People ask, "What kind of loving God is filled with wrath?" But any loving person is often filled with wrath. In Hope Has Its Reasons, Becky Pippert writes, "Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it… . Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference." Pippert then quotes E. H. Gifford, "Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor." She concludes: "If I, a flawed, narcissistic, sinful woman, can feel this much pain and anger over someone's condition, how much more a morally perfect God who made them? God's wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer of sin which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being."
In Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon, 1996), pp. 303-04, Miroslav Volf writes:
If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make a final end to violence—that God would not be worthy of worship…. The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is legitimate only it comes from God… My thesis that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many… in the West…. [But] it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human non-violence [results from the belief in] God’s refusal to judge. In a sun-scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die… [with] other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind.
That is, it is the lack of belief in a God of vengeance that secretly nourishes violence.
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