Graphing the Atonement: The Wrath of God

I wrote an article a while back discussing the various theories of the Atonement. I ended that article by saying that most views of the Atonement failed because they tried to picture the Atonement exclusively in the terms of some human analogy. I said that I didn't think it was possible to have a theory of the atonement if “theory” means “picture” since all pictures and analogies are limited. But that doesn't mean that we cannot have an understanding of the atonement. The issue is that when dealing with the Atonement we are dealing with something that does not have an exact human parallel. That is why the Bible uses a variety of different word pictures to describe it. (Every view of the Atonement can be supported by an individual verse or word.) And these pictures together shows us what the Atonement is and how it works. It is not a picture, but something more like a graph or an outline, making use of a variety of different and even contrasting pictures in order to chart an entirely unique path. And the first step in finding out what the Atonement is to look at the word itself.

The words “atonement,” “propitiation,” “kaphar,” and “hilasmos” (their Hebrew and Greek equivalents) all have different shades of meaning and connotations but at their heart, they all have the same basic idea which is that of covering or turning away wrath. “Atonement” has become associated solely with religious or pseudo-religious terminology, but “atone” is sometimes used in a more general way. For instance, in The H. M. S. Pinafore, the lowly sailor Ralph has aroused the anger of Admiral Porter by his attempted elopement with Josephine, the Captain's daughter. The admiral commands that Ralph be locked up, but Josephine promises him: “I will atone.” That is to say, she intended to placate Admiral Porter's wrath and cause him to pardon Ralph. (Whether she actually could have accomplished that is a separate question.) Atonement means to tun away or cover wrath and therefore, Atonement in a religious sense means to turn away the wrath of God. 

That phrase: “The Wrath of God” is a controversial one. Many people have difficulty in understanding how these two things--wrath and God--can go together. There are three problems: (1) God is consistently portrayed (in both the Old Testament and New Testament) as being loving and compassionate. And so how can he also have wrath? (2) Wrath is an emotion, a passion but God is without passions. When you picture someone getting mad, you think of their face turning red and the veins in their neck swelling up. Anger is a very physical thing. And God--without respect to the incarnation--does not have a body and therefore could not have wrath. (3) Not only is wrath an emotion but it is a “negative” emotion. In Ephesians 4:31, Paul tells Christians to put away wrath and anger specifically because they are to live as God does.

And yet we also cannot remove the idea of God's wrath from the Bible. It is found throughout both the Old and New Testaments in a variety of writers. So, in order to understand the wrath of God let us begin by considering the wrath of man.

Suppose a man is walking down the street and sees two boys fighting. But it isn't really a fight at all, because one boy is several years older and significantly bigger than the other, and so it is really just one boy mercilessly beating up another boy is helpless to defend himself. 

In that moment, the man realizes what is going on and realizes it is bad--that to needlessly hurt the defenseless is wrong. It is cruelty and cowardice. That realization is PERCEPTION; he perceives and understands the nature of the circumstance. Now, suppose he suddenly recognizes that the bully is in fact his own son. Then in addition to the bare perception of the event, he also has DISAPPOINTMENT, disappointment that his own son would behave in such a way. Beyond that he has SELF-REPROACH, wondering if he failed as a father given that his son is acting in such a way. And then there is HUMILIATION; he had always been proud of his son and had even that day been bragging to his friends about how well behaved he was and now he is acting in a way that embarrasses the entire family. There is a feeling of SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS, because at least he never did anything like that when he was a kid. And then there is ANNOYANCE because he is going to have to do something about it and it is going to throw off his schedule for the day. And finally there is his PHYSICAL STATE--the affair will have a much different effect on him on a day when he is already tired and frustrated then it would on another day.

We call this whole experience ANGER or wrath. Certainly, in the moment, the man would be unable to separate out the separate components of his experience. But I am going to suggest that only the first phase--the PERCEPTION--is anger. Anger is the reaction to something that is wrong. It is not merely a feeling; it is a realization. 

