Content warning: brief mention of violence, abuse and rape
In a previous blog post I described the dangers of associating the New Testament with love, and so inversely associating the Hebrew Scriptures (‘Old Testament’) with legalism or punishment. This way of thinking leads to the Judeophobic trope of the ‘angry God of the Old Testament.’ I argued that God’s wrath and vengeance can also be found in the New Testament, just as God’s love and compassion can be found in the Hebrew Scriptures. We might think the presence of an angry, vengeful God in any part of the Bible is regrettable. I’m sure there are many of my fellow Quakers who would say that wrath and vengeance cannot possibly be part of who God is, particularly the God revealed in the life of Jesus. But what if wrath and vengeance are actually necessary aspects of the Divine? What if divine anger and retribution are good things?
I can understand why folk would reject a God who is angry, especially if we believe we become like the God we worship. In their beautiful book Good Goats: Healing our Image of God (1994), Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn and Matthew Linn explain this idea in a clear and helpful way. They write ‘We become like the God we adore… If my God can send God’s enemies to a hell inferno, then I can send a nuclear inferno on my enemies.’ They see God as a parent whom we come to resemble as we grow. If we hope to be peaceful, loving people, then we should worship a peaceful, loving God. This argument has a particular force among liberal Quakers, where, to a large extent, God has been collapsed into the human being. Rufus Jones, the pioneer of liberal Quakerism, presented God as virtually identical with the human personality. When liberal Quakers speak of the ‘Inner Light’ many are speaking of an aspect of themselves, something inherent to humanity. When humanity is identified with the divine in this way, it makes complete sense for a community committed to nonviolence to resist an understanding of divinity which contains wrath and vengeance.
Quakers in Britain began to reject divine anger and retribution at the beginning of the 20th century, when their understanding of Jesus’ crucifixion began to change. Throughout the history of the Church, Christians have tried to make sense of the significance of the cross. What did Jesus achieve by dying in such a violent way? One theory is known as ‘penal substitution,’ the idea that Jesus suffers the punishment humanity deserves. Jesus bears the terrible consequences of God’s anger which is rightfully directed at us. Liberal Christianity came to reject this theory characterised by Steve Chalke as ‘cosmic child abuse.’ An alternative theory that gained popularity among Quakers at the beginning of the 20th century is called the theory of moral influence or exemplarism. It’s also known as an Abelardian approach, after the medieval theologian Peter Abelard who first introduced it. According to this theory, God wins our souls through Jesus’ moral influence, through the way he exemplifies God’s love in his life and death. Jesus demonstrates that the highest form of love is sacrificial. The crucifixion is the highest revelation of this self-giving love, an example so perfect that it can melt the hardest of hearts.
This understanding of the cross was challenged by liberation theologians from the 1960s onwards. Liberation theology concerns itself with the experience of the oppressed, with the people who Kelly Brown Douglas calls ‘the crucified class’ of the modern world.[1] These theologians argue that a message of suffering, sacrificial love does nothing to help the oppressed achieve liberation. In fact, it might do the opposite, encouraging them to accept their lot. For Black theologians like James Cone, this is theologically unacceptable. A God without wrath cannot be a liberating God for Black folk. If God loves Black people, then that love means God must also be angered by racist oppression. And if God loves White people, then that love must be accompanied by a wrathful judgement on their complicity in racist systems. Love without judgment does nothing to stop the harm of racism.[2] For Cone, God’s love and wrath are two sides of the same coin. God loves the oppressed and, because of that love, is wrathfully against the forces which oppress them.[3] In his book God of the Rahtid (2003), Robert Beckford plays on the Jamaican patois word ‘rahtid’ which he translates as ‘wrath.’ Beckford writes that ‘White Christianity in England is proficient in suppressing Black people’s rage.’[4] The God of the rahtid ‘is a God who sides with and makes sense of Black rage in response to racialised oppression in Britain.’[5] This righteous anger can be an energising force of hope, a call for the repentance necessary if humanity is to return to God.
