I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a causality of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spirit of being love. God is wrathful because God is love (italics in original.)
— Miroslav Volf
Cited from Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 138-139
I came across this quote from Miroslav Volf recently. It is never the case that God loves in a sort of way that always finds the good in those who commit the most unspeakable acts of evil according to their depraved impulses. God is wrathful because God is love. Pure divine love keeps God from simply tolerating evil done to the beloved for God. Whether the reckoning is immediate or deferred, those who do evil will have their day of reckoning. Wrath is never a separate rampage mode God enters; rather, evil provokes God to anger. Just as a good father will never stand by to see his daughter raped, but he defends her honor using appropriate action, God’s love never tolerates evil or love perverted.
Love is an attribute of God. Not only that but the God of love is morally complete for God is triune. God is one in nature (essence or ousia) revealed in three subjects (persons or hypostases). Moreover, perfect love has forever been given and received between the three persons of the Trinity, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. A unitarian deity would be morally deficient being unable to give and receive love to another. But the Trinity is complete because there has always been love shared between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Miroslav Volf (b. 1956) is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology and Founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School. He is a member of the Episcopal Church in the USA and the Evangelical Church in Croatia.
Love Truth Blog 