gods anger

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The wrath of God is a motif in the image of God in particular in the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the scriptures of these religions it is usually presented as a supernatural intervention of God against sin , either in the sense of a punishment or a surrender to one's own desires. It is directed against individuals or parts of humanity, so that the faithful believers or the survivors are considered the elect .

Polytheistic Religions

In polytheistic religions, it is more consistent to speak of the wrath of the gods . Homer and the Greek tragedy, but also the Viking legend Vatnsdœla saga can serve as examples .

Judaism

Most of the time, God's wrath is spoken of in response to human misconduct, e.g. For example, regarding the destruction of Jerusalem (587/6 BC) as a result of sin: The people have sinned, so God's anger is kindled against the Israelites so much that even the temple and the capital are destroyed.

Other examples in the Jewish Torah include: B. the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18: 20-21, 19: 23-28; for the interpretation as a divine act of wrath see Deut 29:22). Other texts do not deal explicitly with anger, as there is no word in them that belongs to the semantic field of "anger / anger". Nevertheless, they can be associated with anger, even if the texts themselves do not contain this assignment to anger: the Flood (Genesis 6: 9–8, 22), the dispersion of the builders of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11: 1–9 ) and the ten plagues that fell upon the Egyptians for persecuting the children of Israel (Exodus, chapters 7–12). Biblical Israel itself stands between rejection and election.

Christianity

New Testament Aspects

In the Christian New Testament , too , the warning against God's wrath (John 3:36; Romans 1:18; Romans 12:19; Ephesians 5,6) is part of the beliefs. The Last Judgment is described, among other things, as the "day of wrath" (Rom. 2.5). The Book of Revelation According stands a great last hour wrath of God still pending (Revelation 14:19; Revelation 19:15). There are two main New Testament nouns for anger, namely ὀργὴ and θυμός. These do not appear very often: ὀργὴ a total of 36 times, 10 of them in Romans; θυμός a total of 18 times, 10 of them in Revelation.

Church history aspects

From the epidemics of the 14th century to the 18th century, the wrath of God was often depicted in so-called plague pictures , on which God causes the bubonic plague in people with arrows, lances or sword, which the protective cloak Madonna or a plague saint was supposed to protect against.

In the Judeo-Christian context, there are intra- religious and religious-critical controversies both about divine “justice” and about the polar emotionality of the image of God . In particular, radical preachers and fundamentalist religious communities such as the Westboro Baptist Church see signs of an angry God in major natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and speak of a "sin not to enjoy when God pours his anger and revenge on America".

In contrast, others say that God's wrath came to an end with Jesus' act of redemption. As Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone put it in 2007: The Apocalypse is therefore not, as is often thought, the disturbing announcement of a catastrophic end for humanity, but the declaration of the failure of the infernal powers and the great proclamation of the mystery of Christ, which saved history and of the cosmos died and rose again. (...) The Latin Christian tradition has learned from the Apocalypse that the wrath of God is sung about precisely because and only because of its dissolution and reversal through the love of the innocent Lamb who sacrificed himself for our salvation.

Systematic-theological aspects

Friedrich DE Schleiermacher

In his sermon "That we have nothing to teach from God's wrath", Friedrich Schleiermacher wants to show that it is one of the "imperfections of our creed" that there is too much talk of the wrath of God, which deals with Pauline theology (as he did it exemplarily shown in 2Cor 5,17f) not tolerated. The doctrine of the wrath of God does not belong to Christianity, which is essentially about the reconciliation of the world within itself (and not the world to God).

The doctrine of the wrath of God is not conducive to Christians and not a single word about the wrath of God has come down from Jesus either. Some parables could be interpreted in this way, but only if one z. B. inadmissibly transferring the speech of the angry king (Mt 22: 1–14) literally to God. The reason for the Pauline talk about the wrath of God is connected with the fact that he speaks to people of the old covenant or at least to those who come from it. And there is much talk of the wrath of God and his threats, but for Christians this belongs to the old thing that has passed (2 Cor. 5: 17f). The wrath of God is characteristic of the legality of the old covenant, in which threats of punishment were supposed to have been necessary in order to avoid sin. But in Christianity God works his will through Christ through inner strength of the heart and not through external pressure of the letter. Therefore one no longer needs the idea of ​​God's wrath, but only the reminder of his love with which he sacrificed our sins on the cross, which leads to being kept from evil. Talking about the wrath of God should not serve as preparation for faith either, for fear should be driven out through love. Faith should not be based on fear.

