The wrath of God

That God has the capacity for anger indeed, for anger of peerless intensity constitutes a thesis with copious Scriptural foundation. One finds in the Sacred Text many graphic and stridently unsentimental depictions of divine wrath and its (at times) catastrophic consequences. While it is true that references to God's wrath appear with greater frequency in the Hebrew Bible1 than in the New Testament, Revelation 19:15 speaks explicitly "of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God". This notwithstanding, however, the idea of divine wrath has widely been regarded as an unacceptably naive or "primitive" piece of theology, i.e., as an anthropocentric slur upon the divine perfection. Indeed, as will shortly be elaborated, such is pretty much the view of those philosophical theologians that have been seriously influential in shaping normative theistic metaphysics. Accordingly, it has standardly been contended by distinguished philosophical representatives of Judaism and Christianity that the ascription of literal anger to God is a flagrant breach of conceptual propriety. Moreover, this contention reflects the general doctrine that it is conceptually impermissible to ascribe any affective states to God. Rather (so the argument proceeds), the unsurpassable greatness of the