The Real Question (2)
“Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” Jonah 3:9 NIV
His fierce anger – “A better god has been discovered who never takes offense, is never angry, never inflicts punishment.”[1] If Tertullian is right, then the king of Nineveh is grossly mistaken. Too bad he made all the people and animals repent. It was totally unnecessary. Not only did God already know that He wasn’t going to punish Nineveh, He could care less.
Perhaps you’ve encountered this argument in a different form. Typically, someone objects to the Hebrew God, claiming that no one could seriously worship a God who inflicts punishment on innocent children (extermination of the Amalekites) or sends unbelievers to eternal torture in Hell. Such a God is reprehensible. As Adolf von Harnack claimed, the God of the Old Testament was vengeful and angry—and consequently, needs to be removed as an object of worship. Anger and love just don’t mix. Better to have a God who can’t feel anything than a God who takes out His wrath on His own creations.
But this isn’t really an answer, is it? It’s an answer that ignores ninety percent of the biblical text. Actually, you’ll also have to discard all the apostolic material about vengeance, wrath and Hell as well. What you’re left with is the Santa Claus God without the naughty and nice part. Not even the Four Spiritual Laws stuff goes that far. It still presumes punishment. However, a God of “fierce anger” isn’t welcome in most religious communities these days.
We need some insight into the relationship between anger and love. In other words, we need to stop reading the text as if it were Greek. The Greek word for anger is orgḗ. Its basic meaning is impulsive action. Not surprisingly, our word orgasm comes from this root. The idea is something uncontrollable, explosive, emotionally overwhelming. The Greek and Roman world viewed the gods in this way, as fickle, avenging deities subject to blind rage. Unfortunately, when apostolic writers like Paul use this Greek term, little is done to shift the meaning to the Hebrew idea. To see the difference, we need to read something from Heschel.
“The call of anger is a call to cancel anger. It is not an expression of irrational, sudden, and instinctive excitement, but a free and deliberate reaction of God’s justice to what is wrong and evil. For all its intensity, it may be averted by prayer. There is no divine anger for anger’s sake. Its meaning is . . . instrumental: to bring about repentance; its purpose and consummation is its own disappearance.”[2]
Anger has a purpose, but the purpose is not punishment. The purpose is repentance. God does everything possible to bring men back into alignment with their own best interests, their own fulfillment, their own design. God’s anger is an expression of His desire to see love in the world. It is not directed at sending Man to Hell. It is directed at returning Man to the Garden. And, quite frankly, from the perspective of justice, it doesn’t make sense. But—“ . . . the supremacy of compassion, upsets the possibility of looking for a rational coherence of God’s ways with the world.”[3]
“As a mode of pathos, it may be more accurate to characterize the anger of the Lord as suspended love, as mercy withheld, as mercy in concealment.”[4]
Topical Index: anger, purpose, Jonah 3:9
[1] Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, I, 27.
[2] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 66.
[3] Ibid., p. 67.
[4] Ibid., p. 75.