One may speak of God in a human way, but human anger is a limit for this, because there is no equivalent in the divine being. God disapprove of sin, but not with passionate excitement. The idea that God imposes penalties goes back to an imperfect knowledge of God. The wrath of God does not refer to Christians as children of faith, but only to the children of unbelief (Eph 5,6), to whom it is also left to fear. It is reprehensible to first portray the wrath of God in order to then proclaim the only possibility of salvation from it even more emphatically. Nor should Christians be tormented by uncertainty as to whether the wrath of God has really been quenched. Paul and Peter also did not speak of anger in their missionary sermons (Acts 2; 17). The fact that the two still speak of the wrath of God to Christians is only because they wanted to remind them of their previous condition.

Nonetheless, talk of God's wrath is true because it expresses divine unwillingness to face sin, which in turn expresses itself in divine mercy. To be under the wrath of God (Jn 3: 33-36) is a description of the state of those who live in enmity against God; but not in the sense that God is angry with them, but that their condition corresponds to what the result would be if God were angry with them (according to the human conception). A premonition of anger could lead to a soul being wrested from this disastrous state; but this should not be exploited by sermons. The preaching should not cause the false fear of the wrath of God, but should open the eyes to the knowledge that God is love.

Paul Tillich

Volume 1: The doctrine of being and God

In the volumes of Tillich's Systematic Theology, the first two occurrences of God's wrath are related to paraphrases of Luther's theology: According to Luther, God's love and God's anger are not opposites in God's heart. Rather, love and anger are God's expressions of opposites in the divine-human relationship. In addition, Tillich casually refers to the fact that Luther sometimes identified God's wrath with Satan. In Volume 1, Tillich discusses the wrath of God in connection with God's love in most detail: A conflict between God's love and his righteousness or between his love and his anger is found. But the conflict cannot lie in God's being himself, whose nature is love. The conflict arises only in relation to the creature that violates justice and thus against love, which is followed by judgment and condemnation, but not as an act of divine anger or retribution, but in the sense of a reaction of God's loving power against what hurts love . So damnation is not the negation of love, but the negation of the negation of love. What opposes love, i.e. the reunification of what is separated with God, is left in separation from God, in which self-destruction is inevitably implied. Tillich counteracts the supposed problem that affects are attributed to God by pointing out that something that makes little sense literally can be meaningful in the metaphorical sense. Anger is neither an affect next to his love nor a motive of his providence, but an emotional symbol for the work of love, which rejects that and leaves to self-destruction what opposes it. The experience of the wrath of God is that one has an awareness of the self-destructive nature of evil, which is based on the separation from the ground of being. This experience is real and therefore speaking of God's wrath is indispensable. But does love have a limit in eschatological judgment? Eternal damnation does not mean everlasting punishment, but the end of existence, because the separation from the ground of being means the fall into non-being. The only limit of love lies in the resistance of finite creatures against it.

Volume 2: Harmatiology and Christology

Despair is a sign of human self-destruction and evil. The experience of despair is reflected in the symbol "Wrath of God". In this respect, this symbol expresses an element in the relationship between God and man. The only way love can work in those who reject love is to leave them to the self-destructive consequences that the rejection of love brings with it. Talking about the wrath of God is provisionally legitimate, but in absolute terms it would be wrong, because not anger but love has the last word.

Tillich also goes into the Christology of Anselm of Canterbury. It is about the fact that on the cross both the wrath and the love of God are satisfied: because love without justice would be weak. In this, Tillich also sees the psychological reason for the great success of this objectively understood doctrine of satisfaction, namely that it does not simply ignore sin and a bad conscience, but instead absorbs both - a bad conscience and a message of freedom from guilt.

Volume 3: The Holy Spirit and Life; the history and kingdom of God

The presence of the divine spirit is shown in detail and a. in the paradox of the new being, which lies in justification through grace through faith. Luther emphasized the experience of the individual, which included both divine anger and divine forgiveness, both of which lead to a direct personal relationship with God. This "psychology" of judgment and individual justification is one of the deepest insights in the history of the Church.

The Last Judgment should not be understood as a point in time in the future, but it takes place constantly in the ever present end of history, in which the negative, which pretends to be good, is revealed as negative and the judgment of God as a burning fire fall victim to. On the other hand, nothing positive is burned, not even by the fire of divine anger. Rather, God is the positive, who cannot destroy himself and thus also not the positive, which is the expression of being-itself.