Suppose you ran your fingers over a piece of sandpaper. Because sandpaper has, objectively, a rough texture, you will have a rough feeling on your fingers. Does the way you feel change the nature of the sandpaper? No. The fact that sandpaper is the way it is determines what you feel when you touch it. Your feelings are a perception of the nature of sandpaper.

Does God (outside of the incarnation) have fingers? Does he have nerves? No. So does God know what sandpaper feels like? Yes, because God is omniscient. Anything we know, God knows--God has that knowledge innately and does not have to gain it by experience, as we do.

When we see or hear of some terrible atrocity, some act of cruelty or injustice, and feel anger, that is perception, like touching sandpaper. It is a response to the reality. God has that perception, even though He does not FEEL it the way we do. God does not have feelings and emotions in the same way we do, but that does not mean God is ignorant of the reality which emotions and feelings represent. God knows them very more clearly and more acutely than we do; if He did not, He would not be God.

The Bible warns us that the wrath of man does not accomplish the righteousness of God; that we should put away anger and wrath, because our human perception is so limited--because we so often do not feel anger for the right things and even when we do, it becomes mixed up with other things which corrupt and distort it. And yet at its base, it is not wrong to be angry and there are certain times when it is necessary, as Paul told the Ephesians. (Ephesians 4:26) But the point is that God, who does not have to worry about weakness or sin distorting his vision, can have wrath without danger.

Do you see the point? God's wrath is His perception of sin. God's wrath is revealed against sin because sin deserves wrath. Anger is the proper and fitting reaction to sin.

And by the same token, we can see that there is no necessary contradiction between wrath and love In the example I used, the fact that the man loved his son did not keep him from being angry about his son's actions. In fact, the more certainly he loved him, the more certainly he would be angry. A man who didn't really care about his son would be much more likely to treat the whole matter carelessly. Of course, love can blind our perception, which is another topic, but my point is that there is nothing preventing God from being both a God of love and a God of wrath.

There are those who recognize God's opposition to sin who nevertheless would like to get rid of the concept of the wrath of God and replace it with a more impersonal concept. William Barclay, for instance, spoke the wrath of God as an “impersonal force at work in the world” and equated it with the moral order which comes from God and is built into the world. (Daily Study Bible Series, Romans 1:18-23) And this point of view is right to this extent--God's wrath does not have that degree of arbitrariness which human wrath always does. Even a reasonable man, even a holy man will not always have anger that is exactly and impartially required in a situation. God's wrath is like an impersonal force in that it is exact, impartial, and necessary. If you put your hand in the fire, it will be burnt. There is no personal spite on the part of the fire, no arbitrary reaction. It is an exact and necessary reality. In one way, that is what God's wrath is like.

But that doesn't mean we can simply get rid of the term “wrath” and replace it was something more impersonal. C. S. Lewis warned against the attempt to remove such analogies from our thought. 'Wrath and pardon are both, as applied to God, analogies; but they belong together to same circle of analogy--the circle of life, and love, and deeply personal relationships. All the liberalising and “civilising” analogies only lead us astray. Turn God's wrath into mere enlightened disapproval, and you also turn His love into mere humanitarianism. The “consuming fire” and the “perfect beauty” both vanish.' (Letters to Malcolm, 97) 

However, there is one other point which must be made about wrath. Quite often in the Bible, the idea of wrath is intrinsically linked to the idea of punishment or vengeance. God's wrath, especially, usually means not merely His perception of the sinfulness of sin but also his judicial action in punishing sin. Numbers 11:1: “And when the people complained, it displeased the LORD: and the LORD heard it; and his anger was kindled; and the fire of the LORD burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp.” 2 Samuel 6:7: “And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.” Romans 2:5-6 “But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man according to his deeds.” (c.p. 2 Chronicles 32:25-26) God's wrath is his judgment against sin. So in Romans Paul warns us not to seek for revenge for ourselves BECAUSE God and God alone can truly judge and punish sin. And he will also tell the Romans to submit to the government, because the government is God's means for dealing WRATH upon evil-doers, because the government punishes criminals. (c.p. Romans 12:19, 13:4)