If God’s anger is required for God’s solidarity with the oppressed, what about God’s vengeance? I’ve found a compelling argument for God’s vengeance in the work of Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf. His book Exclusion and Embrace (1996) was written in the context of the horrors of the Yugoslav Wars. Volf argues that Christians are called to non-violence, but this is only possible if violence is entrusted to God. Christians may have been disarmed (Luke 22.49-51) but God still wields the sword (Revelation 19.11-16). If God is truly the God of the oppressed, then there must come a time when God will put an end to all who refuse to be transformed by Divine Love, even as we hope that all hearts will eventually willingly relent. We can only fully renounce violence in this life by trusting that God will avenge the violent injustices of this world in the next.
To Western theologians who recoil at this image of God wielding the sword in divine vengeance, Volf soberingly writes
[Imagine] that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone… Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and levelled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home— protected by police and military force!—for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.’[6]
To the liberal who argues that we become the God we adore, Volf says that, although we are called to imitate Christ, we are not called to take God’s place. Becoming Christ-like requires us to let God be God. Vengeance belongs to the Creator, not the creature (Deuteronomy 32:35).[7]
I think we should reject an image of God as a power-hungry dictator, an unjust judge, or a vindictive and abusive parent. A God who is Love cannot be a reflection of an earthly tyrant. However, if we completely erase wrath and vengeance from our understanding of God, we’re left with a theology that underestimates the seriousness of moral injury we do to one another, and the depths of evil to which human beings can sink. We’re left with a doormat-God who can ultimately do nothing in the face of our wickedness, and our world is a place where the authoritarian strong man has the final victory. Instead of dismissing and passing over the divine wrath and vengeance we find in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, these texts can be an important source of theological reflection for the nonviolent struggle for peace and justice.
[1] Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2015), 174.
[2] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Fiftieth anniversary edition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2020), 75–76.
[3] Cone, 77.
[4] Robert Beckford, God of the Rahtid (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2003), 33.
[5] Beckford, 40.
[6] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Revised and updated (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2019), 237–38.
[7] Volf, 236.
Featured image photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash
Jolly Quaker 
Dear Mark
Again, challenging and thought-provoking. John Calvin said that if you can pray the psalms, you know how to pray. The late Gareth Watts, who lectured on the Hebrew Scriptures at Cardiff, insisted that if we pray the psalms, we should pray them whole, acknowledging our anger and hurt by using the imprecatory verses and then leaving those feelings with God: ‘vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’
Theology is all very well, but so much of what matters most is beyond words. The Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection matter perhaps more than anything else; no words can fully express what they mean. No ‘theory of the atonement’ seems to me account for the Crucifixion; ‘penal substitution’ least satisfactorily of all, the rest too feeble. I feel more and more inclined to say less and less; perhaps just that something profoundly mysterious happened in Palestine some 2,000 years ago, and that thinking about it is like looking deeper and deeper into a pool and coming to realise that, however long you look, you’ll never see the bottom.
What I’ve come to disbelieve is that there is any truth in that verse of the hymn Ride on, ride on in majesty which talks about God the Father sitting on a sapphire throne while God the Son dies and rises. That’s where, for me, words about the Trinity fail and begin to make nonsense. There’s no sapphire throne. God was in Christ. Crucifixion is what humans do to each other and God puts himself through that. Call that heresy if you like!
I’ve gone on far too long. What I meant to say was thank you Mark, once again.
As ever
Stephen
Thanks so much Stephen. I think you’re completely right that no formulation will fully capture the significance of the cross. Jürgen Moltmann would totally agree with your summation of the cross! His superb book “The Crucified God” was an absolute game-changer for me: “The cross is not and cannot be loved.”
I had two questions, if you had time to consider them (many thanks in advance). Q1) I was unclear at the end whether you suggest either of the following, or not suggesting either: (A) that oppressed groups still should *not* engage in any violence in *defence* of themselves or those they love, but leave that to God, or (B) whether it is part of a true and just love of one’s fellow souls that one does not play the doormat when the slaughter of one’s children and the defenceless is underway? This question is bound up with my second: Q2) You speak sometimes of violence and sometimes of vengeance. Do you mean to speak only of violence done out of a spirit for vengeance, or of violence generally (as in self defence against imperial oppression?). [As I ask these I have in mind here Simone Weil on the place of ‘force’ in living under God, and Rai Gaita’s discussions of persons in ‘Good and Evil’ and ‘A Common Humanity’]. Finally, I should say, I value this piece very much, as with your other pieces and books. I’m very grateful for them. I am writing in a sparse way only to keep my questions clear.
