Retelling atonement forgiveness centred (10)

After quite a while, I return to this consideration because Richard Beck wrote a very interesting blog post about forgiveness. It's provocatively titled "God cannot forgive us", and is definitely worth a read. Interestingly, because of that title and the forceful way the argument begins, it might look as if Richard is taking a different and oppositional stance compared with my own as developed in the foregoing posts of this 'retelling atonement' series. I do not believe that this is the case on closer consideration.

I think the crux (!) of the point being made is this: "God is impassive toward human sin. God doesn't have emotional reactions about our sin. This is what Julian means when she says God "cannot be angry." And maybe even that needs further explication: "what it means to say God is impassive toward sin. God doesn't have triggered or conflicting emotions. Nor are there emotions within God that demand satisfaction or reconciliation."

I think that the essential thing here is something about divine timefullness (some might use 'timelessness' -but there are further philosophical issues there) and sovereignty meaning that God is not triggered (and that's a good theological use of the word!) by our sin, injustice, cruelty etc. God's loving nature is always merciful, always (and this is where I bring in the perspective /trajectory of this series) pushing against harm to the beloved with self-giving compassion.

Richard goes on to state:  "We cannot find a season in the heart of God (like the interval of time between the Fall and Jesus' death) when we were not forgiven. And if we cannot find a season in the heart of God when we were not forgiven that means we've always been forgiven." And again, this is consonant, I think, with what I've tried to develop in thinking along the lines projected by this series. In proposing the idea of the cross (and resurrection) as an eikon of forgiveness, I was making the point that these are a playing-out in our space-time of God's eternal forgiving-ness. The whole of creation, if we expand on Barth's point cited in one of the earlier posts, is built around this.

I think that this is very congruent with what Richard writes towards the end of his post: "if by "forgiveness" you mean a change in the heart of God, this is impossible. God cannot "forgive" if you are describing forgiveness as an emotional flip-flop. Forgiveness can only ever name God's eternal posture of mercy toward human sinfulness, something that never wavers or changes."

My addition to that is to say that the cross/resurrection is an eikon -an incarnation of mercy and the 'reconciliation' of love and love in a pluriform universe such as the one in which we find ourselves.

For the start of this post-thread, go here.

‘Anger is language of justice’

It's interesting to me that the link between justice and anger is being rediscovered in more popular discourse.

"...people kept suggesting anger is irrational,” the US-based writer and critic Soraya Chemaly tells me down the phone during her recent trip to the UK. “That makes no sense. Anger is deeply rational response. It’s a warning. Anger is the language of justice and fairness.”

I see in this a parallel with a denial in popular Christian conversation of a link between love and wrath. The two are seen as incompatible opposites.

I guess I should also note, as I bring these two observations together, that I tend to agree with the idea that justice is love made manifest in social ordering. It is a political outworking of loving neighbour as yourself.

I am also invested in this to some degree as I have been thinking about atonement and various Christian accounts of it. Part of that consideration has to be to rehabilitate the notion of anger as an expression of love and as having roots in our notions of fairness and justice. It can, of course, come adrift from love and justice (and often does) but it would not exist without them.

So, rightly directed anger is something we might expect to give us energy to change things for good. To change things for the good of those we love and even for the good of those who have become our enemies. To change things to be more just, fair and gracious. Anger is something we need to learn to listen to: it tells us that someone is hurting or threatened and feeling disempowered or unheard. Our response is not to hit back but to understand, and if necessary offer the other cheek also in order to deal with the injustice at the heart of the matter.



‘Anger is language of justice’ says author of new book on women’s rage | openDemocracy:

See also 9'41" in TEd talk by Ryan Martin.

Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible

One of the characteristics of this book is to take Rene Girard's scapegoat theory of human culture and violence as disclosive and helpful for hermeneutics.

If the mainspring of the Bible is not the legal weight of each word but a progressive engine of disclosure, overturning a root human condition, then we are discovering a radically new hermeneutics. One which provokes human transformation. (p.26)

As I am a little more skeptical about Girard* nowadays, I was interested to see whether one really had to commit to that package in order to find this useful or not. Or whether it could be that the insights can be accepted without the whole package.

The book is set out as a resource for groups or class-work and is designed attractively from a typographic point of view -though not so easily read on screen in the pdf format I had access to, I trust that this will be addressed by suitable formatting for e-book versions in due course. Part of the course-book nature of the volume shows up at the end of each chapter where there are discussion questions and personal questions. I did wonder whether those ought to be the other way round: to encourage readers to be honest and in touch with their own history and responses before entering a group situation. Also, each chapter begins with aims and key points as well as a heads-up for key terms. Good educational practice.

The parts dealing with hermeneutics are set out clearly and succinctly which is no mean feat, I think. I was at first surprised by the basic laying out of the canon of scripture but as I saw it was done comparatively including the RC and Orthodox canons I began to see the point -it gently de-absolutises some approaches to reading scripture by raising implicit questions about why some of us can be so fierce about things which have a little bit of contingency about them -and what does that do to our considering scripture to be God-breathed? -Obviously I'm not going into that here and neither does this book, but it is important to dwell on it before coming over all crusader.

We also have a useful and equally succinct  primer in atonement theories (possibly one of the best I've seen in this respect), and again this can have the effect of encouraging more considered discourse on what Jesus's Ministry, Cross and Raising achieve. This section helps us to see the way that culture relates to plausibility and tends to assist in the foregrounding of particular theological motifs. Again we need to develop a healthy sense of contingency about such things, not to dispose of them but to be able to make use of them (or not) wisely in the service of God's mission. One of the things it notes in presenting these theories is the role that violence plays in the motif, hinting at how that can, in turn, give subliminal permission to populations, rulers or church polities to endorse the use of violence.

There is a brief outline  of the development of the the doctrine of penal substitionary atonement (PSA) which is again helfpful not least in reminding us that the term 'hilasterion' used in Paul is 'mercy seat', that is a place where mercy is found. It also notes that there is not a developed doctrine in Paul, merely metaphor and allusion.

The introduction to Girard's take on violence in human society is very clearly done and again briefly; a great service to the reader. The re-presentation of the Hapiru (=Hebrews) as a class rather than a race is a fair idea and worth putting out there in this regard. This enables us to appreciate reading the text of scripture as a sedimentation of revelation of divine love struggling against the violent defaults of human thinking and its projection onto the divine. This calls us to attend to the whole fabric of scripture and the deep -structures or divine drumbeat of love, resisted as it is by the vested interests of violently upheld power and wealth.

