Friday, January 3, 2020

The Maturity Of Anger

Anger, despite its potential for motivating people to seek justice and refute damaging errors, is often viewed as immature when it crosses an arbitrary threshold of intensity.  Someone who frequently lives in a state of anger over genuine irrationality might be regarded as childish, easily irritated, or selfish, when it is actually the objector who has earned these titles.  If someone who identifies as a Christian characterises anger as largely immature, moreover, their error is particularly hypocritical.

The Christian who calls anger immature calls God immature by logical extension, for anger is a clear aspect of God's character and nature (Exodus 22:22-24 specifies this, for instance).  God not only harbors anger towards certain individuals, but he also harbors anger of great intensity.  Divine anger is no minor thing, and if humans are obligated to imitate God in his love, there is no reason to pretend like we would not also be in the right to imitate God in his anger, however deep and fierce it may be.

Irrationality, injustice, spiritual apathy, and other serious moral problems should be met with the fury of those who recognize that they are to be condemned and avoided.  It is not that a person who cannot experience intense anger regardless of the circumstances is in moral error, but that tolerance, apathy, and dismissal are inexcusable reactions to evil.  To trivialize evil or react to it only in a mild way is the truly immature response to sin.

The idea that anger is immature except in very specific scenarios, ironically, is itself intellectually and theologically immature.  The only immature uses of anger are outrage over amoral or unimportant things and a total submission to anger, such that anger overpowers one's ability to reason or one's resolve to fulfill one's obligations in spite of whatever one does or does not feel.  Short of these specific situations, anger is only a useful and empowering tool.

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