Abstract
Stephen Butler Murray,
Reclaiming Divine Wrath: A History of a Christian Doctrine and Its Interpretation
, Studies in Theology, Society and Culture 8, Peter Lang: New York, 2011; 304 pp.: 9783034307031, £40.00 (pbk)
Few Christian doctrines have been pushed so quietly and unceremoniously to the margins of contemporary theology as that of God’s wrath. And while some may already have sensed something of the ‘dormant, stagnant period’ (p. 7) which this topic has suffered, nowhere has the ‘irresponsibility’ (p. 251) of such theological indifference been more convincingly documented than in Reclaiming Divine Wrath. The book, originally a 2004 doctoral dissertation at Union Theological Seminary in New York, took shape in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Murray observes that, in the period which followed, it became increasingly apparent to him that the Church was grappling with several challenges: overly narrow concepts of wrath; ‘tamed’ notions of God; a refusal to think and speak across liberal-evangelical lines; and a troubling gap between life as it is presented in the gospel and our own responses to violence. Murray’s thesis is a reply to such obstacles. To look closely at ‘the life of the Christian churches’, he proposes, and at ‘the very persona and work of Christ’, is to be led toward a paradigm in which God’s love and God’s wrath are ‘linked inextricably’ (pp. 5, 45).
Towards reclaiming this conceptual territory, Murray uncovers an impressive breadth of theological precedent. Chapter 1 works diachronically through biblical and inter-testamental writings. In chapters 2 through 5, Murray traces the theme of divine wrath as it appears in Christian intellectual history. He begins with the apologists (in their broad, philosophical context), moves through several Medieval and Reformation theologies, and highlights the sharp debates over God’s action in history – and God’s wrath in particular – which defined the rise of modern theology. He concludes his survey with a look at the dominant theologies of the twentieth century (esp. Barth and Tillich), as well as more recent theologies of discontent (e.g., James Cone and Delores Williams). In the sixth and final chapter, Murray consolidates the insights from his historical survey and arranges them according to broad, family resemblances. The result is a kind of taxonomy of God’s wrath – a set of six, overlapping accounts of how this concept ‘can and should be reintroduced into Christian discourses’ (p. 260). Once shed of the prejudices which often accompany this doctrine, we can rightly understand God’s wrath: to provide moral direction; to curb sin; to protect the defenceless; to right social structures; to eliminate the ontological conditions of sin; and to consummate redemption.
The strengths of the book are clear. Murray has read widely in primary and secondary literature. The tone of the presentation is admirably moderate, modelling patience with a topic that often prompts intense and unproductive disagreement. There are also stretches of real lucidity and care in Murray’s theological descriptions. See, for example, his précis of Paul Tillich’s theology (pp. 203–16), which moves from key concepts, such as symbolism and estrangement, to their concrete implications for a theology of God’s wrath. Finally, Murray is consistently attentive to how this material speaks to the Church: Bernard of Clairvaux becomes the occasion for a study on the interplay between a preacher and his ecclesial setting (pp. 76–88); and Thomas Aquinas teaches on the fundamental difference between ‘servile’ and ‘filial’ fear (pp. 94–7). Such examples are enormously instructive – gifts of the polyphony of Christian intellectual history.
Alongside such strengths, however, a word of caution is warranted. The emphasis of this study is decisively on breadth, and, among other things, this means that several theological concepts are left underdeveloped and occasionally mishandled. For example, the biblical exegesis of A. T. Hanson and C. H. Dodd is cited extensively in Chapter 1, without any critical discussion of how their work might itself be caught up in nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates over transcendence and immanence (pp. 10n2, 30n63). The treatment of Anselm’s theology, while conventional, nevertheless overlooks the constitutive role played by beauty and fittingness (pp. 73–6). More too needs to be said about the relationship between thick concepts such as analogy, symbolism and anthropomorphism (e.g., pp. 70, 157). And the distinctly modern concerns which press upon a doctrine of providential divine action (p. 151) suggest that Friedrich Schleiermacher’s work might well have played a larger role in Murray’s assessment.
Most importantly, two conflicting modes of theological reflection are regularly laid alongside one another without substantive comment. The first is a Christian realism which assumes that the living God is active in world history, an objective reality resistant to every ‘deity of our own fashioning’ (p. 254). The second, by contrast, is a constructivist approach, perhaps anti-metaphysical in nature, which assumes that the central task of theology is to refine, critique and deploy symbols according to their capacity either to overturn or to underwrite social and spiritual realities. The emphasis here is not upon divine action but on the ends to which human beings are able to employ the concept (e.g., pp. 13, 111, 162). Should readers of Scripture and history attempt to hold these two approaches together in a coherent and cogent theology? And, if so, how? As it stands, Murray demonstrates convincingly that wrath belongs to God, but leaves both theologian and preacher without a sense for how it does. This is no small lacuna.