On Divine Wrath and Violence

 

On Divine Wrath and Violence

November 30, 2021

 

In the oldest text in the New Testament Paul says that Jesus saves us from what he calls the wrath that is coming. 1 Thessalonians 1:10. That line is just one of many in both biblical testaments that speak of God coming to earth mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. That’s what the New Testament book of Revelation is all about, at least on a superficial level. God’s done with all the world’s corruption and violence and is going to wipe out substantial parts of it. The Hebrew prophets too spoke often of the Lord coming in wrath to wreak death and destruction on the earth variously because the people hadn’t been giving him the worship he demanded or because the elites of Hebrew society were oppressing the poor and other vulnerable people. As we see in 1 Thessalonians the earliest Christians believed that Christ was going to return to earth in power and glory to do the same thing. In most if not all of the biblical texts that speak of God coming to earth to set things right God comes angry and bound to use divine violence against the world’s evils. Yet all of those verses are in the sacred texts of two great religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity, both of which say that God is love, forgiveness, and grace not wrath and violence. So why do those two great traditions also call on God to come in wrath with violence? Here’s the best I can do to answer that question.

I’ll start with this question: What is wrath? Online dictionaries define it as extreme anger, or strong, vengeful anger, or strong, stern, or fierce anger. These sites don’t expressly say that the extreme, strong, vengeful, stern, and fierce anger that is wrath is a human phenomenon, but of course it is. Wrath comes quite easily to many of us humans. It’s easy for us to get quite powerfully angry. Sometimes our anger is righteous, sometimes it isn’t. We get powerfully angry at all of the corruption, injustice, oppression, and violence that fill the world. That’s righteous anger, but we also get powerfully angry at individual people who do things to us that we don’t like. That anger can be righteous, but it can also be and often is strongly unrighteous. We get wrathful about things we wish would change. We want the earth to be a more just, peaceful place than it is. It doesn’t change, so we get mad. We want everyone to treat us the way we want to be treated. They don’t, so we get mad.

Sometimes we think that our wrath is constructive. We think that perhaps that if we get wrathful enough we can actually change things, or at least we wish we could. Sometimes our belief or hope that our wrath will change things leads us to acts of violence. One nation gets righteously or unrighteously wrathful at another, and they go to war. One person gets righteously, or more likely unrighteously, angry with another person and commits acts of violence against that person. In human life there is a strong relationship between wrath and violence. So often we think that the violence to which our wrath leads us will solve some problem,. Violence grounded in wrath is a very human way of trying to set things right.

Yet we can know if we will just stop to think about it that human violence rarely if ever solves anything. The powerful continue to oppress the weak. The wealthy continue to get wealthier while millions upon millions of people remain desperately poor. Rich countries (ours most of all) continue to consume a grossly disproportionate amount of the world’s resources at the expense of poor countries. Sinful violence (all violence being sinful) rages across the earth and seems never to end. No matter how wrathful we humans become about these and other ills, and no matter how violent our wrath leads us to become, the great ills of the world seem just to continue. We seem utterly incapable of solving them. At least, our wrath and violence never seem to solve them.

It is when humans despair of their own ability to solve the world’s problems that they turn to God and expect God to do it for them. Apocalyptic literature like the New Testament book of Revelation is an extreme case of people turning to God to do what we humans would like to do but can’t. The earliest Christians’ belief that Christ would return to earth in power and glory to create the kingdom of God on earth is a somewhat less extreme case of the same phenomenon.

Both versions of turning to God for God to fix the world for us expect God to do it through divine wrath and violence. That’s why 1 Thessalonians refers to the wrath that is coming. That’s why Revelation has God and Jesus Christ killing off a huge percentage of the world’s population. Revelation ends with a beautiful vision of a world at peace with itself and with God, but it gets there through buckets of blood. Most if not all of the times we humans look to God to set the world right we think God will do it through copious amounts of violence.

Yet both Judaism and Christianity confess not that God is wrath and violence but love. We Christians find that confession expressed directly at 1 John 4:8. We confess that Jesus of Nazareth is God Incarnate, and Jesus is radically nonviolent. See Matthew 5:38-48. That means that God is radically nonviolent. Our sacred texts then give us a sharp contradiction: God is nonviolent love, and God will cure the evils of the world through wrath and violence. How are to explain and deal with that sharp contradiction?

The answer to that question seems obvious to me. The texts that depict God as wrathful and violent are nothing but a projection of human ways and values onto God. We would solve the world’s problems through violence if we could. We can’t; so we turn to God to solve the world’s problems for us, and we expect God to do it the way we would, through wrath and violence. Only now the wrath and violence in question are God’s not ours. They are wrath and violence on a scale our human wrath and violence can never reach. Our wrath and violence won’t do the trick (not that we ever stop trying to get them to do it) so we say God’s far more powerful wrath and violence will do it for us.

Yet both of these visions, one of a God of wrath and violence and one of a God of nonviolent love, are in our Bible. How can that be? What’s going on here. Well, what’s going on here is an example of how John Dominic Crossan, Walter Brueggemann, and others teach that the Bible works. All through the Bible we see people of faith embracing the ways of God that turn the ways of the world upside down. Then the Bible has people of faith abandoning those ways of God and falling back into the ways of the world. In the Bible it’s two steps forward and one step back, except sometimes it’s one step forward and two steps back.

The way the New Testament treats violence is a perfect example of this biblical dynamic. Jesus reveals to us God’s way, indeed God’s nature, of nonviolent love. Jesus’ teaching and living of divine love and nonviolence turn the violent, hate-filled ways of the world on their head. That’s how the New Testament begins, with Matthew telling us that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and that God is radically nonviolent. Yet the early Christian communities that produced the New Testament texts couldn’t hold onto that radical, indeed revolutionary, teaching. They fell back into confidence in the ways of the world rather than the ways of God. So we get first love your enemies, then wipe them out with cosmic violence. Nonviolence is God’s way, violence is the world’s way, and we find both of them in the New Testament.

How we people of faith are to handle that scriptural contradiction is obvious enough. We are to follow God’s ways as much as we are able. We’ll never do it perfectly. That’s why God’s forgiving grace is so essential. That we’ll never do it perfectly, however, does not excuse us from doing it as best we can. The way of God we’re dealing with here is nonviolence. Nonviolence therefore must be the way of the Christian. The earliest Christian communities once understood that truth, but they fell back into reliance on violence when they spoke of God coming in violent wrath rather than forgiving, nonviolent love. Our call as Christians is clearly to embrace the ways of God we learn from Jesus and reject the ways of the world to the greatest extent we are able. One of God’s foundational ways is nonviolence. So let’s get over our penchant for wrath and violence when faced with problems. Let’s embrace God’s ways of love, forgiveness, and nonviolence. It is the only Christian and the only right thing to do.