Q&R: Does God feel anger? A Conversation with Brad Jersak
Question: Does God Feel Anger?
First, when we speak of “anger” in relation to God, we recognize the limitations of human language in describing the Divine. At the same time, we cannot help but use words that describe the human experience, and that doing so is appropriate insofar as we do reflect the human image of God (as did Jesus). Conversely, we know that projections of human anger onto a transcendent God are altogether inadequate. Christianity has always recognized both points: that divine “anger” is used in the Scriptures and that ought not to be interpreted literally, especially when humanity’s primary experience and expression of it is so rarely holy and righteous. With that said, let’s dive into the deep end.
Is experiencing anger the same as being subject to it?
No. To be subject to something is quite a precise term in theology that implies that it controls us, that it dictates our actions, that we are under it and in submission to it. But God (as God truly is) lives and moves and responds only from the infinite depths of God’s own nature—which is love—and never at the involuntary reactions to external triggers.
This is not to say that God does not experience anger. But whatever anger arises in God arises from the depths of his love in response (not reaction) to the world. If we’re truthful, we must admit we have no real idea how an infinite Being (and beyond being), who transcends time and space and who fills the cosmos and every atom with unfailing love, would actually “experience anger.” When we use the language of anger, indignation, or wrath, we’re (at best) speaking in analogies, but we always risk reducing and therefore belittling God.
With that in mind, we ought not to project human anger onto God. In fact, we simply cannot reason our way grasping the nature of divine anger. Instead, let’s focus on how God chose to be fully enfleshed in the human condition where he could both experience and transfigure human anger. To know (by experience, not just by omnipotence) and empathize with all that we experience, God assumed human nature in its fullness, including the human emotions described in the Gospels that look just like our experience of grief, irritation, frustration, and anger.
If Jesus didn’t experience emotions in an authentically human way, then he would not be fully human. That would be tragic because (as the maxim goes) “whatever Christ did not assume is not healed.” BUT also, since the human experience of Jesus Christ cannot compromise his divinity in any way (he never ceased to be fully God), so his anger was never simply a sinful reaction. Anger, for Jesus, was a genuinely human emotion that God voluntarily experienced by becoming human. God-in-Christ would see some terrible injustice, feel the bodily reactions (churning stomach, pounding heart, surging adrenaline), and experience anger as a man in ways that he could not have as God alone (see the last paragraph of Hebrews 2 and Hebrews 4).
So yes, Jesus felt anger to the depths of his soul (or he could not save the angry). But was he subject to anger? Not in the sense of following its dictates, not as someone reacting rather than responding, or hating instead of loving. God-in-the-flesh was willingly vulnerable to the experience without ever leaving the way of complete surrender to his Father. That’s the issue: there is a way in which people who experience anger also surrender to it… Jesus, on the other hand, experienced and expressed it inside of his trust-and-obey relationship with his Father, thereby making a way for us to do so as well.
How does responding to anger differ from reacting in anger?
Here is where being reactive and being responsive are quite different. (And this is true of both anger and compassion).
On the human level, by responsive versus reactive, we mean that Jesus’ experience and his response derive from who he is, namely infinite love, rather than reacting in ways that are out of character, the way someone might claim, “You MADE ME mad.”
On the divine level, it could even be that responsive more accurately describes our experience of God than God’s experience. The reason we need to consider this is that God’s love is an infinite, everlasting spring that is always flowing. Because it is infinite, it cannot increase or decrease. Love is God’s immutable (unchanging) nature.
So, let’s say that I’m suffering terribly and I cry out to God in prayer. My cry for help doesn’t turn on God’s love or cause it to get bigger, but because I was hurting and I turned to him and welcomed his love and then began to feel it, it might feel like he responded. You will even see this when you ask people who already love you for help. They’re response came from their love—you didn’t cause their love; you experienced it.
So, too, with his anger. God’s love is constantly flowing, but when it flows over or into areas of injustice, it may feel like anger to us so long as our hearts are hard. And as divine love begins to melt the icy heart, we might experience God’s constant love as if God shifted from anger to mercy. But all of them, the compassion and anger and mercy are all shifting human experiences of the constancy of divine love. So, God’s response seems to be more about our experience than any actual change in God’s heart.
