Christianity and Anger

Earlier in this series, I went on a bit of a tirade about Christianity and depression. Christianity’s complicated history with anger, on the other hand, merits an entire lengthy post of its own, and even here, I’m going to oversimplify a lot. Much popular modern Christian thought regards anger itself as sinful, yet the Bible offers a far more graceful take, so how’d we get from there to here?

Anger in the Bible
The bible features numerous examples of anger— some negative, some positive, and most of them God:

Cain gets mad at Abel.
God gets mad at all of humanity a couple of times.
Everybody gets mad at Joseph.
Pharaoh gets mad at Israel.
God gets mad at Moses.
Moses gets mad at Pharaoh.
God gets mad at Pharaoh.
Israel gets mad at Moses.
God gets mad at Israel.
God gets mad at Israel again.
(This one happens a lot. Get used to hearing it.)
Saul gets mad at the Ammonites.
David’s brother gets mad at him for showing up on the battlefield.
Saul gets mad at Jonathan.
Jonathan gets mad at Saul.
God gets mad at Uzzah.
David gets mad at himself.
God gets mad at Israel.
God gets mad at Jeroboam.
God gets mad at Israel again.
God switches it up and gets mad at Judah.
God gets mad at Jeroboam several more times.
God gets mad at Baasha
God gets mad at Elah.
God gets mad at Ahab.
You know what? Let’s CliffsNotes this: God gets mad at all but like two of Israel’s kings.
God gets mad at Israel again.
Job thinks God is mad at him.
Job’s friends think Job is mad at God.
Whether Job and God are actually mad is complicated.
Proverbs is kind of anti-anger.
Ecclesiastes is kind of pro-anger but in a detached kind of way.
God gets mad at Israel some more.
God gets mad at Babylon, Assyria, Edom, and pretty much everybody.
The author of Lamentations feels God’s anger.
God and Jonah get mad at Nineveh and then at each other.
And God gets mad at Israel a bunch more times.

And all that’s just the Hebrew Bible. Do I need to do New Testament too? That could take a while. I mean, hell, Revelation has actual “bowls of God’s wrath,” and don’t even get me started on all the disciples’ outbursts! Seriously though…

The Hebrew Bible’s message on anger seems to be that we should imitate God in being “slow to anger” (a trait repeatedly ascribed to God in the Psalms and Prophets), but that God’s anger always has its place. Anger itself is not bad, only uncontrolled or unjust anger. Anger at injustice, anger at selfishness, anger at societal sin— all that is okay. In fact, it’s good since this sort of anger leads to positive change. It’s only the personal, vengeful, aggressive anger that the Hebrew Bible discourages.

Similarly, in the Christian New Testament, there are commands “not to let the sun go down on your anger” and “in your anger do not sin.” (Ephesians 4) Jesus even cautions in the Sermon on the Mount that to hold anger toward another is as bad as committing murder, and both actions invite judgment. Please note, none of these verses say not to get angry at all; they’re about holding your anger within safe limits. Jesus himself even displays anger, most famously in the cleansing of the temple (Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19, and John 2), but my favorite example comes from the death and resurrection of Lazarus in John 11. Jesus and the disciples go to mourn Lazarus after his death, and Jesus weeps, consoles, hopes, and feels an emotion in verses 33 and 38 called ἐμβριμάομαι (which many bibles translate “he was deeply moved”). A more accurate translation of ἐμβριμάομαι would be something like, “anger like a warhorse snorted within him,” but I guess that wouldn’t sell as well in the Christian bookstores. In these verses, Jesus feels a total outrage in the face of death, and as a sign of his triumph over death, he raises Lazarus. Not only does anger play a big part in Jesus’s life; it features into one of his most famous miracles!

So yeah, on the whole, the Bible’s take on anger is pretty nuanced. Anger is okay. It’s a natural part of the human condition. Just pay attention to what makes you angry, and be careful how you express that anger. If possible, reserve your anger for injustices rather than individuals, and do your best not to stoke your anger into something you can’t rein in. Anger can be holy, and anger can be useful, but it can also set us on a destructive path when it gets out of control, so stay mindful when those feelings bubble up.

Seems simple enough, right? Well, from here, things get a lot messier.

Foolin’ Around with Greek Philosophy
It’s impossible to overstate the impact of Greek and Roman philosophy (especially Plato and the Stoics) on early Christianity. As Christianity morphed into a major world religion, the teachings of an itinerant Jewish rabbi/messiah collided with classical schools of Greek education in a big way, and seminal Christian writers like Augustine and Aquinas are informed almost as much by the latter as by the former. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s something beautiful about reading the gospel of John through a Platonic lens, and I spout plenty of this stuff myself (especially my beloved Plato’s Symposium). When it comes to emotion though, Greek/Roman philosophy and ancient Jewish and Christian thought stand at pretty extreme odds. While Paul advocated restraint and fleeing from temptation, thinkers like Marcus Aurelius pushed for a full-blown shutdown of emotion in favor of reason, and early Christian monasticism definitely flirts with this idea. While I guess there’s some possible groundwork for it in Ecclesiastes and some of Paul’s writing, I don’t see absence of emotion and total detachment from the world as Christian virtues. We may be “citizens of another Kingdom,” but as Christ became incarnate here with all human emotions intact, so too do we! So how did anger (an emotion which Jesus himself felt and displayed in the Bible) become so off limits? If Greek philosophy planted the idea of moderation and impassivity as virtues, Christian monastics watered it, and the idea evolved.

