Another passage from my forthcoming book tentatively titled, The Way of the Lamb: The Triumph of a Christlike God: So what about the “wrath of God”? There are many ways of reading this, particularly from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, that do not require our literalist approach. As Father John Breck says, “To St. Paul’s mind, in any case, divine wrath is always directed toward non-believers, those who have heard the gospel message and have rejected it. For the apostle, ‘divine wrath’ is a metaphorical expression (an ‘anthropomorphism’) that describes God’s way of responding to unrepentant sinners: by allowing them ‘to stew in their own juice.’ Like the notion of punishment, divine wrath is to be understood not as God’s direct action against us, but as an expression of His silence, His apparent absence in the life and experience of those who reject Him. While we are in this state in which He has seemingly abandoned us, God allows us to suffer the consequences of our sinful actions, including our refusal to repent. It is not God who punishes and condemns us; we do it to ourselves (God ‘gives us up’ to the consequences of the sin for which we are wholly responsible, Rom 1:24f). As One whose very nature is Love, God desires that all come to repentance, in order that all may enjoy the free, unmerited gift of eternal life and eternal joy. The way to that life and that joy, once again, is repentance: a change of ‘mind’ (meta-noia), a conversion and radical reorientation of our life from slavery in sin to freedom in the Spirit.” In other words, divine wrath is the pigpen that the prodigal son found himself in. It is a self-inflicted gehenna. The father of the prodigal son was not wrathful at the son and condemning him to the pigpen. The son reaped it himself. Likewise, in the parable of the lost sheep we dont see an angry shepherd on the prowl to wrathfully destroy a rebellious sheep if it doesnt come back to the fold, but a God who seeks it out to save it from its own self-destructive waywardness. The wrath of God is simply an anthropomorphism, a human way of trying to explain that the violence of our sin will eventually fall on our own heads, that the pit we have dug we will eventually fall into. It is the reality that creation must reflect the Creator, the entire realm of being is for the purpose of manifesting the reality of God, and if we go against this grain, we go against the very nature of existence and therefore reap chaos and destruction. “The wrath of God” is a way of putting our through-a-glass-darkly explanation of karmic reaping and sowing. It is not God shooting lightning bolts at people from the sky. In Romans 1, Paul explains that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness right now. Right now! So where is it? Does anyone see the wrath of God being revealed anywhere? Does anyone see divine lightning bolts shooting from the sky at sinners? Does anyone see supernatural destruction on human beings? No, that’s because Paul goes on to say that “the wrath of God” is a more existential thing. It turns out that “the wrath of God”, Paul says, is God giving people over to the consequence of their own self-destructive sin resulting in death. “The wrath of God” is God saying, “Okay, have it your way.” And this wayward road leads to alienation of mind and death. “The wrath of God” is God allowing the son to end up in the pigpen from his own choice. “The wrath of God” is allowing the sheep to find itself in a perilous situation from wandering outside of the fold. And admittedly, “the wrath of God” is not a great way of putting it. But again, we are dealing with metaphysical concepts “through a glass darkly.” Metaphors, analogies, anthropomorphisms are constantly employed by the writers of the Bible. There is not always consistency. Elsewhere, Paul says, “Whoever sows to the flesh will of the flesh reap destruction.” And that is a more to-the-point way of putting it. But why did they use this language of “the wrath of God” in the first place? The Hebrew line of thinking was that since God was complicit in the ultimate sense, then everything ultimately came from him. Its like this: God said not to cut down the tree, I cut it down, it fell on me, must be the wrath of God. God did it. After all he created the laws of physic that made it fall on me. “God did it.” No, not really, although thats one way of looking at it. In reality, now that the tree is on top of me, God is pulling me from under it! God is our Savior, not our enemy. God is the father waiting for us to come home, not the pigpen making us miserable. Even if such words as wrath, anger, hatred, and many meager others are pressed into speaking of the Creator, we should not suppose that He ever does anything in anger or hatred. Many such figures are employed in the roiling span of Scripture, provisional terms far removed from Who He Is. Even as our own, relatively rational persons have already been tweaked, increasingly if slowly made more competent in holy understanding of the Mystery -- namely, that we should not take things quite so literally, but should suspect (concealed within the corporal surface of unlikely narratives) a hidden providence and eternal knowledge guiding all – so too we shall in future come to see the sweep of many things to be quite contrary to what our current, juvenile processes afford us. - Saint Abba Isaac of Nineveh Now, one might say Youre trying to fit God into human understanding, explaining away anything that might make us uncomfortable. No, Im simply aiming for a consistent view of God. Like all who study theology, I am simply trying to get at a consistent theoLOGIC to the revelation of Christ. Without logic there is no theoLOGIC, so logic actually is part of theology. If its just a contradictory mess excused as paradox then that doesnt help anyone. This view doesnt in any way lessen the emphasis against sin and for holiness. Rather, it shows God as being consistent, as the Savior from our destruction and not our destroyer, and it shows Jesus as actually fully revealing within himself the truth of who the Father is. We can believe Jesus when he says, “Whoever sees the Son has seen the Father.”
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 05:37:40 +0000
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