The wrath of God

[Walter E]

I would like some help with the Greek meaning of wrath.

For example, what does 'orge' or wrath means in John 3:36 "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him."

What is the last part of this passage saying?

Thank you.

[Olympiada]

> I can refer you to a biblical studies group I belong to if you are intere= sted. > It is full of over 500 international biblical scholars and has links to > biblical resources. It is where I go to ask questions of this nature. > Yours in Christ > Olympiada >=20 > PS I was looking up the word vengeance last night!

[M.C. Steenberg]

Dear Walter,

The 'wrath' of God is something petitioned in the scriptures and prayers of the Church with frequency: 'Be not wrath with us'; 'Let not thy wrath remain on us'; 'His wrath is fierce upon sinners'; et cetera. The Greek orge is the basic word for 'anger', but in ecclesial writing often takes the meaning of 'retribution, punishment', at times even 'revenge'. Yet the verbal form (orgizomai) retains its basic meaning of 'to be angry'.

Your question seems far more theological than linguistic -- i.e., 'What is anger when we speak of God?' When a verse like that from St John says that God's anger/wrath shall remain on a person who does not 'see' God, what does this mean?

Others can perhaps give various perspectives from specific texts, prayers, etc.; but I might just offer a perspective from the psalms, which, as anyone who hears them in the daily cycle of the hours is well aware, are much about wrath. But the overwhelming spirit there is clear: 'His anger is but for a while, yet his mercy abideth forever'. The wrath of God in the psalms is above all God's spur to action and reform in his people -- that which evokes action and change. Unlike human wrath (which is also discussed in the psalms, making kathisma 9, for example, a painful and fearsome text to read), which is often vengeance pure and simple, the wrath of God is part of his response to human life -- and a necessary part of that response. But it is wrath met in love and mercy.

INXC, Matthew

[Byron Jack Gaist]

Dear all,

I have been thinking about Divine Wrath, and our own Orthodox understanding of it. As Matthew points out in his post #844, the Bible, and especially the OT, but also the NT, is full of references to God getting angry at sinners, even taking revenge for sin by sending plagues and calamities. This is not a very popular image of God, but reading Scripture one comes across it all the time, and very boldly expressed. How can we as Orthodox really understand Divine Wrath? Matthew suggests it is "wrath met in love and mercy", which I simplistically understand in human terms to be rather like a parent getting angry at his child for behaviour they know may damage the child's health or wellbeing - disciplinary anger that is the fruit of love and concern for the child, not retaliation or bother.

I therefore understand Divine Wrath to be closely linked to Divine Justice. From the OCA website:


God takes no "pleasure in the death of the wicked" (Ez 18:22). He "desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the Truth" (1 Tim 2:4). He does everything in His power so that salvation and eternal life would be available and possible for all. There is nothing more that God can do. Everything now depends on man. If some men refuse the gift of life in communion with God, the Lord can only honor this refusal and respect the freedom of His creatures which He Himself has given and will not take back. God allows men to live "with the devil and his angels" if they so desire. Even in this He is loving and just. For if God's presence as the "consuming fire" (Heb 12:29) and the "unapproachable light" (1 Tim 6:16) which delights those who love Him only produces hatred and anguish in those who do not "love His appearing" (2 Tim 4:8), there is nothing that God can do except either to destroy His sinful creatures completely, or to destroy Himself. But God will exist and will allow His creatures to exist. He also will not hide His Face forever.

The doctrine of eternal hell, therefore, does not mean that God actively tortures people by some unloving and perverse means. It does not mean that God takes delight in the punishment and pain of His people whom He loves. Neither does it mean that God "separates Himself" from His people, thus causing them anguish in this separation (for indeed if people hate God, separation would be welcome, and not abhorred!). It means rather that God continues to allow all people, saints and sinners alike, to exist forever. All are raised from the dead into everlasting life: "those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment" (John 5:29). In the end, God will be "all and in all" (1 Cor 15:28). For those who love God, resurrection from the dead and the presence of God will be paradise. For those who hate God, resurrection from the dead and the presence of God will be hell. This is the teaching of the fathers of the Church.

In another thread on this forum, Anastasia lucidly wrote:


I said that God as wrath was a perverted perception of the damned, not the way God really is. I misspoke some. Somebody compared the Presence of God to rubbing alcohol: for intact, healthy skin, rubbing alcohol is refreshing, cooling, soothing. But for broken, unhealthy skin, rubbing alcohol burns and hurts. And it REALLY does, not just in our imagination! So with the damned (supposing there will be any, which remains to be seen): God's all-loving Presence really will burn them. Not because He is angry with them (that's the part that is in their minds only) but because they haven't been made healthy and pure and whole enough to tolerate the Divine Presence, the Divine Love. Unable, in their hatred, to love or even to receive love, in spite of wanting to more than anything, the presence and yet inaccessibility of It will torment them. "He is like a refiner's fire." His presence will purify and refresh and warm and illumine the gold, but burn and melt the ore.