Thanks so much for taking the time to ask these questions. You raise important points that need clarifying.
I think your questions point to the importance of context in theology. Volf was writing in the context of the Yugoslav Wars and the rise of the European New Right. His theology of nonviolence is about breaking the cycle of retributive violence between ethnic/cultural/national groups. Cone wrote in a very different context, that of the subjugation of Black folk in the USA. Cone saw white liberal Christian calls for nonviolence as a way of preserving the status quo and said that whites had no business telling Blacks how to pursue their liberation. So, although as a Quaker my inclination is to see nonviolence as a primary Christian commitment, as a white person living in and to a large extent benefiting form, a violent post-imperial power, I have to recognise that it’s not up to me how oppressed peoples pursue their liberation. In general I believe Christians are called to non-violent struggle, but occupying the place of privilege I do, I have to concede that there may be contexts where violence is the least-worst option.
I think I’d also want to say that if violence is the least-worst option, that doesn’t make violence a good thing. Violence is still a fruit of sin and may lead to the proliferation of further violence. One of the valuable points Volf makes is how morally complex the world is: ‘From a distance, the world may appear nearly divide into guilty perpetrators and innocent victims. The closer we get, however, the more the line between the guilty and the innocent blurs and we see an intractable maze of small and large hatreds, dishonesties, manipulations, and brutalities, each reinforcing the other’ (pp.74-75).
Thanks again for reading this post and making such insightful comments.
I can understand how Jewish theologians can speak of wrath and vengeance but I’m puzzled how black liberation theologians in the Christian tradition can say such things. Martin Luther King Jr envisioned – and The King Center still envisions – “the Beloved Community where injustice ceases and love prevails.” He did this and they do this solely through actions founded in peace and forgiveness, which for him is a constant thing. Of course, without doubt, MLK Jr is the black liberation theologian. Look no further. His was emphatically not a message of wrath or vengeance.
I am puzzled, too, which George Fox journal Quakers are reading if they are coming up with a Quaker theology that speaks of wrath and vengeance. Fox and his followers faced extreme persecution, yes – wrath and vengeance, by what was essentially a militarised religious state. At its hands they were, to quote Isiah’s prophetic description of Jesus’ experience ‘despised and rejected’, were people ‘of suffering, and familiar with pain’, ‘held in low esteem’ (53:3). In short, to borrow the New Testament summaries, like Him they did indeed ‘suffer many things’ (Matt 16:21, Mark 8:31 and Luke 9:22; 17:25). Some were martyred, just precisely for their faith in the Spirit of Christ that they knew.
Despite their visceral experience of wrath and vengeance, though, wrath and vengeance were not descriptors of the God they knew. Wrath and vengeance were the enemy – and the Enemy. The Lamb’s War was an inward spiritual battle – and perhaps too, an external experience of wrath and vengeance metered out to them. In both cases the outcome of which, and this comes through in almost every epistle Fox wrote, was what can best be described as Love and Peace, beyond all understanding.
Fox’s God and MLK Jr’s God is not a doormat god just as He is not a pagan god. The Living God does not force us, we each of us choose His way – moment by moment. Or not, as the case unfortunately may be. We know this experientially, to use Fox’s word – ‘experimentally’. As Genesis notes, we are made in God’s image (1:27, 9:6), not the other way around. When we speak of Christ fulfilling the Law in a New Covenant, we are not describing an agreement with a god made in our image; that would be idolatry. Besides, whatever God may or may not do on the Day of Judgement, that is for God. It is not for us to replicate ahead of time what we think will happen, here on earth. Yet that is precisely what we do! Why? Because a belief in Wrath begets wrath and a belief in Vengeance begets vengeance. Just as a belief in Violence begets violence.
Eschatologically, it seems to me Jesus explains very clearly that ‘the goats on His left’ will not suffer wrath or violence on the day of Judgement. In calm words, plainly and clearly, he will say (or tell, or declare, or profess, depending on the Bible version) to them ‘depart from me’ (Matt. 7:23). There will be no shouting, no yelling, no hitting. There is no need. They simply will experience estrangement. Permanent separation. Is this act of ultimate dismissal even vengeance? No.