Wilfried Harle

In his article "Talking about love and the wrath of God", Härle distinguishes five levels:

  1. The level of ethics : In the Bible, human anger is usually portrayed negatively. The anger from bad motives should be distinguished from a holy anger that is kindled over what harms the loved one. The latter is the wrath of God, which can partly also be transferred to people.
  2. The level of the doctrine of God : anger is not a quantity independent of love, but an expression of its truthfulness. It would not be real love if it were not angry about what harms the loved one. God's nature is love, but his nature is not anger, even if it is part of love that he is sometimes angry.
  3. The level of Christology : Anger is forgiven by the fact that those who forgive do not direct the anger against the guilty, but rather bear the anger themselves. So also God in Christ bore wrath.
  4. The level of eschatology : The salvation will of God applies to all people so that they are saved from anger. If forgiveness is not accepted by faith, it will remain ineffective. Whether God cannot enforce his universal will to salvation or whether the criterion of faith becomes obsolete, that must remain open. Or maybe God will find another way, which we do not understand, to combine his universal will to salvation with the criterion of faith.
  5. The stage of the doctrine of predestination : a predestination to calamity (for example to “vessels of anger”, Rom 9,22f) does not come from God in any case. The simple predestination only for salvation applies to all people (it is, however, resistible / losable). If people nevertheless fear that the wrath of God will be upon them, they should be reminded that nothing, including rejecting anger, can separate from God (Rom. 8).

Ralf Miggelbrink

In his hermeneutical considerations , Miggelbrink explains that the biblically attested wrath of God is not mythological speech, but was primarily shaped by the scriptural prophets and Deuteronomic-Deuteronomic theologians who advocated a de-divinization of the world: the worship of mountains, stars, trees, etc. The concrete political idea was opposed that God is angry about the grievances of society.

Nor could the wrath of God be considered a legitimate form of speaking from God alongside others in the sense of postmodern pluralism. From the beginning the theology of God of Wrath claimed universal validity because it is the one, monotheistic God who cares about the salvation of all of his creation.

Instead, Miggelbrink adopts a reading that is based on metaphor theory: Any speech about God has an analogous and metaphorical character. Metaphorical speech should not be misunderstood as improper speech, but rather it provokes the performance of the recipient: Texts are meaningful events that arise when recipients engage with other realities and are thus changed. God is the secret that can only be revealed mystagogically, i.e. through existential concern (instead of through analytical consideration). Knowledge of God is always connected with the subject and his biography. However, this does not lead to the relativization of theological statements, but rather in subjective experiences one is connected to others who have similar experiences. The Bible also contains basic types of experiences of God with which one can identify. This is related to the fact that theology can only function narrative-metaphorically: The diverse, contradicting metaphors and narratives of the Bible cannot simply be translated into abstract language.

The manifold experiences recorded in the Bible also include the experience of God's anger , which people experience as a divine resistance to the injustice structures of this world. The prophetic zeal for justice was inspired by Adonai, who in turn revealed himself as the god of the slave-liberators (Ex 3). Animal sacrifices and the temple cult would have served to maintain the status quo, whereas the prophets are said to have exposed the suppressions that were covered up by them. This is why the angry Jesus criticized the temple. He let himself be guided by the wrath of God, which ultimately led to bowing himself under the injustice that was to be criticized. Trusting in God, whose power actually proved to be superior, Jesus broke the spiral of violence by renouncing violence that triggered divine wrath. Divine anger is motivated by love, which cannot allow certain people to be denied access to a wholesome life. However, those who do not accept the offer of salvation remain in the violent structures that are hit by God's wrath. In any case, the task of the church is to allow itself to be infected by divine anger, which out of love resolutely opposes the corrupt imbalances of this world.

Stefan Volkmann

Metaphor model for the wrath of God according to Stefan Volkmann

Volkmann begins his examination of hermeneutical reflections. In addition to the observation that the wrath of God is a marginal topic of theology, he goes into the fact that speaking of God is a metaphorical language. Metaphors are not simply individual terms that can be translated into non-metaphorical language, but are "a figure of language through which we talk about a thing in terms that are viewed as pointing to something else" (260). So the referent God is spoken of in terms that indicate human anger. Human anger unlocks the wrath of God and vice versa. Basic metaphors can be worked out into models if they are not reduced to their creative function, but if they are checked with regard to their coherence and sustainability: A model could contain further metaphors from a similar image-donating area, which together form a system. Volkmann wants to show that the model that is developed from the basic metaphor of anger is a partial model of the larger model of the basic metaphor “God is love”. Within the larger model, the partial model must prove to be coherent. Whether a metaphor model is successful depends on the type of analogies that predominate: Positive analogies are given for properties that belong to both the explicand and the explicant. Negative analogies are properties that either only belong to the explicand or the explicant. Neutral analogies are properties for which it is not yet certain whether they are negative or positive analogies, whereby this type particularly stimulates further research efforts or shows the limits of human reason and knowledge.