From this wise paragraph I understand that God's Presence is itself a burning fire, experienced as anger by those who have wilfully rejected Him in life. The whole purpose of our life is therefore to live according to our true nature, which is to worship and adore Him, and to seek His Will in everything. When we choose not to do this, we go on existing, but God also goes on existing, and is experienced by us as burning fire of Divine Wrath. And this fire only gives us a chance to be purified while we are still here on earth, for once we have died it is too late to repent (though the prayers of our loved ones may comfort us in some way even then). This is why God's wrath may also be experienced by those who are not aware of having sinned in any conscious way, even by the pious, because God "reproves him whom He loves" (Prov. 3:11-12) in order to purify us while we are still here, in order for Anastasia's "alcohol" to cauterize the wound and speed up the process of healing while we are still living on earth.

Even after all this, I am still wondering: does God experience emotions? What do we mean when we say He is compassionate, or He is angry?

In Christ
Byron

[M.C. Steenberg]

Byron wrote, above:


Even after all this, I am still wondering: does God experience emotions? What do we mean when we say He is compassionate, or He is angry?

This discussion, which began on 'wrath' and its meaning when one ascribes it to God, and which you've brought also into the broader realm of the idea of God experiencing 'emotions' (compassion, anger, jealousy, joy, etc.), is tied up very much with the concept 'impassibility' as descriptive of God, which has always been maintained by the Church, even as the same Church declares that the same God engages in such emotions.

What it seems to me is an often-unaddressed question that really has to lie behind any conversation on this theme, is what we mean by speaking of such emotions at all. We tend to think of an ascription of, say, anger to God, as ascribing to him a human emotion/feeling/state-of-being. But is that what 'anger' authentically is? To take the experience of emotions known by humanity in its fallen existence, and ascribe this to God, is frought with problems - we experience and know anger as, in some sense, a loss of emotional control over our love and compassion. To speak in such terms about God would certainly fail even the most basic of the criteria of impassibility, which above all means to assure that God's being is not 'held captive' by any force beyond his control.

But the question remains as to whether this is really an authentic way to understand anger, even in a purely human context. It's here that the positive valuation of so many emotions - anger included - by their ascription to God in the scriptures and elsewhere, has to give some pause for thought. If we know that our common experience of anger is something that cannot be ascribed to God, yet know equally that 'anger' is ascribed to God by the Church, there is some grounds for questioning whether what we popularly understand of this emotion is authentic to what ought to be a Christian understanding.

In a sense, we have to invert the normal manner in which we think of these things. Rather than emotions being human attributes 'ascribed to God', they are perhaps better understood as divine attributes granted to man. Anger, compassion, joy, jealousy, are divine realities made the lot of humankind as creature bearing the image of this God. The fact that we experience and 'know' these emotions as volatile, uncontrolled mental states and dispositions speaks chiefly of a degradation of these realities in our fallen experience.

What needs to be done, then, is not seek to explore how we can think of God acting and possessing emotions that are 'human', but how our human expression of the realities of God are most often disfigurations of their authentic nature.

INXC, Matthew

[Walt E]

The fact that God is eternal, undivided, and that He does not change, could it be that the emotions are really just our perception of His actions on us?

How can He be angry one moment, but not the next? That contradicts His nature. It says God is love. From what we understand from His nature, we can conclude that He always was love, is love, and will always be love. It is the same with truth, and life. He is always truth and life. There is never a moment or place that He is not love, truth and life.

So if God is really angry, then because of His undivided nature would mean that He was always angry, is angry and will always be angry. I don't think we can say God is angry in certain situations. Because for one, we are concluding that God is divided. Or if He will no longer be angry for eternity, we're concluding that He will be less God than He was before. One of His nature is lacking, His anger.

If we say God is angry with this person, but He is not with this other person, we are dividing Him. Hasn't it been determined that wherever God is, the fullness of God is there, and not just part of it? In fact, where I am sitting right now, the whole Trinity is there, not just a portion of God?

And the other concludes that we can push His buttons or control Him. A person can say I am going to make God angry, so he sins. Now I am going to make God happy, so he confesses His sins.

So when we sin, we are really separating ourselves from God. To which we are also separating ourselves from life, and thus we feel the pain. And the perception we feel is the anger of God.

I think it is interesting that it says God IS love, God IS truth, God IS light, God IS life, etc.. But I can't find where it says God IS angry. It says the anger of God, which I think it refers to punishment, and not necessarily how He feels.

[Owen Jones]

The only way we have of speaking of God is by analogy to things in the world. God is not a thing. But there is no intrinsic language of non-thing reality.

