There’s a rather vigorous conversation going on right now in the Anglican blogosphere about wrath – God’s wrath, to be precise. You can read about it here, here, here, here, here, and in a number of posts here.
I’m not going to jump into it, because I think that, like most Internet theological arguments, it will go on and on interminably and no one’s mind will be changed. It will involve ad hominem attacks, caricatures (i.e. the idea that the wrathful God is an Old Testament bogeyman banished by Jesus, when in fact, as C.S. Lewis pointed out somewhere, all the most terrifying texts about punishment in the New Testament are on the lips of Jesus himself!), people flinging favourite texts and favourite theological ideas at each other, and so on.
I do, however, have two comments to make that are vaguely connected.
The first is that I was strongly reminded of a quote I heard again this week from Richard Niebuhr’s 1938 book ‘The Kingdom of God in America’, in which he describes the message he heard in American Protestant pulpits as follows:
“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross”.
Niebuhr was certainly no Conservative Evangelical, but he recognized the religion he heard preached in American Protestantism as a weak, anaemic shadow of true biblical Christianity. I would suggest that Niebuhr’s observation is even more relevant in our day, when a vague, therapeutic deism has largely replaced the full-blooded Theism of historic Christianity, bringing with it a God (or ‘god’) who above all else would never dream of making us feel bad.
I would also suggest that if God is not angry at the monsters who abduct children and turn them into child soldiers, or the rapists who destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of women, or the military dictators who kill thousands without conscience, or the complacent rich who live in comfort while the majority of the world lives in poverty (I am of course a member of that statistic), then God is not worth bothering about. The God who could not be angry at these monstrosities is a God who loves us too little, not a God who loves us too much.
My second comment concerns the utter disregard of copyright and/or authorial intent that some Christians appear to be exercising here. I’m a songwriter myself, so this cause is dear to my heart. Some of my songs have theological themes, and I would be quite disturbed (in the unlikely event that some of my songs ever became worship classics) if people I had never met took it into their heads to amend my lyrics because they didn’t agree with my theology. If you don’t agree with my theology, don’t sing the song!
However, this is apparently happening with regard to ‘In Christ Alone’. Bosco Peters (the Kiwi Anglican blogger who got this whole thing going) talks on his site about one way the song has been amended:
Till on that cross where Jesus died
the love of God was magnified.
Other commenters on his site suggest:
Till on that cross where Jesus died
the arms of love were opened wide.
or,
Till on the cross where Jesus died
the love of God was glorified.
…and so on. To which I reply, in the strongest possible terms, it is illegal to amend the words of a copyrighted song without the permission of the copyright owner. My understanding is that the authors of this song have not given permission for their words to be amended. Therefore, you have two simple choices: sing it as they wrote it, or don’t sing it at all.