For those who have already been thinking a lot about non-violence, the gospel and Christian peacemaking, there is probably little in this that will surprise. Though the Girardian reading of the fall may be intriguing and thought-provoking. Where this book really scores is in offering a well-presented, clearly argued and succinct tour of the 'deep structure' of non-violence in scripture in a way that is thoughtful. The strength of the Girardian reading of the Hebrew Bible is to give a way to reframe what appears at first to be divine violence. It is a strength that this book is not so much an argument for a particular reading (or set of readings) but an invitation, in effect, to 'reason together' by inviting study and asking questions, including personally reflective questions. It is a kind of invite to try the approach on for size.

The book is also offering itself as a helpfully laid-out teaching/learning resource. In the USA I guess it would work as adult Sunday school material. In Britain it would more naturally lend itself to cell-group or home-group contexts or even to a Lent-course particularly for people who are keen to get to grips with something a bit 'meatier' and are okay with a degree of challenge.

if the

mainspring of the Bible is not the

legal weight of each word, but a

progressive engine of disclosure,

overturning a root human condition,

then we are discovering a radically

new hermeneutics. One which

provokes human transformation.

if the

mainspring of the Bible is not the

legal weight of each word, but a

progressive engine of disclosure,

overturning a root human condition,

then we are discovering a radically

new hermeneutics. One which

provokes human transformation.

if the

mainspring of the Bible is not the

legal weight of each word, but a

progressive engine of disclosure,

overturning a root human condition,

then we are discovering a radically

new hermeneutics. One which

provokes human transformation.

Links for this Review

Seven Stories on Amazon
Anthony Bartlett’s Website
Wood Hath Hope Website
Anthony Bartlett on Facebook

#SevenStories

Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible: Amazon.co.uk: Anthony W Bartlett: 9780692931943: Books:

*I don't find the linkage between the three pillars of the theory very convincing. I definitely think that the mimetic theme is right -and this was the reason I first looked into Girard. I also am convinced that there is something important in recognising that the sacrifice of Christ is among other things an unmasking of violence and power. I'm less convinced by the rivalrous sacrificial crisis-resolution aspect in that it purports to offer a universal cultural mechanism, and I'm simply not sure that it is so. I do think that there is a reality to the scapegoating mechanism but I just don't think it is necessarily a total explanation or a universal. And then I guess too that my own take on atonement -basing it in forgiveness rather than things like 'satisfaction' or 'penalty' tends me towards considering that seeing sacrifice purely as a human construct misplaced onto the divine may be in danger of removing an important insight about love.

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (9)

Analogy: human to divine and back again

Recently I re-read a series of  my posts from last year  on forgiveness and atonement. I noticed that one of the issues I'd posed in the first post in the series I had not properly returned to:

 Can this apply to God in relation to humans?
God-talk is inescapably analogical. The question is how far and how truthy is the the analogy? Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (1):

So I'm going to try to sidle up to that issue here.


 As I see it, this issue is how far is it meaningful to see God as loving, lovingly-angry, being hurt and even 'experiencing' such materially-based responses. These questions devolve to understanding the nature of God and the relationship between God/eternity and the world /temporality. Of course, those are huge topics and in themselves the subject of books and articles. So I'm not aiming to resolve or contribute anything particularly new, merely to position the issues in relation to the kind of perspectives and insights that seem to be helped or to help in this case.

Really it comes down to whether and how we can think or speak about God's love given that our primary understandings of it are formed in relation to human experience which is finite and has at least some basis in hormones, neurochemistry and culture. Similarly anger -with the added difficulty that it tends to be perceived negatively and as somehow unworthy of God. So can an infinite, essentially unmaterial being ('without parts and passions') experience emotions in any sense we can relate to as humans? Can a being for whom Time is not necessarily 'sequentially present' in the way we are accustomed to knowing it, be understood to have any similarity of experience to our sequential processing of love, anger and forgiveness?

I think that the previous posts in this series have given a broadly adequate account of the emotional dynamics of forgiveness in human terms. I think, too, that they have offered a bridge, via the motif of the eikon of forgiveness, to God's forgiveness. But can that bridge carry the traffic and is it well-anchored on the far shore? Or is God actually too different from us for that anchor to hold over there?

I think that we need to start with 'God is love' (1 Jn.4:16) which derives, in turn, from reflection on the incarnation (the combination being caught in John V Taylor's book The Christlike God alluding to the paraphrase 'God is Christlike and in God there is no unChristlikeness at all'). in the fact that this quality of Deity is expressed thus, we get a sense that something in our human experience is shared in some essential way with Deity: love. So the point of rooting my analysis in love is underlined. Though we may be aware that God's love exceeds our love, it is not a difference of kind but rather of degree and translation (from eternity to temporality, from infinite to finite).

This opens up the possibility, in principle, that offense against love could result in love-born anger in Deity and that such anger could be forsworn and reined back. This is further evidenced by the use of terms to do with anger and offense as well as forgiveness applied to God as subject. The same logic would apply as mentioned in a previous post: if God is not outraged by the detriments to those God loves, then surely we would doubt that God cares for us creatures: in effect we would not believe that God actually loves us. And if there is no reaction against harm to the beloved, then what would be forgiven? These are the necessary correlates of God's love.

Trickier to handle is the relationship between our temporality and God's being not bound by it in the way we are.  Implicated in this is the issue about our emotional life being founded in bio-chemical processes and finite perceptions which can in no way be ascribed to God. Though perhaps that is not entirely true because the incarnation shows God taking on the experience of time- and space-boundedness and the materiality of bodily-based information processing via affective and cognitive systems. For the analogy cinched by 'God is love' to hold, it should be noted that the incarnation commits us to holding together the possibility that our material-bodily emotional systems are capable of paralleling and even expressing appropriate analogues of God's life -obviously in a form that is appropriate to a space-time bounded existence. In a sense, the incarnation is our guarantee that the analogy can hold, that the bridge from the human side can be well-secured on the divine side.

So this presumably means that the love-anger-forgiveness 'cycle' we can see in human affairs does model adequately, at least sometimes, something of God. But what we probably need to note is the fact that these things are, in fact, the same thing in different temporal modes. Anger is love confronted with the harming of the beloved. Forgiveness is love in the face of the anger-response of love against the beloved who has become a perpetrator of harm against one who is beloved. The 'eternal dimension' of each of those things is Love. The temporal dimension works out in different ways according to the temporal conditions love is refracted through.