A positive analogy is affectivity, since anger can be traced back to a violation of norms or descriptions of identity. The idea of ​​divine anger serves as a corrective to the idea of ​​the neutral judge, who is interchangeable and only has a secondary relationship to the accused and the accused. The talk of God as an angry judge makes it clear that he has a primary relationship with his creatures, which he loves. He reacts to their aversion with hurt.

Divine immutability (immutabilitas), incapacity to suffer (impassibilitas) and incorporalitas were repeatedly formulated as objections to the wrath of God. However, God-Father gets a share in the anger of other people through idiom communication, i.e. a share in the wrath of Christ, who became angry and also suffered from anger on the cross, and also a share in the anger of the Holy Spirit, which repeatedly expresses itself in prophets and saints . A positive analogy can therefore also be established here.

A negative analogy consists in the (un) limited possibilities of angry acts and the certainty of their success, which are different between the almighty creator and the dependent creature.

A neutral analogy consists in the assignment of God's love and God's anger, which has its correspondence in the human bipolar affect constitution, but especially in the question of predestination in connection with Luther to the problem of God's actual work (opus proprium) and others Work (opus alienum) lead. This analogy is neutral insofar as it is currently only possible to speak of the unity of love and anger in the mode of hope, but this hope only has to be demonstrated in the eschaton.

Ingolf U. Dalferth

Anger at Dalferth

Dalferth starts with the human emotion of anger, which on the one hand is a biological human ability and can be explained neurobiologically, but on the other hand its expression can also vary from person to person and depending on the culture. Therefore, cultural semantics and neurobiology must complement each other in anger research. Tension can be identified in the European anger culture: Anger is experienced both as something that is beyond one's own control and overcomes one like a foreign power, and as something for which one is responsible. You cannot defend yourself against anger, but you can either deal with it responsibly or inappropriately. The following points could already be picked out from Aristotle:

  • a) Anger is a negative emotion with a negative intention to act.
  • b) Anger is directed against a person.
  • c) Anger is based on the violation of a norm.
  • d) The motive of anger is that the addressee has caused actual or intended damage.
  • e) Anger can hardly be suppressed.

In ancient Greek polytheisms, people were presented as the gods' fields of activity: various human emotions can be traced back to the fact that deities work in these people (e.g. the deity Eris in the case of controversy). The philosophers rejected polytheism because they criticized representation (anthropomorphism), imagination and relevance of the gods. They developed what Dalferth calls apathetic or cosmotheological monotheism, which he contrasts with biblical monotheism:

Cosmotheological monotheism Biblical monotheism
There is only one God. There is only one God.
God's relationship with the world is correlation. God's relationship with the world is creation.
Evil is a necessary fact. Evil is a contingent fact.
God is apathetic. God is pathetic.

God's love promotes that which makes the world his creation, his anger ends that which perverts the creation. Anger does not stand in opposition to God's love, but is an expression of his righteousness. Anger is also not secondary to love, but subordinate to it. God's love becomes anger when something threatens his loving order. As Paul suggests in Rom. 1:18, anger is directed against ungodliness, but not against the person himself, but only against that which causes the self-damaging disregard for God's love. On the other hand, those who repent and believe will be saved from judgment of wrath. God's concern for people is therefore pathos and passion: It is not a question of love without affect, but love that manifests itself in both anger and mercy.

Islam

In the Koran that speaks first sura from the wrath of God as a distinguishing feature for the straight path of those on whom God has bestowed favors, from the path of those who have fallen for the wrath of God and go astray. In particular, those who fall away from the faith after believing, incur God's wrath and, according to sura 17, verse 106, "await a tremendous punishment."

Among other things, the Hamas Charter (Art. 32), with reference to the anti-Semitic protocols of the Elders of Zion , quoting Sura 8 , verse 16, refers to the wrath of Allah incurred by all those who turn their backs on the struggle with the unbelievers turn to.

