Linked to the recent conversation about God, emotions, passions and affections, someone asked about whether or not God is eternally wrathful. Will he continue to have wrath/righteous anger after Satan has been thrown into the lake of fire. Interestingly, those who identify with classical theism have been the strongest in insisting that God is not eternally wrathful.
The explanations I’ve seen seem to run along the lines that “wrath” isn’t a proper attribute of God. Rather, it is an aspect or property of his attributes. It’s how God’s justice is expressed in response to sin. I think this is partially helpful. Certainly we do want to distinguish the attributes themselves from those aspects of them. Note, that this would equally be true when we talk about compassion and mercy. So, it’s not about feeling that wrath unlike love sounds negative.
However, I think there are risks with talking this way and I’m not convinced it is the best and complete answer. That’s first because, it sounds a bit like we are saying that God’s attributes don’t change but that something within them changes, that God’s love can change from wrath to compassion to reconciled welcome. That sounds inadequate to me and also leaves the question as to why we cannot then talk about God having emotions that change. Isn’t it just as possible to describe God’s grief as his love being shaped when sin provokes it or his “repenting/relenting” as his righteousness being affected by unrighteousness.
Nor though do I think we need to devise what feels rather like a pre-Copernican level of complexity to explain away wrath. There are two reasons for this. First, we have Hell. What else is Hell but an external revelation of God’s wrath against wickedness.
Secondly, we tend to say that wrath is not about God losing his temper (and rightly so), rather it is about God’s settled verdict on sin. This is no mere intellectual verdict, hence we can describe it as an affection. So, if this is God’s settled will towards evil and if we say that God is eternal so that he has all of his life at once and is perfectly and maximally alive then that should give us a clue about wrath. Further, if we insist that God is perfect and unchanging then we won’t want to suggest that God needs to either acquire wrath or lose it to be perfect.
So, instead, would we not do better to recognise that wrath is about God’s settled and eternal verdict on evil. This will be true for ever because God will always hate evil. God’s wrath towards my old self is an eternal verdict. God’s wrath is met either at a specific point in history in Christ Jesus or in eternal punishment.
Faithroots 