Next post

Previous posts in the series:

Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further
posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness
posting 6 The cost of forgiving
posting 5 Counter mimesis
posting 4 Reacting to being wronged
posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?
posting 2 Forgiveness in human life
posting 1 Love and Anger

An alternative typology vs Gustaf Aulen

Ben Myers reflects interestingly out of his teaching: Faith and Theology: How does Jesus save? An alternative typology (against Gustaf Aul�n):

...alternative typologies of Christian views of salvation. So here's a suggested typology of six themes in patristic literature:
1. Christ the Second Adam. ... Christ replaces Adam as the new life-giving head of the human family. (Main scriptural source: Romans 5.)
2. Christ the Sacrifice. ... explicit mainly in liturgical texts. ... artfully interwoven with a plethora of other Old Testament themes and images. (Main scriptural source: the Pentateuch and the Gospel of John.)
3. Christ the Teacher. ... Christ is the divine pedagogue who, by a slow and patient process, leads human souls up into the presence of divine wisdom. In some accounts this process extends into the afterlife. ... life is a school, and deification is the graduation prize. (Main scriptural source: the four Gospels.)
4. Christ the Brother. The adoption theme is prevalent in early Christian writing. ... Christ is God by nature, and as his brothers and sisters we become gods by grace. ... (Main scriptural source: Romans 8.)
5. Christ the Life-giver. ... The divine Logos had to become incarnate in order to become capable of dying; by entering into death, he absorbs death into the divine life, thus draining away death's power; and by rising again, he transforms corruptible human nature into a glorious incorruptible nature. ... (Main scriptural source: 1 Corinthians 15.)
6. Christ the Healer. ... Very frequently Christ is described as a physician who cures our illness. Often he is also described as medicine. Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of the incarnation as a healing of human nature. Augustine is particularly fond of the healing theme, ... Christ's humility as the medicine that cures us. (Main scriptural source: the four Gospels.)

I'm still considering this, but I think that it could be a helpful way of thinking about the issue, doubly so in view of the way that Ben Myers relates it all back to the Scriptural sources and motifs. He points out that in actual usage these tend to flow together in various combinations.

God Crucified?

Excellent post  about the issue of PSA (penal ubstitutionary atonement) which manages to capture helpfully and briefly the difficulties it has as a telling of how the cross might work. First off a positive telling from Nadia Bolz Weber:

God Crucified? | Storied Theology: … that’s not “God’s little boy, like God is some kind of divine child abuser sending his son (and he only had one!).” Come on, give me a break! “God’s little boy and he only had one, and as this divine child abuser and as this cigar-chomping loan shark demanding a pound of flesh, sending his little boy…” What hogwash, right? That actually is God on the cross, God saying, “I’d rather die than be in the sin-accounting business you’ve put me in.”

 But the then post goes on to re-assert why there is a problem:

The problem I keep coming back to is that everywhere and always in scripture, the son who dies is precisely the son who is not the father, and is nowhere the God who, as Godself, is dying to save us.

 And that is precisely the thing that is so difficult to try to explain in evangelism. Something like the doctrine of Communicatio Idiomatum is part of the response to the issue then raised:

Is the need for it to be God as such who dies so profound that we simply have to abandon the suffering Human One of the Synoptic Gospels, or the obedient Second Adam of Paul? Or do we simply need to return to the question of why Jesus died to shore up a better answer of why this man, man I say!, goes the way of the cross?

But then that's no easier to tell at a popular level. Whatever else is said, it points to the difficulty of using PSA in popular preaching; it actually needs quite a sophisticated Trinitarian theological explanation to sustain it in the face of the increasingly likely follow-up questions.

I actually think that the kind of approach I try to sketch out in my posts on the Cross as an Eikon of forgiveness helps to handle these issue more helpfully in terms of giving a frame to say why God should be implicated intimately in the Cross, dying and so forth, and by having something which connects incarnation and the Cross very closely helps to deal with the issue of the Persons in a more wholistic light by seeing it as a Trinitarian action rather than some how as a fragmentedly Personal action.

Evil is suffering passed along

In the series of posts the lattermost of which is on forgiveness-centred atonement, I propose that we understand forgiveness in terms of "to refuse counter-mimesis, to deny the recirculation of detriment into human affairs". And I'm interested to note that in a Quora piece by Diane Meriwether, Why do certain people derive pleasure from doing cruel things...- Quora:  there is, by implication, a congruent proposal about suffering and human response to it.

 When suffering is upon us we have two options. We can process and digest it or we can pass it on. Processing emotional pain can be as silent as pressing our hands to our chest and rocking back and forth, or it can be as loud as a scream that starts in your throat and tunnels down through your gut, through your knees, and tears a channel into the earth. Working through pain can happen in an instant, when you finally stop running, drop your hands and invite what's been chasing you to kill you if it must. Or the process can last years, playing hide and seek with the sweetness of a memory. In time, the processed suffering may transform into wisdom or compassion. My definition of evil is suffering passed along to someone else. In the process, whatever started the pain is lost and the energy moves as revenge or cruelty until someone else can bring it to ground.

For me, the thing to take away is is explitising the corollary of the proposition tha forgiveness is forbearing to pass on suffering, that is that to pass on suffering is a definition of evil. Now it's not all you would want to say and it leaves unexplored what internal mechanisms might be involved (which I try to do in the earlier posts to the one I link to), but it is a helpful starting point, not least because  it gives a way into consideration of forgiveness and therefore of God and atonement. interestingly, of course, it also relates to the idea of karma in south Asian thinking and perhaps the intriguing thought here is that speaking of karma and speaking of atonement become plausibly compatible language games.

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness-centred (8)

Eikonic forgiveness explored further

In my last posting I outlined a way of thinking about the Cross of Christ as an eikon of forgiveness. In this one I'm hoping to begin exploring whether a well-connected and more widely plausible account is possible sufficient to make this a usable model.

Incarnation and atonement are integral

In a sense what the Eikonic approach is suggesting is that the atonement is part of incarnation and not a mere precursor: it is the incarnation of God's forgiveness -or more accurately of God's paying the price for forgiveness. Now, when I write 'paying the price' this needs to be heard not in the way that substitutionary theories tend to use the phrase but rather in an analogous way to when in the language of sports or professional training we might talk about paying the price for excellence or paying the price for peak performance which is a way of metaphoring the effort, endurance, determination, pain and self-discipline as a cost -the price- for the prize of achievement of goals. 

