The Wrath of God

“When I consider the violence my own country, my elected officials, and my tax dollars now inflict on the world, I think of divine wrath. 

Divine wrath is the cry of the mother whose child has gone to war, to prison, to poverty, to hatred. It is the ache in the heart of the universe—when love is mocked, when power crushes the weak, when truth is twisted into a weapon, when life is thrown away like trash.

I am told that wrath is not the final story, that God does not give up on us. That beneath the fury, there remains love—fierce and aching. A love that grieves what could have been and should have been, and works toward what still can be, even amid the tragedy.

But we must taste the wrath in order to know the hope. We must feel the burn of divine pain before we can feel the balm of promise. Some truths are only born in fire.”

It is characteristic of many liberally minded Christians to dismiss images of divine wrath as primitive or psychologically projected—leftovers from a fear-based era of religion. “God is love,” they rightly say, and conclude that love excludes wrath. But process theology, especially when read alongside the prophetic wisdom of Abraham Joshua Heschel, offers a deeper and more compassionate vision. Wrath, in this view, is not the opposite of love—it is a saddened face, the fierce edge of divine grief.

Heschel insists that the God of the prophets is not indifferent or distant but deeply moved--a God of pathos. God feels the weight of injustice and the cries of the oppressed. In this light, divine wrath is not a divine tantrum or a demand for vengeance. It is love wounded by betrayal, grief sharpened by moral urgency. It is how God responds when justice is trampled, the vulnerable are ignored, and the world turns its back on what it could have been and should have been.

From an open and relational (process) perspective, divine wrath is not about God’s need to punish—it is about God’s refusal to be indifferent.  And this is where the concept of amipotence—God’s uncontrolling, all-faithful love—enters. Coined by theologian Thomas Jay Oord, amipotence invites us to see divine power not as domination, but as unceasing, persuasive love.  Amipotent wrath is not violent. It does not seek to crush. It seeks to awaken. It is not the fire of judgment but the fire of yearning—a fire that says, “You were made for more than this.” It is divine heartbreak.

Wrath has a forward looking side. It is not damnation, but the persistent hope of rehabilitation and redemption. For process theology, which sees all of reality as an unfolding journey, this hope does not end with death. Wrath is not final judgment—it is the beginning of moral awakening. And so we must imagine, or at least hope for, a continuing journey after death—for the victims, whose pain cries out for healing, and for the victimizers, whose distortion of love demands transformation. Both require more than closure; they require a future. A future in which divine love continues to work, patiently, tirelessly, through the slow alchemy of grace.

Wrath, then, is not God’s refusal to forgive. It is God’s refusal to give up. Even on us. Even on the world. Even after death.

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Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart,
​three-person'd God

By John Donne
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Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.