The Quaker creed – we do have one – is ‘there is that of God in every one’, and we are quoting Fox when we say it (he uses the phrase in many epistles). There is the Light of Christ, the Seed of Christ in every one. Do we each choose to tend the wick diligently, so that the Light burns ever brighter within us? Do we each tend the ground in which that Seed (from the Tree of Life; for Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life) is planted, so that it grows into a strong tree, a new Life within us that (like the Light with the wick fully turned up) all can see?
Christ’s response on the Day of Judgement would not be vengeance. It would be a simple, straightforward answer to those who have not bothered to grow the Light, the Seed of their relationship with Him, into a true Living relationship within them. Of course, it is not for me to pre-judge God’s decision about any one. Me included: Whatever it is, it is, that is His Judgement to make and I accept it. I thank God for it.
All I have to do is follow Jesus’s example, as fully as I can, so that I may learn from Him, grow in Him and He in me (John 14:23), day-by-day. Each in their own rendering, this was both MLK Jr’s and Fox’s message. Most importantly, it was Jesus’ message. It was also the Quaker message until Liberalism ‘climbed in some other way’ (John 10:1) at the Manchester conference. Jesus’ way was the Quaker way. For those who are Christ-centred in their Quaker faith, it still is. Hearken unto Him that Speaks to thy condition. Experience Him experimentally and He will tune you Lovingly, Peacefully, step-by-step. It is simple, it is original, it is spiritual. S.O.S.
Follow Him. If everyone did this, then we would Truly become “the Beloved Community where injustice ceases and love prevails.” Wherever Love prevails is the right – or speaking eschatologically, His right – side of things. I’m sure Martin Luther King Jr and George Fox are there. Where am I? My faith is in my Inward Teacher, the One whose yoke I have taken upon me and who I learn from (Matt 11:29). It is for Him to Judge.
Just two points of correction. 1) Ask any living Black theologian who the most important Black liberation theologian of the 20th century was and they will undoubtedly say James Cone, not Martin Luther King. I highly recommend Cone’s book ‘Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare’ (2002) for his important critique of King’s theology. 2) Early Quakers believed in God’s wrath and vengeance. The believed God’s wrath would come upon those who didn’t turn to the inward light. The early experience of quaking was understood as an encounter with God’s wrath. In his Journal, Fox writes on a number of occasions that God’s wrath and vengeance would be upon those who persecuted Quakers.
There’s an ancient thought which was popularised/translated by the poet Longfellow:
“Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small;Though with patience He stands waiting, With exactness grinds He all.”
To me there is some sense in the idea that God is setting things right, that things might appear to be slow but justice means they’ll be sorted out in the end. A similar idea is about the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice.
But I wallow in doubts and have little time these days for people who use the “wrath of God” to mean that “God is angry about the things I’m angry about” or worse. I’m not sure if I believe in a deity at all, but I definitely don’t believe that.
Thanks Joe, I think you’re right to be wary of using God as a validation of our own grievances. For me, this is why the cross is so important as a guide to who God is. I feel I can confidently say that God is so strongly against our crucifying systems that ‘wrath’ is an accurate description of this opposition.
As always, thank you for looking at this head on, and sharing the reading and thinking theologically with us. Anything which doesn’t make sense to people who have been through the worst, just won’t do theologically and morally. We need this. Thanks, Mark.
Thanks for reading Lenora, and for your supportive words. “Anything which doesn’t make sense to people who have been through the worst, just won’t do theologically and morally.” This is such an important truth!
This kind of religion is suppressed by authoritative mindset, is that why its not so popular?
I’d say that talk of God’s wrath is unpopular among members of dominant groups because of a reluctance to see God as opposed to their domination.
Nice one, Mark.
I fear that we recoil at the wrath of God at least in part because of our discomfort at our own complicity in unjust systems, which we know in our heart God must smash for justice’s sake. Will we be destroyed along with them? Maybe!
God is slow to anger, and has given us much time to turn our lives around and form new communities as resident aliens in Babylon.
“Come out of her, my people!”
Thanks for reading Micah. I recently gave an academic paper on Quakers being open to God’s wrath/judgment in the context of whiteness and was asked ‘but what about hope?’ But God’s destruction of all that is unjust is a message of hope! The Christian hope isn’t that we escape this mess unscathed.