Is God’s Anger in the Bible Real?
Or it is a metaphor?
A five-star review of Where Are You? A Beginner’s Guide to Advanced Spirituality:
The book is gorgeous. It's accessible and engaging for both those drawn to the language of spirituality and those seeking meaning and purpose (but skeptical of terms like "spirituality"). It offers provocative insights about the human experience that make it worth not just reading once but keeping as a companion to re-read with over and over.
When approaching the Bible as literature, God is a character who appears in the story. The Biblical character of God may or may not accurately reflect your beliefs. That’s up to you to decide.
Perhaps you believe that the Bible’s depiction of God is an accurate reflection of reality. Or perhaps you believe in a higher power, but not one that resembles the God of the Bible. Or perhaps you are a devout atheist.
Regardless of your beliefs, you can still reflect upon the character of God in the story. What did this God character mean to the authors and to those who first encountered these stories?1
Discomfort with God’s anger
One area where people’s beliefs about God often diverge from the God that appears in the Bible is around anger. In the Bible, God frequently gets angry.
Many traditional Bible commentators are uncomfortable with God’s anger. Some sought to minimize God’s anger. Others, including the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, believed that God doesn’t get angry. Where the Bible says that God was angry, Maimonides holds that God was pretending to be angry to serve a pedagogical purpose.
If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of God being angry, know that you’re in good company. However, I think Maimonides and others who minimized God’s anger in the Bible started with beliefs about God’s nature and then read the Bible to validate those beliefs.
Regardless of my comfort with the idea, I think the Bible’s authors wanted their readers and listeners to understand that God got angry. Not pretend angry. God-sized angry.
If God is so powerful, why does God get angry?
At the time the Bible was being written, cultures in the surrounding ancient Near East also had stories of gods getting angry. These gods were typically angry with one another, not with people. As a general rule, people didn’t capture the gods’ attention. The gods’ anger often affected people but for the gods, this was an inconsequential side effect.
The Hebrew Bible shifted this narrative. Now, instead of divine dramas taking place between the gods, the drama took place between God and people. And just as the gods got angry with one another so too did God get angry at the people.
The people also expressed their displeasure with God. They did this by ignoring God’s wishes and by worshipping other gods. The relationship between God and the people is filled with disappointment on both sides.
The relationship is also filled with romance and love. God’s anger in the Bible is the flip side of God’s love. Unlike the gods in some of the neighboring ancient Near Eastern cultures, the God of the Bible cares deeply about people and about what happens to them.
If God is all-powerful and God cares, why doesn’t God make everything work out well? The answer is that the Bible understands human beings to have some measure of autonomy and God’s power has limits, self-imposed or otherwise.
For the Biblical authors, that’s enough of an answer. They were less concerned with the exact contours of human autonomy and divine power and more concerned with God’s relationship to people and people’s relationship to God.
The God of the Bible has anger issues
I start with the view that when God gets angry, this tells us something about the character of God in the Bible. For starters, it tells us what God cares about. And as we’ll see, it also tells us that for God, learning how to handle anger and disappointment is an area for growth.
From the global destruction of the flood story in Genesis to the exhortations of the prophets to God’s response to Job, one of the themes that can be traced in the Bible is God’s wrestling with anger. And in this wrestling, God’s greatest challenges, and greatest assistants, are people.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum teaches that the proper response to anger is to quickly turn it into effective action. If there’s no action to be taken, then anger serves no purpose and you’re better off leaving your anger behind. And if you’re already taking appropriate action, then anger also serves no purpose.
What makes God angry? When God gets angry, does God handle it as Martha Nussbaum suggests?
We’ll examine these questions in future installments of Not So Random Thoughts.
Even those who think that the Bible is the inerrant word of God acknowledge that the books had human authors.
I decided a long time ago that I don't want to believe in a God that is angry and punitive. I've had to do a lot of deprogramming to get the place where the divine is pure love, devoid of the extravaganza of human emotion. Love to me, is a noun and a verb, not necessarily something we can generate on our own, but is who we are.
I’ve always perceived God as Non Judging and all encompassing love, maybe there’s a deeper layer below this Anger, when all things are let out and expressed, all shall return to love