Of all people, it may be of some interest to see how John Calvin (1509–1564) answered this question because he, in the minds of many, was a theologian of God’s wrath. While he certainly emphasized divine wrath, he (against some modern expectations) prioritized God’s love for humanity before wrath—indeed, for Calvin, passages about God’s wrath aim to underscore divine love and mercy.
Jesus bore divine wrath at the cross for our sake (Isa 53:5), and so protected us from it. This act implies that God hates humans since he would have poured wrath upon humans if not for the work of Christ’s cross. Yet John says that God loved the world (John 3:16). So how can Scripture speak both of God’s wrath and his love for us? Does God hate us or love us?
Of all people, it may be of some interest to see how John Calvin (1509–1564) answered this question because he, in the minds of many, was a theologian of God’s wrath. While he certainly emphasized divine wrath, he (against some modern expectations) prioritized God’s love for humanity before wrath—indeed, for Calvin, passages about God’s wrath aim to underscore divine love and mercy.
Accommodation
Calvin knows that Scripture speaks of humanity as enemies, as being under a curse, and as estranged. In this regard, he cites Romans 5:10, Galatians 3:10, 13, and Colossians 1:21-22. Yet he explains such strong language under the category of accommodation.
He explains, “Expressions of this sort have been accommodated to our capacity that we may better understand how miserable and ruinous our condition is apart from Christ” (Inst. 2.16.2). He continues, “For if it had not been clearly stated that the wrath and vengeance of God and eternal death rested upon us, we would scarcely have recognized how miserable we would have been without God’s mercy, and we would have underestimated the benefit of liberation.”
In other words, God uses language of wrath and vengeance to help us understand the greatness of our salvation. These words accommodate divine speech to our lived reality. Thus, for Calvin, our hearts cannot fully appreciate God’s mercy “unless our minds are first struck and overwhelmed by fear of God’s wrath and by dread of eternal death.”
While he does not specify then what this accommodation conveys, he will shortly argue that God loves us and that (as he notes earlier) he freely favours us (Inst. 2.16.3, 2). On this basis, he sees language of God’s hatred for humanity as divine accommodation since it is clear elsewhere that God loves us. For example, John tells us that God first loved us before we loved him (1 John 4:19).
Before continuing on this topic, we need to turn to the cross because it stands at the centre of Calvin’s understanding of God’s love for us and divine wrath.
Cross
While commenting on Jesus’s cry of dereliction, Calvin comments, “Yet we do not suggest that God was ever inimical or angry toward him” (Inst. 2.16.11). Calvin finds such a view impossible since Christ rests in God and God’s love for Christ is why he can make satisfaction on behalf of others.
In light of this, he explains that Christ “experienced all the signs of a wrathful and avenging God.” And for Calvin, these signs are the sources of Christ’s death (Inst. 2.16.11; cf. Matt 3:17). And so Calvin can cite Hebrews 2:15 in the same context to speak of what Christ frees us from, namely, the fear of death—wrath and vengeance.