[Fr Raphael Vereshack]

Dear Walt,

I think you have a very good question here as to what it means to refer to God as unchangable but yet capable of anger. We know that God is not passionately reactive to situations- His anger certainly is not of this nature. So is His anger actually just His love which we experience in a certain way due to our actions?

Actually the Holy Frs say something similar to this:


God is good, dispassionate and immutable. Now someone who thinks it reasonable and true to affirm that God does not change, may well ask how, in that case, it is possible to speak of God as rejoicing over those who are good and showing mercy to those who honour Him, while turning away from the wicked and being angry with sinners. To this it must be answered that God neither rejoices nor grows angry, for to rejoice and to be offended are passions...It is not right to imagine that God feels pleasure or displeasure in a human way. He is good, and He only bestows blessings and never does harm, remaining always the same. We men, other other hand, if we remain good through resembling God, are united to Him; but if we become evil through not resembling God, we are separated from Him...Thus to say that God turns away from the wicked is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind." (On the Character of Men-St Anthony the Great- #150; Vol 1- The Philokalia).

When we refer to the anger of God then we are definitely not meaning to say that God is passionately reactive.

This is not to say however that there is not a sort of changableness in God.
For example St. Maximos the Confessor explains:


The wrath of God is the painful sensation we experience when we are being trained by Him. Through this painful experience of unsought sufferings God often abases and humbles an intellect conceited about its own knowledge and virtue; for such sufferings make it conscious of itself and its own weakness.

and


The wrath of God is the suspension of grace- a most salutary experience for every self-inflated intellect that boasts of the blessings bestowed by God as if they were its own achievement.

God's unchangability thus also expresses the way in which He always lovingly acts & never departs from this. It is true that God's unchangability is a bit like the sun which it is we who are to some degree open to or not. In this analogy the sun is always constant. God though is not just a mute force but has a providential care for His creation. Using the sun again as an analogy we recall the words we sing at Pascha,


The myrrh-bearing maidens anticipating the dawn, seeking as it were day, the Sun Who before the sun and Who had set in the tomb, and they cried out to one another...Arise O Master, Thou Who dost grant resurrection to the fallen.

In Christ- Fr Raphael

[Walt E]

I have heard that a river of fire comes from the throne of God. To those who are in Him, the fire is very pleasant. And those who reject Him, the fire is torment. The fire is still the same, but the perception is different depending where they stand.

I guess a simple analogy is that the oxygen we breath is very pleasant to those who breath it, but not so good to those who refuse to breath it. The oxygen is still the same, but the perception is different on whether you take it or refuse it.

But I like what you said,


So is His anger actually just His love which we experience in a certain way due to our actions?

Certainly I have seen where a person was deeply in love with another, yet the other person hated him. I think it is the same with God. God's love to us is love, but those who reject Him, the same love is perceived as anger.

Those who will spend time in the lake of fire, are they really experiencing God's love? And the reason it is torment is because they can't stand God? And since God is everywhere and always present, God's love or from their perception, torment, will be eternal?

Please forgive me since I have recently been attending a very small GOC from a Protestant one , so I don't know much.

[M.C. Steenberg]

The scriptures state that God is angry in a number if places (e.g. 4 Kingdoms 3.19, Psalm 7.11, Deuteronomy 4.21, etc.). This is different than saying 'God is anger', which I don't believe is anywhere written; so it is not quite of the sort of statement as 'God is love' (rather than 'God is loving'), though I think one should be careful of trying to draw too strong a distinction in types of expression here. In any case the fathers (as the scriptures) tend to view love as the umbrella over all 'emotions': authentic love includes authentic anger, wrath, jealousy, etc. Love is not authentic love unless it is also authentic judgement, authentic zeal, and so on.

Part of the concern over the apparent division within God or mutability imposed by the idea of anger, comes from the tendency - which I mentioned in an earlier post, above - to read ascriptions of anger as the positing of human experience to God, which is always problematic. This experience of anger is, if I can borrow Fr Raphael's phrase, 'passionately reactive': responsive, often impulsively and in a manner beyond our immediate control (that is, mandated by external situations). But the fact that this experience of anger is not one that can, on reflection, be ascribed to the immutable God, cannot cause us to deny the scriptural confessions that God does, in fact, become angry, and does become angry in specific situations, towards some people while not towards others -- e.g. God becoming angry with Moses (Deuteronomy 4.21); with Solomon (3 Kingdoms 11.9); with the children of Israel (Jeremias 3.12); more broadly with all the evil (Psalm 7.11).