See also

literature

philosophy

  • Max Pohlenz : On God's Wrath. A Study of the Influence of Greek Philosophy on Ancient Christianity. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1909. Online

Old testament

  • Jörg Jeremias : The wrath of God in the Old Testament. Biblical Israel between rejection and election. (Biblical-theological studies 104) Neukirchener, Neukirchen-Vluyn 2009. ISBN 978-3-7887-2382-8
  • Samantha Joo: Provocation and punishment. The anger of God in the book of Jeremiah and deuteronomistic theology. de Gruyter, Berlin 2006. ISBN 978-3-11-018994-0
  • Andreas Wagner: Emotions, feelings and language in the Old Testament. (Small studies on the language of the Old Testament and its environment 7) Spenner, Waltrop 2006, ISBN 3-89991-674-3 .
  • Franz, Matthias: The merciful and gracious God. The speech of grace from Sinai and its parallels in the Old Testament and its environment. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2003. ISBN 3-17-017896-2
  • Ralf Miggelbrink : The angry God. The importance of an offensive biblical tradition. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2002. ISBN 3-534-15582-3
  • Ruth Scoralick: God's goodness and God's wrath. The predications of God in Exodus 34, 6f and their intertextual relationships with the Book of the Twelve Prophets. Herder, Freiburg 2002. ISBN 3-451-27849-9
  • Kari Latvus: God, anger and ideology. The anger of God in Joshua and Judges in relation to Deuteronomy and the Priestly writings. Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield 1998.

Christianity

  • Pierre Damien Ndombe Makanga: La notion de la colère de Dieu dans la sotériologie dramatique chez Hans Urs von Balthasar. Une lecture méta-anthropologique à partir de la notion de l'admirabile commercium. Lang, Frankfurt 2009. ISBN 978-3-631-57192-7
  • Stefan Volkmann: The Wrath of God: Studies on the Speech of the Wrath of God in Protestant Theology , Leipzig 2004, ISBN 978-3-374-02549-7
  • Ralf Miggelbrink: The angry God. The Importance of an Objectionable Biblical Tradition , 2002. ISBN 978-3-534-15582-8
  • Meinrad Limbeck: Is God Really Angry? Questions to Paul. Catholic Biblical Work, Stuttgart 2001. ISBN 978-3-460-33164-8
  • Hans Walter Schütte: The elimination of the doctrine of the wrath of God in the theology of Schleiermacher and Ritschl. In: New journal for systematic theology and philosophy of religion. Volume 10, pp. 387-397.

Islam

Cross-religious

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johannes Irmscher, Götterzorn bei Homer , Berlin Dissertation 1947; Gerhard Nebel, fear of the world and anger of the gods. An interpretation of the Greek tragedy , Stuttgart 1951
  2. ↑ Vatnsdœla saga, chap. 17. Translation by WH Vogt and Frank Fischer.
  3. ^ Stefan Wälchli: Zorn (AT). In: Wibilex. 2014, accessed February 21, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Jens Herzer: Wrath of God . In: Religion Past and Present (RGG) . 4th edition.
  5. ↑ Bibleworks 10 .
  6. ^ Peter Dinzelbacher : Pestbild. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 1128.
  7. ↑ Last Judgment: "God pours his wrath on America". Spiegel Online from September 7, 2005.
  8. ↑ Address at the opening of the “Apocalypse” exhibition on October 18, 2007.
  9. ^ A b c d Friedrich DE Schleiermacher: Dogmatic sermons of the maturity period . Ed .: Emanuel Hirsch. Berlin 1969.
  10. ^ Volume 1, Intro, D 12
  11. ^ Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, Part Two, II. A., 1b
  12. ^ Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, Part Two, II. B, 6c
  13. ^ Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 2, Part Three, I. D, 4b.
  14. ^ Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 2, Third Part, II. E, 5
  15. ^ Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology Volume 3, Fourth Part, III. A, 3b.
  16. ↑ Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 2, Part Five, III. A 5
  17. ↑ Wilfried Härle: The speech of the love and wrath of God . In: Journal for Theology and Church . Supplement 8, 1990.
  18. ↑ a b c d Ralf Miggelbrink : The angry god. The importance of an offensive biblical tradition. Wissenschaftl Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2002. ISBN 3-534-15582-3
  19. ↑ Volkmann, Stefan: Der Zorn Gottes: Studies on the speech of God's wrath in evangelical theology . Marburg 2004.
  20. ^ Ingolf U. Dalferth: Selfless Passions . 2013, p. 99-136 .

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