In short, when we say that God has wrath--when we say, as Paul does in Romans 1, that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men--it means that God recognizes man and sin and punishes it. That does not deny God's mercy or love. But God realizes and recognizes sin; God condemns sin and will punish it. It is an inevitable rule of life that judgment follows ungodliness and unrighteousness. Picture a diagram: at the top we have God and at the bottom we have man. So long as God is righteous and man is sinful, there will always be wrath coming from the top to the bottom. The relation between God and man, under those circumstances, must always involve wrath; that is, displeasure and punishment. God is a God of truth and He cannot and will not accept a lie. God cannot and will not simply ignore sin or treat it as if it were righteousness. Wrath follows sin as certainly as smoke follows fire.

Here we have to add another aspect to our understanding of God's wrath--WRATH is also a civil matter. God's wrath is specifically a matter of judgment against those who break his law. When the government punishes a criminal for breaking the law, it is not a personal matter. In modern, western society we have deliberately separated the judicial, legislative, and executive functions of government into separate branches to avoid any personal bias. A civil law is made with the specific purpose of forbidding some action and forwarding the good of the whole commonwealth and those who break the law are punished, not because the judge has some personal vendetta, but because their actions are against the law and therefore are bad for the whole country. (In theory, anyway. How the making and enforcing of laws works in practical politics is a quite separate question.) The wrath of a government is not a personal wrath but is intentional, aimed at bringing about a certain end. It is definite, concrete, and intelligent.

Having looked all this, one point should have become clear. When we speak of the wrath of God, we cannot exactly compare it to any one thing in human experience. Rather, different human experiences in one way or another reflect one aspect of it. Any time we see some act of cruelty or injustice and feel an irresistible and impersonal flash of anger, that is something like the wrath of God. When a judge sends a man to jail for breaking a clearly defined, just law that is also something like the wrath of God. When you stick your hand in a fire and feel a searing pain, that is also something like the wrath of God. That's what I mean when I say that in drawing out a view of the atonement we are doing something like a diagram or graph, rather than a picture. There is nothing we know in this world that exactly combines those various aspects of wrath (just as there is nothing in our experience that combines three-ness and one-ness in exactly the same way that the Trinity does), but it does not take much faith to believe that they could be united in God.

We are now in a position to draw out our first proposition. God's law is something deliberate and intentional like a civil law, something objective and unalterable like a law of nature or mathematics, and something intensely personal and heartfelt like the law of a family. And so, by the same token, God's wrath partakes of all these elements.

It is only now that we can talk about the idea of propitiation or atonement. A large segment of modern Christianity has tried to remove this idea of God's wrath and the propitiation of that wrath. And, to some extent, the reason is obvious. Think of the story of the prodigal son. The son had deeply wounded and rejected his father and had gone his own way. No doubt the father was angry and rightly angry at the foolish and ungrateful attitude of his son. But when, years later, the son returned broken and contrite, the father received him with open arms and forgiveness—and in that is a type of God. There are some fathers who might not have received the son in that way. Some fathers would have still been angry and bitter, like the elder brother in the parable. Some fathers might have required the prodigal to do something in order to placate him before he offered forgiveness. But surely that is not a Christian attitude and therefore cannot be the attitude of God. Surely the Christian thing to do is offer forgiveness freely and immediately as the father in the parable did. The need for placation or propitiation is a sign of human weakness not of divine strength. Indeed, more often than not, in human relationships the desire for placation is simply a desire to give forgiveness without losing face.

But the point to remember about the prodigal son is that when he returned at the end of the story the situation had altered significantly from the time when he left. When the son left, his father loved him. And when he returned, his father loved him. That love remained constant. But when the boy left, the father (we assume) was angry and when the boy returned his father was forgiving. Given that the father's love remained constant, the thing that caused the difference was the attitude of the son. If the prodigal had come home for a visit a week after he left, still flush in cash, anxious to flaunt his newfound freedom in the face of his family, it is safe to assume that the father's attitude would not have been that which we read in the end of the story. By saying that his father would still have been angry, I don't mean that he would have set the dogs on the boy and driven him off. But I do mean that he could not have have been the figure of Luke 15:20 in such a picture.