Anger Turns “Deadly”
Apologies in advance, but we’re about to enter into the realm of guesswork. I hate guesswork, but there’s just not much recorded about this transition. Here goes.

As Christian monasticism entered the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers developed a system of classifying sins. We’ve covered the Seven Deadly Sins before on this blog, but the short version is that confessions in monastic communities tended to fall into seven broad categories to watch out for: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. The Seven Deadly Sins aren’t specific actions; rather, they’re attitudes which can lead us into sinful action. I guess “Seven Deadly Attitudes” just didn’t have a catchy enough ring to it though, so we got deadly sins instead. History from this era is pretty vague, so it’s hard to pinpoint when the Seven Deadly Sins really entered accepted Christian theology, and it’s harder still to pinpoint how “wrath is a path to sin” evolved into “anger itself is a sin.” Imagine a theological game of telephone across multiple centuries, multiple transcribers, and multiple languages. Combine this with increasingly popular portrayals of Jesus as an emotionally passive character and the saints as stoically facing their martyrdoms, and we arrive at a fairly widely accepted view that anger is a sin rather than an emotion with capacity for health and hope and holiness.

Sidebar: The “gentle Jesus meek and mild” thing still baffles me. The dude flipped over tables and called people Satan. He had internal-snorting-warhorse anger. He told stories that challenged authority and confused the hell out of people, and he preached change constantly. The persistence of a bland passive portrayal of Jesus really speaks to the ability of artists and poets and songwriters to shape our collective imaginations. It’s kind of like how Vikings never wore horned helmets, but we all imagine them that way because of freaking Wagner. “Gentle Jesus meek and mild”? Pfft. More like “radical Jesus kind but wild!”

Modern Pastoral Malpractice
Sure, wider availability of the Bible and early Christian texts seems like it should have done a lot to debunk the idea that anger itself is a sin, but it’s really hard to overcome almost two millennia of conditioning! Whether it’s pastors preaching anger as sin, Christian counselors unconsciously condemning anger, or a concerned parent seeking guidance from an underprepared youth pastor about their child’s anger, anger gets a bad rap in modern churches. The anger-as-sin tradition lives on because it’s hardwired into so many of us!

Let’s get specific to America for a minute too. Maybe this will seem obvious, but American Protestant and Evangelical churches have been heavily shaped by American culture, and as we discussed last week, America has a big anger problem. Enlightenment philosophy (with its Greek philosophical heritage) was formational to the founding of this country, and American Christian churches also carry this influence perhaps more prominently than churches in other nations. Swirl in a little of the Puritan emphasis on work ethic and detachment, and yeah, American churches seem set up to deny or condemn anger. Additionally, American Evangelicalism has a very combative relationship with science, and that includes psychology. Modern psychology has made tremendous strides in helping us think of anger as a natural human emotion with good and bad repercussions rather than a dangerous sinful force, but this doesn’t really matter to Christian subcultures suspicious of science.

Sidebar: In my experience, the criticism of anger definitely gets leveled at women more than at men— especially toward female pastors. A touch of anger in a male pastor’s sermon is far more likely to get praise than it would in a female pastor’s sermon. Drawing on our previous analysis of anger and power as equal/opposites, I think this trend says a lot about the fragility of male leadership. In my time in church-based ministry, I constantly encountered aggressive male pastors complaining about the “feminization” of the church, and no matter their motivation, I always interpreted it as a bid for power. The “anger as sin” narrative has been way harder on women than on men. All the more reason for us to work on dispelling it.

So, big picture: is there hope for modern churches to adopt healthier approaches to anger? Probably, but it’s going to take time. Institutions tend to move at pretty slow paces. Funnily enough, perhaps one of the best tools to help all this may be anger itself— the sort of anger described in the Bible, an anger at injustice and abuse, an anger which can spur hope and change. I believe the more we model healthy anger to these sorts of systems and the people who inhabit them, the more we can chip away at the idea that anger is sin.

Anger is not sin. You are not sinful just because you’re angry. Anger may cause problems when it gets out of control, but in its proper place, it’s every bit as healthy and holy as the other feelings we’ve covered so far.


For more on Christianity’s complicated history with anger and the ways we might navigate it in our modern therapeutic context, I highly recommend Andrew Lester’s The Angry Christian (Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).