In this way 'paying the price for/of forgiveness' is saying that a forgiver can't pardon without it requiring effort, determination, endurance of pain and self-discipline on their part. It is then saying that for God to forgive those things are also part of what it entails and that where that 'paying' goes on and can be seen and accessed is precisely in the Cross of Christ.


There is a related precedent idea in Karl Barth's thought - see historicisation of God's being (a previous posting which very briefly outlines the current series of posts). In that article we're reminded that Karl Barth wrote:

in the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have to do with a movement and action which took place not merely in human history but first and foremost in God Himself, a movement and action in which Jesus Christ as the Son of God . . . [is] a pure object and recipient of God [the Father's] . . . free and pure grace which as such can only be received, and the historical fulfilment of which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I'm suggesting that this applies also to the Cross: it takes place not only in human affairs but in God's own being: God's will to forgive is graciously expressed in the Christ's free acceptance of passion and death. More: God's willingness to bear the cost of forgiving, to refuse counter-mimesis, to deny the recirculation of detriment into human affairs, is given effective, operational, expression in the life or rather end-of-life of Jesus.

Resurrection is also integral

One of the criticisms of PSA theory is that it needs no resurrection; its internal logic is entirely about the Cross. And I think that this is a significant issue because any theory of the Atonement needs to integrate the Resurrection very firmly since it is clearly the central matter of the Easter event. 
Kim Fabricius reminds us (emphasis mine):

Karl Barth called the resurrection “a paraphrase of the word ‘God’”. The resurrection defines who God is: God is the God who raised Jesus from the dead. And in raising Jesus God identifies himself with Jesus and vindicates the cause that got Jesus killed – championing the poor and the shafted, challenging the rich and the powerful, rejecting the way of violence of good guys and bad guys alike.

Thus, if we understand the Cross to be about the enfleshment of God's forgiveness, then vindicating the 'cause that got Jesus killed' would translate to affirming the genuineness of the forgiveness and the demonstrating that the possibility of personal relating is still open beyond the forstalling of counter-mimesis. The Resurrection is the handshake offered once the pardoner has decided for forgiveness and bearing the cost of it.

'Rejecting the violence' is at the heart of the refusal to perpetuate the recirculation of detriments into human affairs. So, the Resurrection shows God to be the God who creates life beyond the death-dealing of recirculating detriment and beyond human personal (willed, agentive) wrong.
Previous post. 

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness-Centred (7)

The Eikon of Forgiveness.

The image I find myself returning to again and again in relation to the cost of forgiving (recast into a theological key), is summed up in the phrase 'the Cross is the Eikon of Forgiveness'. This is really what is at the heart of what I'm wanting to say and is , in fact, where I started in my own thinking before trying to write these last few posts (immediate precursor here) -which have been explorations of some related issue by way of background.

The core thesis that the phrase references is this: that the Cross of Christ is a showing forth in spacetime and human affairs of the costliness of God's forgiveness. I would actually like to find a stronger way of expressing it than 'showing forth' because 'showing forth' might seem to indicate only a kind of picture rather than being in some way the real thing. And this perhaps allows us to glimpse why I would want to use a word like 'eikon' rather than picture.

A picture is not the thing itself, merely a depiction of it, a representation of it in another form but without the reality of it involved. This is not adequate when we are talking of the Cross and forgiveness because the Christian tradition (scriptures and the history of theological reflection on them) tends to regard the Cross as an actual divine-human effectual event -one where something actually happens. 

An ikon -'eikon' to evoke the original Greek more fully- is not supposed to be a mere picture. it is meant to be a point of interaction between heaven and earth where the person depicted is in some way actually present to the viewer and vice versa. Thus, in the phrase 'eikon of forgiveness' I'm trying to convey the idea that the cross is a point of interaction between heaven and earth where what is depicted (in this case forgiveness) is made actual 'for us and for our salvation'.

Forgiveness actualised in human space-time

I think this is where I'm differing from the theories of atonement I was given as my defaults through Christian nurture. And I'm not necessarily seeking to displace them, rather add to them: I think that each has interest and can be helpful in appropriate circumstances as well as being unhelpful if used or pressed inappropriately (which may be happening with PSA in our culture).

In quick and dirty terms what I'm proposing under the heading 'Cross as eikon of forgiveness' is that we focus on the cost of forgiveness to the forgiver; the fact that it hurts us to forestall our retributive desires and that we suffer agony of personal miseries when righting the wrong and 'expunging' the detriment is frustrated (even if willingly by our own choice). This is brought about by our refusal at the point of forgiving to re-export the wrong back to the harmer; we decline to put the pain back into circulation in human affairs; to absorb ourselves the detriment and to neutralise it in our own person rather than to seek to pass it on (however just such a handover might be).

That pain and cost as experienced by human beings is what is brought to culmination in the intersection of divine and human life in the crucifixion of Jesus. On the cross of Christ we see the pain-cost of forgiving human ill, fleshed out in time-and-space and in human affairs. On the cross of Christ we find God demonstrably bearing the weight of the divine refusal to put the pain of wrongdoing back into human affairs. And we find God absorbing in God's own being the detriments and neutralising them in God's own 'person'. This is what it costs God to forgive, real-ised in the reality of divine-human life.

There, that's the core of the thesis.

What has to happen now is to explore it further in terms of what it means for divine-human life and how it fits with what we already think about God's ways with and in the world.

Next post.

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness-centred (6)

The cost of forgiving

In the previous post I noted that we could consider retributive anger as a reverse-polarity dynamic of mimesis and concluded that forgiveness, then, is somehow to end that counter-mimetic dynamic. The important thing to notice now, then, is that forgiving costs the forgiver.

It seems to me that part of what the successful completion of the counter-mimetic move achieves for the affronted is satisfaction, a sense of completion, of peace even. There is a very real and potent psychological satisfaction in seeing revenge, justice or proper and adequate acknowledgement of the wrong. One might regard this as a form of relief: the sense that the wrong no longer has to be borne as a personal detriment (even if the effects of it do). The ongoing personal hurt of the wrong can be laid to rest.

So, in order to forgive, we have to be willing to forego that satisfaction and to retain within ourselves the ongoing personal hurt. In short, we have to choose not to try to 'export' the hurt back onto the wrongdoer but to bear and process the hurt ourselves.

Bearing the cost.

