Check out this post from the Out of Ur blog (Christianity Today, Leadership journal, etc.). It’s from last November when Rob Bell was on The Gods Aren’t Angry Tour. I appreciate the temperament of the author towards the Bell/Driscoll controversy, as it somewhat resembles my own. I don’t want to be too quick to condemn someone as preaching another gospel, and I believe that this is a good impulse as John Piper demonstrated well at Driscoll’s recent Text and Context conference. The only false gospel that Dr. Piper would identify is the Word of Faith/Prosperity Gospel, which I will blog about shortly.
However, the author of the Ur post betrays some evangelical dishonesty or theological ignorance if he did not balk at ideas like this: “The problem, according to Bell, is not that God is angry with us, but that we think God is angry with us. Thus, Jesus’ purpose wasn’t to change God’s mind about us, but to change our mind about God: to notify us of God’s lack of anger and to free us from the prison of our misconceptions so that we can truly live well.”
Really?
Can you really sum up the OT as a grand exercise in people being too convinced that God was angry with them and not convinced enough that, really, deep down, God wasn’t angry at all?
Seems to me that an elementary reading of the biblical text leads us to the conclusion that God was indeed a bit TO’d at times, angry enough to send a tsunami powerful enough to wipe out the entire human race. Even if you think the flood is a metaphor or parable (as Rob or his followers might) the message is still pretty clear: God was ticked. And the problem with the aforementioned human race wasn’t so much self-doubt (gee-whiz, am I good enough and smart enough for God to like me?) as God-doubt and self-absorption, both of which made God kinda mad.
But that is a tangent. The real point is this: if Bell totally removes a place for God’s anger, then what happens to sin, what happens to judgment, what happens to atonement, and what happens to the Savior and his cross? What happens to the epistles to the Romans and the Hebrews? What happens to the holiness, righteousness, and justice of God if God can’t be angry with those who do bad stuff?
I just found this blog post, and it makes me feel a little better. It does not, as the previous author did, make it seem like Rob discounts God’s anger towards sin and sinners - and the resultant concept of atonement - entirely. It focuses more on the reality that in Christ, because of his sacrifice, God is no longer angry with us. We have been reconciled, and no more work is required. THIS is the gospel.
So, I hope the latter author’s take is the more correct one. Surely, God is and has every right to be angry with those who do not respond to his gracious call, with those who worship only self and self-made gods, with those who persist in the rebellion of their ancestor Adam; he has every right, and will execute his right, to judge them. But the grand thing is that as holy as God is, he is also loving and merciful and longsuffering and gracious and kind - kind enough to send his son to pay the price on our behalf, kind enough to softly and tenderly call on our stubborn and rebellious hearts to come to him and find rest as long as we have breath.
Toward us who respond to the call, who are in Christ, surely, God is most definitely not angry.
