Episode Summary
The medieval English theologian Julian of Norwich understands God's anger as impossible: God can rejoice over us and pity us. God can even thank us. But God cannot be angry with us. Willie James Jennings, on the other hand, suggests that God experiences anger connected to God's righteous indignation; an anger born out of desire to re-order a broken world. What might you make of the stakes of what we believe about God and anger?
“Our Lord was never angry and never will be angry.”1
These are among the most surprising words written by the wonderful, and often surprising, medieval English theologian Julian of Norwich.
As Julian sees it, God can rejoice over us and pity us. God can even thank us. But God cannot be angry with us. Why not? The idea is not that God is just too sweet and kind to get angry. Rather, she says, God is too strong, too wise, and too good to be angry.
Anger flows either from someone injuring us (or someone we care about), or from our not knowing how to achieve our aims, or from ill-will we bear towards someone. Nothing, however, can injure God. Indeed, for Julian, nothing at all can happen that God didn’t either actively will or intentionally permit. For God to get angry at something that flowed from God’s own creative will would be for God to contradict Godself.
The idea is not that God is just too sweet and kind to get angry. Rather, she says, God is too strong, too wise, and too good to be angry.
Similarly, nothing can frustrate God’s plans because God knows and foresees everything and arranges it all with perfect wisdom. And finally, God is love in Godself, so God can’t bear anyone ill will. Put it all together, and every path to divine anger is, Julian thinks, ruled out.
[Listen to Ryan McAnnally-Linz's reflections on "How to Read Julian of Norwich: Understanding the Revelations of Divine Love"]
Elsewhere, Julian says that “if God could be even slightly angry we could never have any life or place or being.” Our existence depends utterly on God’s loving friendship. But “anger and friendship are two contraries.” God’s anger would, therefore, wipe out the one thing that holds us in existence.
I find Julian’s reflections on anger attractive—even, from a certain vantage point, quite compelling.
"For the Christian, Jesus stands between anger and hatred, prohibiting the reach, blocking the touch and saying to us, ‘Don't go there. There is nothing there but death.’ "
One thing gives me pause: So much in the world cries out for the anger of a creator who is love itself. Consider this passage from Willie Jennings’s meditation of anger at injustice and God’s righteousness indignation:
"For the Christian, Jesus stands between anger and hatred, prohibiting the reach, blocking the touch and saying to us, ‘Don't go there. There is nothing there but death.’ Anger, bound to God's righteous indignation has a different purpose for us. It points us to the change that must happen, that is the overturning of an unjust world order, this racial order."
What are we to make of the disjuncture between Julian’s imperturbable God and Jennings’s testimony to God’s righteous indignation?
I suspect there are ways out of the apparent impasse, but I’m afraid my goal here isn’t to find them and lay them out. Instead, I pass the puzzle2 over to you: What do you make of the stakes of what we believe about God and anger?
References:
1. Quotes are from Elizabeth Spearing’s translation of Julian of Norwich’s works (Penguin, 1998), chapter 46 and 49 of the “Long Text.”
2. Fun fact: the word puzzle comes from taking the verb pose (as in, “pose a question”) and adding a “frequentative” suffix, i.e., one that indicates repeated action. So to “puzzle” someone is to repeatedly perplex them with questions, and a “puzzle” is something meant to be repeatedly posed.
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