These kinds of passages pose a real problem if the anger that God bears towards such people, or such acts/situations, is understood as the kind of passionately reactive emotional response characterised by our common fallen experience. This is why one must stop to question whether this characteristic experience is really the proper definition or understanding of 'anger'. The reality of God's love, of which his anger is a part, is a constant and consistent property of who he is; it does not fluctuate, but is received / experienced differently depending on the circumstances of encounter. One encounters the eternity of God's being, God's love, from the mutable experience of one's created being; the relationship of creator / created is concordantly a relationship of immutable / mutable, which means that even though God as immutable does not change, the relationship of encounter we, as created and mutable beings, have with this unchanging God, does vary. To encounter the unchanging love of God can, and at times will, be an encounter with the anger of God; God's love 'becomes' God's anger when it is approached in a manner contrary to that love.

This understanding comes from the testimony both of the scriptures and of the fathers, who write on it at great length (especially in certain early periods, when it was being challenged by various theological movements: e.g. 'Gnosticism', Marcionitism, etc.). In most of those contexts the points being clarified are theological - that is, dealing with the articulation of God's being. But they are also significant for a Christian anthropology, or articulation of genuine human reality. Especially from the writings of the ascetical tradition, it is clear that the common human experience of 'emotions' is a fallen experience (part of the difficulty in understanding their ascription to God, which we have been discussing). The 'anger' which we have trouble ascribing to and understanding in God, is not even authentically anger in our own human realm. Rather, as creatures bearing the image of God - imaging God - it is anger as a present reality in God that is the genuine definition of human anger. Which is why 'apatheia' is so intrinsic an ascetical concept: that our anger, together with our love, joy, etc., may become, like God's, not 'passionately reactive', but grounded in a participation in God's unchanging being.

INXC, Matthew

[Fr Raphael Vereshack]

One thing I feel it is very important to add to this understanding of God is that He acts. By this is not meant to go against the understanding of God's unchangability. But in our description I feel it is very important to not leave the impression that God simply IS and it is really only according to our actions that we experience God as being consolation or wrath. The danger here I think is that we understand God's unchangability as if it was some sort of inert life-force.

We speak of God acting, leading, shepherding, and use many other words to express God's providential care for us. It is crucial of course to keep in mind that such words are used by analogy only. Nevertheless this is not to deny God's providential care for His creation but rather to express this in a way suitable to us. Thus word is a reflection of reality, and even if only dimly so, it is surely vital to the whole understanding of salvation that this understanding does refer to something real.

Not that anyone here has denied this. But I feel it very important add to & to keep in mind how and in what way God precisely is personal in His dealings with man and creation.

I think our understanding of God needs to thread the eye of the needle between two equally false portrayals- a God Who is my emotional big brother who can 'relate' to everything I do & a God Who is the ultimate existentialist blissfully aware that He IS.

The Cross & Resurrection are not condescensions which are aberrations in God's nature. Rather they are condescensions which reflect in the most perfect way something essential to God's nature.
In Christ- Fr Raphael

[Mourad Mankarios]

The wrath that has been interpreted here seems to me to be referring to some form of transitory reflection of man's relationship with God with the view of a rehabilitative effect...

However, if this is the case how do we explain the flood, the burning of Sodom and Gommorrah, the complete annihilation of so many nations, the killing of Uzzah and Annanias and Saphira...And most of all eternal damnation...What mercy or love is left for these, what lesson to be learnt?

So often I find it so difficult not to take scripture and either interpret from it a wrathful and retributive God or some kind of schizoid maniac wavering from one side to the other...

It overwhelmingly seems that while God may labour with man, He too has a threshold and when it is reached there is no mercy, love is dried up and there is only fear, dread, wrath, chains, retribution and eternal fire...

[Herman Blaydoe]

It overwhelmingly seems that while God may labour with man, He too has a threshold and when it is reached there is no mercy, love is dried up and there is only fear, dread, wrath, chains, retribution and eternal fire...

Start here: http://www.stnectariospress.com/par ish/river_of_fire.htm (http://www.stnectariospress.com/parish/river_of_fire.htm)

[Byron Jack Gaist]

Dear All,

I've been away from my PC for a while, but I'd like to thank everyone for their continuing posts on this thread, which are helping me to clarify what is for me a very difficult issue.

Matthew, I like what you've said about the difference between "passionately reactive" human emotion and the phenomena which characterise the always dispassionate God.


Which is why 'apatheia' is so intrinsic an ascetical concept: that our anger, together with our love, joy, etc., may become, like God's, not 'passionately reactive', but grounded in a participation in God's unchanging being.

Even psychotherapeutically, there is a distinction between healthy, appropriate anger which is directed at another through a disposition which is ultimately loving; and the kind of disproportionate and inappropriate anger which has its origins in older repressed material and constitutes the foundation of rage. However, the kind of "anger" God may display has to be understood in probably yet a third way, as perfect anger, something only the very wisest and most enlightened human beings can at times receive the gift of.

In Christ
Byron