01. Beyond Fire and Brimstone
It can be really hard to believe in God. For many, it is even harder to experience God as a loving friend. Even if I believe there is a God . . . how do I know this God actually cares for me? This is what I yearn for, but maybe God is displeased with me, or even worse, maybe God is indifferent toward me.
For some reason (perhaps psychology’s “negativity bias”?), many of us find it easier to believe in an unhappy and angry God than a loving and caring God. As anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann puts it in her study of multiple religious groups, “A judgmental god who punishes might seem more realistic—more in accord with the world as it is—than a god who promises eternal joy. . . . Across these faiths run a common thread: that which we fear is more believable than that for which we yearn.”Tanya Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 20–21.
Sometimes, sacred texts and religious practices make it even harder to believe in a loving God. Consider the famous atheist Richard Dawkins. In his manifesto against theism, The God Delusion, he gives this assessment of Yahweh:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 51.
While intense and difficult, these words capture the God-image many people struggle with in our world today: angry and wanting his pound of flesh.
This struggle is compounded when we consider how images of a scary and angry God have been used in church history to try and convict people of sin and convince them of their need of grace. A famous example is the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be case into the fire.”Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Other Puritan Sermons (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005), 178. Yikes! With sermons like these, no wonder we find it hard to feel lovingly connected to God.
Based on a global sample of over 8,000 people, social scientists have found that beliefs like these are correlated with a growing movement of deconversion and de-churching. Regardless of the effectiveness of eighteenth-century preaching practices, it seems that in our world today, belief in an angry God is not only unhelpful, but may actually be driving people out of our churches. These beliefs are so difficult, that statistically speaking, the average person leaving church stops believing in God before they stop believing in hell. Think about that! On average, it is harder to stop believing in the existence of hell than it is to stop believing in the existence of God.D. R. Van Tongeren, I. Brady, C. Casper, H. Fuller, and C. Swanson, “To Hell with the Devil: Lingering Negative Religious Beliefs among Religious Dones,” Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 16, no. 4 (2024): 343–51
An angry God, hell, eternal judgment . . . these things are scary, but easy to believe, and churches sometimes makes it even easier. For those of us prone to negative self-talk and self-criticism, the situation can feel hopeless. How do we engage in healthy spiritual formation given these facts?
02. Calvin’s Non-Angry God
It is here I want to share with you a piece of my journey. I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that the sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin helped me rehabilitate my view of God as a loving friend. Surprised? I get it. Calvin and Calvinism are often associated with the kind of “fire and brimstone” preaching just mentioned. And yet, for me, studying Calvin’s theology has taught me a brilliant lesson. Through careful study, John Calvin, of all people, taught me to believe that God is not, and cannot, be angry with me. You read that right. God is not, and cannot, be angry with me.
Take for instance Calvin’s commentary on a phrase from Hosea 11:9 (“I will not carry out my fierce anger,” NASBAll Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)). In this passage, the God of the Old Testament is portrayed as holding back his desire to execute angry punishment on Israel. But Calvin says that there is no anger in God:
God, we know, is subject to no passions; and we know that no change takes place in him . . . we know that these feelings belong not to God; he cannot be touched with repentance, and his heart cannot undergo changes. . . . But why does Scripture say that God is angry? Even because we imagine him to be so according to the perception of the flesh . . . God, with regard to our perception, calls the fury of his wrath the heavy judgement.Calvin Comm. Hos. 11:9, italics mine.
Step back. Double take. Did Calvin just say that God is not angry, but only appears to be angry to us? Yes. Because for Calvin, God does not change. God is love, life, friendship, flourishing. God adores God’s creation and cannot do otherwise. Saying that God is loving is like saying that water is wet. It is who God is, and God cannot do otherwise. Saying that God is angry is like saying that water is catching fire. It can’t happen. All that can happen is that we can mistake shining water for dangerous fire.
Calvin confirms this in his commentary on Romans 1:18 (“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people”). This passage, which speaks of God’s wrath against human sin, seems to indicate that God is justly angry. But Calvin disagrees:
The word ’wrath,’ according to the usage of Scripture, speaking after the manner of men, means the vengeance of God; for God . . . has, according to our notion, the appearance of one in wrath. It imports, therefore, no such emotion in God, but only has a reference to the perception and feeling of the sinner who is punished.Calvin, Comm. Rom. 1:19, italics mine.
Breath-taking! Once again, Calvin seems to be saying that God is not angry. We just think that God is angry with us, because of sin.
