I think movements away from the doctrine of hell are also often connected to discomfort with divine wrath. For example, I remember Rob Bell’s question in the promotional video for Love Wins: “What kind of God would need to save us from himself? And how could that possibly be good news?” The root issue for Bell was not just hell per se, but the more general notion of divine wrath and judgment.

Many people in our culture, both within and without the church, have trouble with the idea of an angry God. Many secular people look at Bible passages where God gets angry and judges people and think, That’s precisely why religion is so primitive and dangerous. And many Christians seem to want to tone down, or even excise completely from our creed, the doctrine of divine wrath. It is seen as an embarrassment—something to be ameliorated, qualified, explained, reconfigured.

Many, for example, feel more comfortable with the view C. H. Dodd popularized in the early 20th century, that God’s wrath refers not to God’s attitude toward persons, but to the inevitable cause-and-effect process of a moral universe. Similarly, others point to passages like Romans 1:18–32 to argue that God’s wrath is simply a passive response of letting sin reap its consequences.

This whole development is not a theological sidebar, irrelevant to church life and worship. The doctrine of divine wrath is an integral piece of the gospel message, and therefore, moving away from it will inevitably have far-reaching consequences for the church’s faith and life.

Vital to the Gospel

For example, I believe the driving impetus behind most revisionist atonement theologies is discomfort with the traditional doctrine of divine wrath. George Smeaton claimed all the way back in 1870, “The question of divine wrath is at present the great point in debate on the subject of the atonement.” I think his comment remains apt in today’s atonement discussions. As goes our view of divine wrath, so generally goes our view of the atonement.

I think movements away from the doctrine of hell are also often connected to discomfort with divine wrath. For example, I remember Rob Bell’s question in the promotional video for Love Wins: “What kind of God would need to save us from himself? And how could that possibly be good news?” The root issue for Bell was not just hell per se, but the more general notion of divine wrath and judgment.

My heart goes out to those who might struggle with this doctrine, especially those who struggle because they’ve seen it caricatured or associate it with their experience of sinful human anger. As an effort to help, here are four problems with downplaying divine wrath (or denying its active, personal dimensions).

1. The Bible

If we want to move away from the notion of an angry God while retaining an authoritative Bible, we have some pretty heavy revisionist lifting to do. I would say the effort is roughly comparable to Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to scissor-cut the supernatural out of the Bible. Just type in “Lord wrath” or “God angry” to a Bible Gateway search. There are more than 600 references to divine wrath in Scripture.

What strikes me most, however, is not how frequently God’s Word speaks of God’s wrath, but the absence of the embarrassment or hesitation or shuffling of the feet so often present in contemporary attitudes toward this doctrine. In the Bible, God’s wrath is not the problem but the solution, not the offensive doctrine needing defense but the long-awaited vindication of justice after the tension of the prophets’ “How long, O Lord?” Hence God’s wrath is expressed in the strongest metaphors, and with the firmest language. Note, for example, the metaphor of fire (implicit in the words “burning” and “kindled”) employed by the narrator of 2 Kings 23:26 after recording Manasseh’s sin:

Still the LORD did not turn from the burning of his great wrath, by which his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations with which Manasseh had provoked him.

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