It is this bearing the hurt ourselves which I think is the key to re-imagining the Atonement. The hurt of the original detriment is compounded in the refusal to pass it on to another: the pain is held, experienced and processed by the one hurt rather than relieved by counter-mimesis.

Really this kind of forestalling of counter-mimesis can only be achieved by having a strong motivation to do so. Of course, I am thinking of love and at the moment I can't think of other motivations, except related ones, that would be sufficient to enable the forbearance necessary. it could be a variety of pathways of love that lead to such forbearance. 
It could be love of the perpetrator themself which stays the retributive move, as when a parent might bite back their telling off of their child recognising that redemptive purposes might be better served by different reactions; for love of the child and hope for their growth and potential, a constructive approach is called for. So their forbear to punish in the hope of repentance which might be made more difficult by punishment.

It could be love of someone who would be hurt collaterally by the retribution, for example withholding a consequence for someone for the sake of their children who would be unjustly hurt in some way by the retributive action.

It could be proper self-love -where the offender is not in a position to be confronted by a consequence of their offence (maybe they've died, or they are too far away physically or socially) or simply too inured by their own justifications (rightly or wrongly) for the wrong done). In such circumstances, to give up the counter-mimetic impetus is a way to mitigate the wrong and prevent it from continuing to make one a victim by poisoning ones inner life and relationships with bitterness, brooding or distracting thoughts and desires.

As I write those things , I note that I've not said anything about regret, remorse or repentance on the part of the offender. I do think that such things are significant in the processing of forgiveness and that in many cases forgiveness cannot take place in the sense of reconciliation without them. It is also the case that there are times when, in a fuller sense of the term, forgiveness should be withheld until there is some indication of repentance else collusion or enabling of continued wrongdoing is the likely result (co-dependancy?).

However, we should note that even where a fulsome apology, amends and repentance are in view, forgiveness still requires the 'gift' of remittance of the counter-mimetic dynamic. It may be easier but in many cases it is not significantly easier to let go and to forgive a penitent than an impenitent. It still costs us as witnessed by many people who have baulked at it. Repentance or not, forgiveness still requires of us to forgo the retributive impetus; it still costs, and that cost is what I'm trying to focus on.

Previous post. Next Post (probably the most key post in this series).

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness centred (5)

Reverse polarity mimesis.

More on being hurt and reacting to it.

From the prior post we have understood that when we are hurt, we react with anger. That anger is, at its best, a driver towards in some way righting a wrong. (At its worst it's simply vengeance and prejudice). Part of the reaction is about transferring our anger to the other by hurting back. The reaction to a wrong is a kind of reverse mimesis kicked off by a detriment. In 'regular' mimesis we take into ourselves and reproduce within ourselves something from outside of our inner world. Usually it is something that we encounter in people in our acquaintance circles. Usually desire drives and fastens the imitation.

Now this is my take, I've not found this particular theory or way of looking at either mimesis or reacting to wrong. So consider the the next bit 'experimental' and your reaction to its plausibility is part of testing it out. Also let me know if you've come across the like before. However, recall that it is an attempt to theorise something that happens, so if I've got it wrong, then then there still remains something to be explained -it would simply be that my way of explaining it would be misconceived.

I'm proposing that our mimetic drive is thrown into reverse in the case of our being personally harmed (that is taking a detriment which is transmitted through personal agency and with person-generated intentionality and meaning). Rather than desiring to add the mimetic target to ourselves, the fact that it hurts means we defend against it and we do so by trying to reproduce something of the hurt in the perpetrator/s. This probably relates to our sense of fairness (which seems to be deeply embedded in humans) which trades hurt for hurt.

So whatever forgiveness is, it involves dealing with this reverse-mimetic reaction to personal detriments which are felt to be unmerited or under-merited. Somehow or other, forgiveness undertakes to remove it, nullify it or take it out of play between us.

Previous post.  Next post.

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement Forgiveness-centred (4)

Reacting to being wronged.

To forgive involves wrestling with our own reactions to being wronged. As we've seen in previous posts, being wronged involves more than simply having something bad happen to us but a moral agency -another being with understanding and choice- either deliberately inflicting some kind of detriment on us or hurting us through a negligence which could be regarded as a failure to take proper forethought or care in carrying something out. Perhaps the phrase 'sinned against' captures much of that.

So, someone hurts us, whether with malice aforethought or negligently, our reaction is of personal affront: someone has hurt us, it is not accidental and we have no reason to dismiss the person as outside (perhaps 'beneath') our concern about what they might think of us. That hurts emotionally and produces an emotional reaction in us usually one to push away the cause of the hurt: it is to defend us by securing our personal boundaries and/or by removing the source of the hurt in some way. In turn this often becomes anger. This anger may be at the perceived injustice of the detriment to us: we haven't deserved it, or it is out of all proportion if we have in some way deserved something of it; we have been disrespected; we have been misunderstood or misrepresented explicitly or by implication (and therefore have not deserved the treatment we have received).

Having started to push away the hurt by focussing on its undeservedness (and so we don't have to take it to heart in the way we would if it were thought to be deserved), we may focus on the agent/s of the hurt. Their blameworthiness enables us to push away the hurt to some degree: if they are unfair, negligent or misinformed, then we are 'okay'. The implication is that  if they are 'okay' in this matter, then we are not; we have entered into a zero-sum game. Our anger tends either towards changing the person who hurt us or even towards eliminating them. Either of these ends might be served by punishment which could be redemptive or restorative or on the other hand simply retributive.

It is worth noting that perceptions of degrees of malice or negligence play an important role in the reaction. So also perceptions of the relative 'value' of the hurt in our lives; whether it is serious for us or relatively minor. This may be related also to our valuing of the perpetrator of the hurt: if they are important to us the hurt is likely to be greater or to matter more.

Does this relate to love?

In what has just been set down, there is little mention of love. We noted in earlier posts that anger is related to love. So how does that fit here? I would suggest that there are a handful of connections: one to do with proper self-love; another to do with the perceived lack of loving by the perpetrator/s; and still another to do with the love of the perpetrator.

Anger and proper self-love

Loving our neighbours as ourselves implies that loving ourselves is at least taken as read and further that it is possible to love ourselves in such a way that doesn't prevent loving God and neighbour appropriately. this is proper self love and I would suggest that it a non-competitive desire to look after ourselves and acting to take care of ourselves is not of itself a bad thing, we would expect that in certain matters and in ways that acknowledge that others and God have legitimate claims upon us we would do so. in fact such self-care is part of caring for others: not being a burden on others. As is making sure that we are fit to play our part in caring for others and taking our part in the Missio Dei is proper self love. It is also legitimate for us to regard ourselves as capable of being sinned against and that those who might disrespect us or harm us as sinning. Such sinning against us is something we might in some circumstances even challenge for the sake of not setting a precedent which would harm others or even for the sake of challenging, in effect, the perpetrator to repent.