In such experiences, you might say, “God was angry and then relented” (and that’s okay—the Bible talks that way), but in truth, the whole thing was the same vast love of God experienced in different ways. But no matter how we describe it, the fact that God’s love meets us (even in different ways) is a good reminder that as Love, God is by nature truly relational. Our descriptions of those experiences may say more about our experience than God’s experience, but we do hold that God Incarnate IS (not just was) fully human and fully divine—God is always divine love, but also knows the human experience of compassion, anger, or mercy, etc.
So how does God experience ‘anger’ toward humanity?
So, as above, God may “experience” anger, but every idea we have about that is limited by our experience of anger. BUT Jesus DID experience and express anger as the human God, and that anger was always his love refracted through our sin.
Does He transform ‘anger’ while experiencing it? Bringing it back to us as grace?
Exactly this. Yes. And I would say it like this: In his complete union with humanity, he unites himself to the human experience of anger and through that union of divine love and human anger, transfigures the anger by healing it and recycling it as radical forgiveness.
Does God feel anger toward the powers of evil?
Again, what does ‘feel’ mean to an infinite God? It must mean something. Probably not exactly what I feel, but since I’m made in the image of God, it’s not wrong to wonder about that. My guess is that we should think about how divine Love orients itself to sin, injustice, and evil. Rather than thinking of how God feels anger, we might ask how Infinite Love addresses or acts upon evil. The biblical images for this are often fire. Love that consumes evil is experienced as anger by those who cling to evil, no doubt.
Would it be fair to say that Christ (in a mystical and pastoral sense) is, in fact, still suffering with humanity?
Yes, I think we must say that. Not as a victim of humanity, but in co-suffering love with human victims. How so? Because in his risen and glorified state, Christ is united to all people from every age, and their birth, their suffering, their death, their resurrection, and their glorification are all NOW to him. Christ transcends time (“Before Abraham was, I AM”) and his Cross spans eternity (“The Lamb slain from the foundation of the cosmos”). Therefore, he is united with every human in all their suffering. And I don’t just mean Jesus sees someone suffer and feels pain for them. I mean he is suffering it with them, in them, and as them and as all of us. He knows directly what it is to be a lonely widow or a mom who has lost a child or a man whose spouse has left him or a child who has become an orphan. He is quite literally in them and they in him, enduring it all precisely in order to transfigure it all and bring an end to all suffering and death. And this too is NOW to him… “God knows the end from the beginning,” not just as foreknowledge of what lies ahead for us, but as the eternal now in which God always dwells.
This is why Jesus is both (1) called “Almighty” in Revelation 1 AND (2) why he still bears the nail scars of our affliction.
If Christ continues to suffer with us, can we attend to his wounds (just like the woman at the cross) by joining humanity in being present to suffering?
Yes, exactly. To tend to any human need or wound is to minister to Christ-in-them. We’re on holy ground here. We can even kneel with him in Gethsemane as he bears the sin and sorrow of the world. And this, too, is NOW for him.
Are we balm to His wounds? Are we caring for ‘his body on earth’ by stepping into suffering and holding the promise of new life?
YES.
And if he is still suffering, how does that relate to Christ’s statement, “It is finished?”
Because right there, Jesus Christ accomplished or fulfilled all that needed to occur SO THAT he can (even now) co-suffer with us all. It is at the Cross where he makes true and universal his role as Lamb for all time (past and future). The suffering, the healing, and the resurrection are ALL NOW because in that place in space and time, he actualized what is true eternally, and it is only true eternally because he actualized it in real time and space.
How does this apply to Hebrews 9:23-26 (that Christ doesn’t have to die every year, His suffering was enough, once and for all?
Christ was crucified once and for all outside Jerusalem so that he IS Lamb once and for all and forever (past-present-future). It’s not that he repeatedly suffers like the annual sacrificial lamb. Nor is he being re-crucified every Sunday in the Eucharist. Just the reverse happens… in his once-and-for-all death, that moment becomes the eternal now and all of history and every tragic story and every communion service revolve around it and is taken up into it. The saying goes, “The Cross stands as the world turns.” In other words, the Cross becomes the axis mundi (axis of reality) where the universe is gathered, suffers, dies, and rises with him.
This is a mystery, but not one in which we throw our hands up to say, “I give up; I don’t get it.” Instead, we throw up our hands in worship and say, “Behold, the Lamb!”
We hope that our articles and resources bring comfort, hope, encouragement, and healing to our readers. If you’re experiencing that, please subscribe freely, share freely, and, if you’re able, please consider donating toward paying it forward by clicking the blue giving at the top of your screen.
Plain Truth Ministries | Box 300 | Pasadena, CA 91129-0300