We spoke of this idea of wrath as compared to the attitude of a father and the attitude of the government. We may get to the truth most quickly if we think of a case where the two roles were combined in a single individual. David, the third king of Israel, was a great man with many talents and skills. Parenting, however, was not one of them. When his son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar, the Bible records that David “was very wroth.” (2 Samuel 13:21) And that, apparently, is it. Not only did he not execute the penalties of the law upon his son, he doesn't seem to have done ANYTHING about the situation. Thinking about this may suggest to us some points which are relevant to our previous discussion, but this is not the part of the story I wanted to highlight.

Two years after the beginning of the story, Absalom (Tamar's full brother) ambushed and murdered Amnon in revenge, executing his own wrath upon the criminal—and then, for obvious reasons, fled the country. David was heartborken at this terrible crime among his children, but as time passed the historian gives us this comment: “And the soul of king David longed to go forth unto Absalom: for he was comforted concerning Amnon, seeing he was dead.” (2 Samuel 13:39) And as a result of this grief and the connivance of Joab (the most subtle and complex character in the Old Testament), David gave Absalom a virtual pardon and allowed him to return to Jerusalem and, eventually, fully restored him to the favor of the family. (2 Samuel 14:33)

David was seemingly angry at Absalom at the time of the murder. And by the time Absolom returned, he was no longer angry. Now, it is a conceivable position that David shouldn't have been angry in the first place—that he should have given Absalom a medal for his public service of ridding the world of Amnon. It is also a conceivable position that David should have been angry at such an act of treachery, even given the provocation which Absalom had. But if Absalom's act was wrong to begin with, then it was still wrong two years later. And if it was right to begin with, then David never should have been angry in the first place. The point is that the mere passage of time did nothing to alter the moral (or legal) state of the case. Nor do we see any alteration in Absalom's attitude. He seems as imperious and hotheaded when he returned as he was in the assassination of his half-brother. In other words, the situation when Absolom returned was exactly the same as when he left. The only thing that had changed was that David's anger about the murder had gradually subsided over the course of time. Like a river wearing smooth the stones in its path, the days and weeks had worn away the sharp pang of anger in David's heart.

And this, I maintain, is wrong. It was unfair to Amnon, to simply forget about his murder because he was safely out of sight. It was unfair to Absalom, who received a pardon which he must have known was meaningless sentiment. And it set in motion events which ended catastrophically for everyone concerned. David was wrong merely to forget about Absalom's crime and allow his wrath to fade away without being dealt with. That is where this idea of propitiation comes in. I am not here trying to decide what  David should have done—it is a little late for that by this time. I am not saying what should have been done to placate or propitiate David's wrath; but I am saying that something should have been done. For David's reaction to the situation to alter without the situation itself changing in anyway was both illogical and unwise.

So, for instance, in the story of the Prodigal Son, the situation has altered by the end of the story because of the prodigal's repentance. Or, in another example, in the case of Philemon and Onesimus, it was possible for Philemon's wrath to be placated both because of Onesimus's repentance and transformation and because the original loss was covered by St. Paul.

That brings us to our second proposition. In so far as wrath is only a human emotion then it is only logical that it will slowly fade away over time. But in so far as wrath is a recognition of a real wrong, it cannot simply go away. In so far as wrath represents the judgment and condemnation of an objectively bad situation, then it must remain until that original situation is altered in some way. When we speak of propitiating God's wrath, we don't mean that God was so mad that somebody needed to talk him down. We mean that a situation was in place in which wrath was necessary and appropriate reaction and that the only way to do away with wrath was to alter that situation in some way.

But how could that situation be altered to bring forgiveness? What does it even mean to forgive? That is a question that is surprisingly difficult to answer and so we will dedicate a separate article to the attempt.