I would see the act of turning the other cheek to be an instance of the latter. If Walter Wink is right (and I think he was), then the presentation of the left check (having been backhanded on the right cheek) would represent an invitation to the perpetrator to repent of a semiotic of superiority and to give the blow representing an equality between perpetrator and 'victim'.

Thus is it possible that we might be rightly angry out of a proper self-love when we are disrespected, treated unjustly or derogated. Of course, given our fallenness, it is quite possible and likely that such anger may actually flow from improper self love rooted in pride, disinformation or confirmation bias against certain people or classes of people. But evil is never original and always twists good and is rooted in more fundamental goodnesses.

We might recall by contrast that self-loathing is also not right: it is regard ourselves in a way radically differently to the way that God regards us, it is to become a burden on others and it means not finding in ourselves analogues by which to understand how to love others.

Here the matter we looked at in earlier posts should be recalled: if we are not angry about the mistreatment of one who is loved, then we probably don't really love; we are in fact indifferent to them.

The failure to love by perpetrators

In this case anger is a reaction to negligence: the failure to give proper regard to the consequences of actions or inactions so that people are harmed or disrespected collaterally. This is a failure to love neighbour who is 'owed' the respect of being considered. When we love others we consider how our actions (or inactions) might have impact on them. Not to do so is to declare, in effect, that we do not regard them as worthy of our attention or respect. The reaction to this is rightly that other human beings (including ourselves) are worthy of consideration. As a Christian I would frame this worthiness of consideration as being grounded in human beings being made in God's image and objects of God's love (which has a further implication we shall look at later).

The disrespect of insufficient regard likewise should generate a degree of anger because we care. And in caring we desire the good of the one loved and the righting of the wrong.

Love of the 'enemy'

'Enemy' is in inverted commas because it's a way of naming 'perpetrator' in a way that connects our relationship with perpetrators of wrong with Jesus' teaching about loving enemies. It is recognising that we can be angry with a perpetrator for the sake of their own greater good: in doing wrong, the perpetrator is marring God's image, acting as less than they are called to be and harming themselves in more ultimate terms. it is right for us us be angry at such things, even where self-inflicted. 

The hurts of others?

Some forgiving involves how we respond to the hurt of others. Usually these others are those with whom we identify and that is mostly 'our loved ones', though it's worth noticing that loved ones can include those admired from afar like artists, performers, sport-players and others. When these others are harmed, we become angry. Our identification with them generates in us analogous senses of outrage and protectiveness to when we our directly threatened ourselves. Such anger can be assuaged by things being put right with the 'victim' which further demonstrates the reality of the identification and of the love.


Prior post in this series. Next post in series.

Posts in the series:
Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (3)

To know all is to forgive all?

This proverb makes sense best when 'forgive' is understood as 'excuse' and it has the strength of alerting us to the frequent mismatch between the number of occasions in which we take personal offence and the number of occasions in which personal offence is not really justified. That is to say that many of us assume or presume much of the time that some wrong done to us is deliberately, perhaps even spitefully, meant or some kind of blameworthy negligence. The proverb alerts us to the possibility that much of the damage and hurt we do to one another is actually not really 'personal' at all in the sense of malice or inconsiderateness. It recognises that many people act out of limited knowledge, habits of mind and action and even from out of their own damaged-ness and compulsions which are not necessarily under their 'personal' control. In such circumstances they are not truly blameworthy and so are excusable. If forgiveness is most truly about putting aside personal affront which responds to the malice or inconsiderateness of others, then to know all is to discover there is nothing to forgive.

However, the proverb is probably too optimistic: there are occasions when malice and blameworthy negligence are key factors in hurts we sustain in our personal interactions with others. And so while we might be able to say “To know all is to excuse much” we might also have to say “To know all is to understand what truly needs forgiveness”. In putting it that way I'm indicating that I think that that, once all the excuses are made and due weight given to mitigating factors, such as ignorance, irresistible compulsions or cultural relativity,  there is likely to remain a residue at least of blameworthy acts or planning of culpable acts which cannot be excused and for which we are truly responsible to some degree. It is these that concern forgiveness. My own suspicion is that these are less frequent or common than some theologies would lead us to suspect. On the other hand 'responsible to some degree' might mean that there are more than more 'optimistic'  or relativistic anthropologies might suggest which, as per the proverb in the heading, could well suggest that there are very few or none.

One of the areas where I want, at a later point, to probe further in relation to culpability, is that relating to socialised wrong-doing, in particular in relation to our participation in organisations -corporisations- which subsume us to varying degrees in their own emergent agency. The question that these pose is how far do they subsume our individual agency, and how far are we responsible for their ill-deeds and to what extent are we excusable or even victims of them?

So this piece on excusing should help us to approach forgiving more properly starting in the next post.

Prior post here. Next post here ...

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (2)

In this post (prior one here) it's time to consider how forgiveness tends to work (or not) in human relationships and in particular to pay attention to the way that love and anger are involved.

Forgiveness in human life

In looking at some of the stories on the Forgiveness Project website, one of the things that became clear to me is that 'forgiving' covers a range of things in everyday language. In some cases people use the term to speak about putting aside differences, in others it can be about accepting in good faith what they have come to believe is someone's 'honest mistake' and recognising that no ill-will lay behind the act. Sometimes it seems to be mostly about recognising a shared humanity and ones own frailty and prone-ness to err as much as the one being forgiven. And sometimes it is a costly putting aside of hurt and anger and a refusal to allow such woundedness to continue to define a life or attitudes.

With CS Lewis, I would say that forgiveness proper is about putting aside a righteous anger and that we should be wary of mere excusing which is actually about finding that there is actually nothing to forgive. That said, excusing, finding common humanity, awakening to humility, reframing ones sense of proportionality are all clearly, from the stories on the Forgiveness Project website as well as the simple experience of listening to people in the struggle to forgive, are all part of dealing with our own inner sticking points on the way to forgiveness. Sometimes we have to clear away closely related issues and emotions in order to face the central task of forgiveness. Sometimes doing that clearing away makes the central task easier and reframes it in such a way as to diminish the struggle, perhaps considerably. Sometimes it simply makes clearer the next part of the struggle.

