In the modern hymn, In Christ Alone, we sing that “The wrath of God was satisfied” (on the cross). But some Christians have objected to the phrase, believing that it should be softened or the the phrase takes away the focus from the big idea that God is love.
The team behind a Presbyterian hymn book in the US excluded the song after failing to get permission to change the disputed line to “The love of God was magnified”.
Meanwhile, Terry White, a Fellow at the Baptist seminary Spurgeon’s College, has said that “the octave leap from ‘The’ to ‘wrath’ [is] quite jarring because it seems tonally to celebrate God’s wrath.”
And yet, the hymn – with its appealing tune and reassuring lyrics that major on the key points of the gospel and emphasise God’s protection – remains popular.
So how should we take the idea of God’s wrath – which we, in the Church of England, pronounce “wroth”? And does it conflict with the idea of God’s love? Well, I think there are three key points to consider:
1. Wrath is not an essential attribute of God
Wrath, defined in the dictionary as “extreme anger”, is not an essential attribute of God.
“Anger is not a divine attribute in the same sense as love is,” says Old Testament scholar John Goldingay. “The instinct to love emerges from God without any outside stimulus, but God gets angry only as a reaction to outside stimulus.”
Essential attributes are those that God has to have, as Kevin Kinghorn and Stephen Travis point out in their book But what about God’s wrath? If he wasn’t omniscient (all knowing), he would cease to be God. Likewise being love is an essential attribute because it’s a necessary part of the Trinity. When we read in John 3 that “The Father loves the Son”, this is not just a choice: it’s an essential part of making God consistent with himself.
But wrath is not an essential attribute because if only God existed, he would not need it. It is only because God has chosen to create the universe that it exists at all.
2. God’s ‘wrath’ comes from his love
Wrath is relatively unusual word in normal life which we tend to use in hyperbole, suggesting fury without any restraint. This can give us a misleading idea of what it means in the Bible.
When the Bible attributes wrath or anger to God, it is not describing a God whose rage is like the tantrums of a three-year-old, or a God who flies off the handle like a boss whose employee has yet again ruined a work project. It is instead more like the controlled anger of a parent whose teenager daugher has stayed out way beyond the expected time of her return home and has thereby not only worried her parents but also made herself vulnerable to unwelcome dangers. Such anger is motivated by concern for the well-being of the person toward whom it is directed.
In other words, God’s wrath comes is derived from, and is a function of, his love.
3. Love is a bigger truth than wrath
The theologian N.T. Wright argues:
Divine anger at human rebellion and particularly at the rebellion of the chosen people features prominently throughout Israel’s scriptures. Similar notes are struck in the New Testament, not least in the teaching of Jesus himself. And suggestion that “sin” does not make God angry (a frequent idea in modern thought as a reaction against the caricatures of an ill-tempered deity) needs to be treated with disdain. When God looks at sin, what he sees is what a violin maker would see if the player were to use his lovely creation as a tennis racquet. But here is the difference. In many expressions of pagan religion, the humans have to try to pacify the angry deity. But that’s not how it happens in Israel’s scriptures. The biblical promises of redemption have to do with God himself acting because of his unchanging, unshakeable love for his people.
Separately, Wright argues that:
John’s and Paul’s deep-rooted theology of the love of the triune God [means not that] ‘God was so angry with the world that he gave us his son’ but ‘God so loved the world that he gave us his son’. That’s why, when I sing that interesting recent song and we come to the line, ‘And on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’, I believe it’s more deeply true to sing ‘the love of God was satisfied’…