protective factor X,” which is an invisible counter-force that serves to minimize the potential for mutual harm as much as possible. Suppose we choose to trust that God has indeed put countless systems in place to protect human beings from their intense destructiveness. Indeed, I hope and believe that all possible factor X’s are already in place, having been engineered into the life system all along by the creator and sustainer of the cosmos. The question that remains is therefore this: “If human beings are so perverse, then why did God create us at all, or why, having created us, does God not simply wipe us out and start over with something more promising?” To this I answer, from a faith stance: God loves the human race so much that God is willing to go to great lengths to continue offering us the chance to experience the joy of life and of mutually beneficial relationship, even if the major portion of us are ultimately insistent on turning it down. There are two more factors to add in here: first, the divine power of forgiveness and reclamation, which implies that human beings, even in their perversity, are redeemable, and second, the divine power of restoration and resurrection, which implies that no amount or kind suffering is irredeemable. For me, faith names a search for the God who has the great love to seek and reconcile the perverse, and who brings to that pursuit the power of creation, forgiveness, reclamation and restoration. This, in broad outline, is the direction I would go to develop a response to the problem of evil.