The central task, then, is about the putting aside of anger and its alienation, but that needs putting in context to grasp more fully the various dimensions involved. We'll do that by considering more carefully in relation to human actualities.

Forgiving in life

Perhaps it would be well to start by asking why there is a need to forgive at all; what is it about human life that raises the issue of forgiving? When our family had a dog, I would sometimes do something accidentally that caused pain to the dog. My automatic reaction was to say sorry but then to chide myself because the dog couldn't understand 'sorry'. What was more effective was making a little bit of a fuss of him to reassure that I was still well-disposed towards him and to try to say that the pain was not any fault of his. I was also conscious that he didn't seem afterwards to carry any resentment, or any apparent need to re-establish a good relationship: the incident was forgotten as far as I could tell and in a sense, perhaps, 'forgiven'.

In mentioning that human-canine interaction I have in mind by implication a contrast or at least comparison with human interpersonal transactions. As more fully meaning-making creatures with a marked interest in reading the attitudes and intentions of others, we tend to add further layers to an incident where one may inflict pain on the other. We interpret the intentions and 'messages' of the hurt using contextual clues, subsequent actions and/or memories of prior 'transactions' with our conversation partner. So, for example, if I step on my friend's toe, she may take stock of several things to understand what I might have 'meant' by it -or at least what it might mean.

My friend might note contextual clues. Different clues might tell different stories about the meaning of my stepping on her toe. If we've been ballroom-dancing together she may have in mind two hypotheses: one being that I've mis-stepped and her foot was in the way, that is it was an accident, a mistake, a clumsiness on my part. Another hypothesis could be that I did it deliberately. The latter hypothesis might be considered to be confirmed if she saw a smirk on my face and/or we had just been talking about how I never stepped on toes. That might be interpreted as deliberate and probably playful on my part.

My friend might weigh subsequent events. If I said sorry it would be taken as a sign of the accidental nature of the incident -unless my tone of voice was sarcastic or in some other way appeared to be insincere. Alternatively, if I went on to collapse onto the floor, my friend would probably assume that my treading on her toe was a first sign of my seizure or my loss of balance. Though it could be read as an inadvertent accompaniment to a piece of clowning on my part, particularly if I bounced straight up and said “Ta da!”. Though in the latter case it would probably be read not as a simple accident but as misadventure for which I would be somewhat blameworthy because of attempting a risky manoeuvre.

My friend could call to mind incidents from the history of our interactions. She might recall I had done this a lot but normally, apparently, not deliberately and so her first thought is likely to be that this is yet another example of my clumsiness. On the other hand she might recall that we had recently quarrelled about my clumsiness and suspect that I had sought revenge for a perceived slight by doing deliberately what she had commented on as clumsiness.

What these interpretive cameos begin to show is that our understanding of what happens to us plays a key role in our response to them and especially when other human agencies are involved and we try to read the intent in mind behind the action. What is implicit in the cameos is that it makes a difference whether we perceive someone's action to be deliberate or with some degree of intention. And if with intention, whether that intention is malign, careless or relatively benign.

If the action is not deliberate, we may not be pleased but we tend to excuse it and our anger is diffused. Sometimes we might perceive the actions of others as careless and feel some degree of affront that the potential for harm or slight to us was not given sufficient weight. In such a case we will tend to be angry but recognise that there may not have been bad intentions behind it or that even there may have been good intentions. In such cases we may relatively readily put the incident behind us.

At other times we will suspect or even know that the other person hurt us deliberately. At such times it is much harder to put the incident behind us: the personal detriment weighs as heavily or even more heavily in the hurt taken. That is to say the fact that person-to-person ill-will is involved and that harm was intended adds a further dimension to the matter. As the advert for at least one film has it “... and this time it's personal”, meaning that the matter is of holding someone personally to account for a wrong done to a particular person (the chief protagonist of the film in this case) and of feeling the need to find some recompense or even revenge. Yes, it is a matter of perceived justice but it is personally felt and not some impersonal or abstract principle.

We should remember that our justice systems are arguably not really there first of all to administer impersonal justice but to stop personal justice being administered because 'personal justice' has a much greater tendency to become revenge and to overstep the bounds of proportionality and so to fuel cycles of violence. They stop personal justice by substituting impersonal, 'blind' justice in a similar way to how bureaucratic systems attempt to stall prejudicial procedures, bribery and croneyism in corporate life. I would like to put down a rhetorical marker at this point to note that modelling a theory of Divine Atonement on a deliberately-impersonal model may be less than satisfactory -forgive the pun.

Next post here...

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger

Retelling Atonement forgiveness-centred (1)

nullIn this first post in this area I want to consider mostly
Love and anger.
I've been long reflecting on models of the atonement. At college, before ordination, I did a study -complete with pilot study of Evangelical church members- of how people became Christians with aparticular interest in whether a sense of guilt and forgiveness was an important aspect (basically, 'no' except for a minority ). So, in respect of PSA (penal substitutionary atonement) I found Scot McKnight's article here Center of Atonement | Theology, News & Notes | Fuller helpful in sketching out some of the issues behind the PSA debate of late:

The Neo-Puritans believe that the most genuine, authentic experience of the gospel and personal salvation is to comprehend in a profoundly humiliating encounter with the utter holiness of God that a person is a wretched and vile sinner, and therefore also knows both that he or she deserves nothing but wrath and hell but has experienced, by the sheer grace of God, an elective salvation so that he or she has been welcomed into the arms of the Father through the Son’s propitiatory and reconciling work. (Their worship follows this pattern.) My contention is that penal substitution is required by the gospel of the Neo-Puritan. To question this is to question everything.

I tended to agree with the proposition that the Evangelical gospel seeks to answer a question few people in our society ask: 'how do I find deliverance from my guilt?'. So a lot of Evo preaching heads into the business of guilt arousal rather than finding ways to respond to the other questions being asked. And because for many Evangelicals, in fact, the existential dread of wrath and a guilty conscience is actually not a very prominent/real subjective experience, they don't actually 'tell' the PSA story that well or with much conviction. Indeed it tends to be mangled or scrimped and heard as, well, "cosmic child abuse". it is possible to articulate PSA with a degree of care to avoid that charge (as, I think, Jim Packer did and a helpful example ofwhich is set out here) -but then you have to be prepared to talk Trinity -and that may not be helpful in an evangelistic situation with limited time. The other effect is to pretty much put a wrathful idea/image of God centre-stage which actually works in popular imagination against the one of the primary attractions of a Christian theology that God is love.

Most people see wrath and love as mutually exclusive; and so that needs looking at. Most people don't really understand forgiveness. These dysunderstandings are linked. And the real challenge is to tell the Cross story in a way that holds love central, puts wrath into a congruent perspective and clarifies forgiveness. Anything else is going to miss the mark -NT-theological pun intended.

So I want to sketch out such an approach. It is a kind of 'practical theology' account in that it starts with a consideration of human forgiving and supposes that analogies to divine forgiveness are possible (else why let 'forgiveness' figure so highly and frequently as a concept in Scripture?).  To get some better idea of the human dynamics you might want to look at the 2004 posts I made under the 'forgiveness' tag. in those posts you will see me trying to uncover the psychological dynamics of forgiveness and hints of how this might relate to God's forgiving. In this latter respect, a  more recent post commenting on what I think is a Barthian approach may show something of the genealogy of my thinking.

I am taking it, too, that forensically-centred, cosmic-battle or exemplary approaches may not claim any last words -as McKnight argues in the linked article.

Love and anger: closer than we often think
I want to start with love then anger then forgiving and being forgiven. God is love, and many reckon that anger has no part to play in our thinking about relating to God because love and anger are conceived to be mutually exclusive. However, as I learnt from CS Lewis, we should remember what love is and involves. In my experience love can be a driver of anger. Lest that sound too oxymoronic, let's notice that in fact most people would actually think there was something wrong with a parent who did not get indignant (and I think that is a form of anger) or even outraged if their child is mistreated, bullied, or discriminated against. That anger is born of love for the child. The anger is directed to challenging and righting or at least mitigating the wrong being done to the child. I note, with interest a recent editorial in the Guardian that seems to point in the same direction: outrage and indignation arise from caring about the good.

However, that is not holding the two emotions towards the same person simultaneously, so the illusion of the incompatibility of love and wrath could be maintained. Maintained, that is, until we consider the matter more fully still. Perhaps the child is being bullied by her brother, who is just as cherished as his sister. Does the parent fail to be angry about the wrong because the perpetrator is loved? No. The parent is cross, and cross with the brother yet the brother remains loved. JM Barrie's Tinkerbelle was said not to be able to have two emotions at once on account of being so small. We being bigger can. And God being, in a sense, bigger yet certainly can have both 'emotions' at once and do so in relation to millions and billions. Even so we should note that the two emotions are actually not so different but share a commonality: without love, there would be no anger. Without anger, we doubt the depth of the love.

So the first thing to notice is that love generates anger when the beloved is harmed. That anger is directed to rectifying the harm, the wrong. In so doing it can be directed to the wrongdoer (especially where the wrongdoer identifies with the wrongdoing).

The second thing to notice is that the anger doesn't nullify the love and that we (and God who is ever greater) can both love and be angry with a beloved (I note that I can't find a simple transitive verb for 'be angry at' ...).

Let's note too, that it doesn't necessarily require that someone else be involved. We parents can be cross-out-of-love with children who harm themselves or even just put themselves in harm's way. Witness the parent who rescues a child from running in front of a moving car -quite often relief competes with anger and the child may be scolded as well as hugged.

So, I argue, God-who-loves-us is enraged-out-of-love for us when we harm ourselves or harm others whom he loves. And this love-born-anger is about the desire for the best, the welfare of the beloved and the love-born-drive to right the wrongs involved.

In brief, this means that if we think that it is great that God is Love, then we have to be prepared that such love has to be outraged by the wrongs done to the beloved. If it is not so outraged, then it is not love: it is indifference, or apathy, but not love. We should also frame this consideration globally: God loves everyone. So when I wrong someone else, I am wronging someone whom God loves. When someone wrongs me, they are wronging someone whom God loves. When I harm myself or even just fail to be my best, I am wronging someone whom God loves.

None of this is to say that what I've just presented exhausts what human anger is about. I've presented anger in a more noble form. It is of course possible to find human anger that is not rooted in a virtuous or godly love for others. It can be irritableness -or worse- at being inconvenienced or slighted or pouting about such perceived mistreatments of ourselves (or sometimes significant others). In a few words, it can be selfish or narrow-minded or 'petty'. But before moving on from that observation, let's notice that even these instances are still the same dynamic as the more noble version we first considered, it's just that they are based in less noble motives. It's not so much that the anger is wrong, but that the 'wrong' it seeks to right is not really wrong or it is selfish or petty or unworthy.

The  interesting and important thing even here is that the dynamic is nevertheless basically the same. A wrong is done to someone (or something) that we hold in our affection or esteem -it may even be ourselves. We react out of love for whatever-it-is with a desire to right the perceived 'wrong': a desire that carries a surge of energy to take down/away the wrong and wrongdoer/s. The main problem is that the wrong may not be really wrong or disproprotionate or even misperceived. With regard to that latter: most of us have probably known times when we have been cross about a wrong done to us or to others, an injustice. Only to find that anger deflate as we discover that in fact it was not wrong or unjust; we'd got wrong what was happening, misinterpreted and so misapplied our anger. It is not so much the anger that is wrong as the misjudgement, lack of charity, quickness to think ill or whatever other lack of charitable disposition. It is most fundamentally about truth and humility.

And this is part of the problem for PSA. It tends to sound as if it is portraying God as displaying an anger that is rooted in  taking umbridge at a slight to his honour or that his rather arbitrary rules have been ignored or flouted. It is not seen as related to noble love but something rather petty. God should just 'get over it' is the thought that lurks so easily as a next step from that perception.

In subsequent posts I hope to take the argument further in the following sorts of ways:

What's this got to do with forgiveness?
To answer this we need to consider, first of all, a working definition of forgiveness. We then have to relate it to what we've noticed previously about love-born-anger and love itself. And we should note at the outset of this bit of enquiry that there is much misunderstanding of forgiveness around -just as there is about love and anger.

Can this apply to God in relation to humans?
God-talk is inescapably analogical. The question is how far and how truthy is the the analogy?

Next post in series...

Posts in the series:

Posting 9 Analogy: human to divine and back again 
Posting 8 Eikonic forgiveness explored further

posting 7 The Eikon of forgiveness

posting 6 The cost of forgiving

posting 5 Counter mimesis

posting 4 Reacting to being wronged

posting 3 To know all is to forgive all?

posting 2 Forgiveness in human life

posting 1 Love and Anger