If Calvin is right, divine anger is not real, but is just a fallen human perception. Ever since our primal parents Adam and Eve took the bait of the lying serpent and fled from the garden, we have been “homesick for Eden.”Gary Moon, Homesick for Eden: A Soul’s Journey to Joy (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1997). Part of that homesickness is the desire for a loving God. What gets in the way of our union in love with God is not that God is upset with us. Rather, what gets in the way is that we feel that God is upset with us. The problem is not in God. The problem is in our God-image.
What, then, is the solution? Calvin gives an answer in his commentary on 2 Corinthians 5:19 (“God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself”). For Calvin, the reconciling work of Jesus is to make us right with God, but that right-making involves a change in our perception, not change in God:
Now, although Christ’s coming as our Redeemer originated in the fountain of Divine love towards us, yet until men perceive that God has been propitiated by the Mediator, there must of necessity be a variance remaining, with respect to them, which shuts them out from access to God. . . . For when we contemplate God without a Mediator, we cannot conceive of Him otherwise than as angry with us: a Mediator interposed between us, makes us feel, that He is pacified towards us.Calvin, Comm. 2 Cor. 5:19, italics mine.
Calvin is saying that, even though God is not angry, we feel like God is angry. And as long as we feel like God is angry, at-one-ment between us and God is not achieved. For salvation and reconciliation and flourishing in divine friendship, we need things to work both ways. We don’t just need God to like us. We need to believe that God likes us.
Think of it this way. Suppose I start a business and employ my daughter and then discover she has embezzled millions of dollars. That would be devastating and would interrupt our union in love. Suppose that I then tell her, “Lettie, I forgive you. I am not angry. You do not need to pay back a single dime. It is forgiven.” Technically, I am not angry, and she is forgiven.
Union in love, right? Not quite. Because she might then say to me, “Dad, thank you for forgiving me. But to be honest, I still don’t feel good about this. You have forgiven me, but I feel like I still owe you. I know I don’t, but I see your business suffering because of me.”
Even though I am not angry and she is forgiven, she is not convinced of it. Suppose I then say to her, “Lettie, just so you can know how much I love you and do not wish you ill, I will personally pay back your debt myself. I don’t need to do this. But you need me to do this, so you can know and believe in my love. All is restored.” Now we have union in love. I want what is good for her and to be close to her. But now she knows it, deep down.
03. Hell: Location or Condition?
When I first discovered this from Calvin, it blew my mind. It deconstructed all my preconceived ideas about salvation and spiritual formation in the Reformed tradition. I remember thinking “surely I must be misreading Calvin!” But after years of doing a PhD on the topic, presenting at professional conferences (with people who know way more about Calvin than me), and looking closely at Calvin’s whole corpus, I am convinced this is what he really thought about God. I am also convinced this is very healthy for spiritual formation and reconstructing a healthy God-image. God is not angry. But we feel like it. And Christ was willing to be born and die and rise again, even if just to change our minds and hearts on the matter.
All good and well. But if God isn’t angry—and according to Calvin, cannot be angry because God cannot change—then what about hell? Isn’t hell literally the place where God is angry?
Once again, Calvin can surprise. In one of his lesser-known works, he introduces a radically psychological take on hell. The work is called the Psychopannychia (which literally means “soul party”) and is all about how Christ followers continue in divine friendship with God even after their bodies die (what Calvin calls a “party” or “festival” of the soul). In this work, Calvin gives an outright psychological definition of hell:
It is no uncommon thing for Scripture to employ these terms (“hell”, “death,” the “grave”) for the anger and withdrawal of the power of God, so that persons are said to die and descend into the lower region, or to dwell in the lower region, when they are alienated from God. . . . In these places of Scripture, it (infernus) signifies not so much the locality as the condition of those who feel God has condemned and doomed them to destruction.
Once again, Calvin is saying that hell is less about a place and more about the feeling that God has abandoned you, or that God is angry with you. Hell is feeling at war with God.
This is confirmed in his other commentaries, such as those of Hebrews and 1 John, where Calvin says hell is feeling like God is angry with us: “for where there is guilt before God, there immediately hell shows itself” such that “we are subject to a thousand miseries, and the soul is exposed to innumerable evils, so that we always find a hell within us.”Calvin, Comm. Heb 2:15; 1 John 3:2, italics mine. In a pastoral letter to a friend, he conceded that “there is no condition more unhappy than to live in trouble of mind, and to have a continual warfare raging within one’s self, or rather without ceasing to be tormented by a hell within.”“Letter to Monsiuer de Falais (1543),” in Letters of John Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1858), 1:397, italics mine.
In other words, according to Calvin, hell is not so much a place we go when we die. Hell is not some place we are inside of. Hell is something inside of us. It is the feeling and condition common to all humans east of Eden, the feeling that God is not my friend, that God is my enemy, that God is against me, that God is angry with me.\
Thankfully, this hellish feeling is also the condition that Christ entered on our behalf.Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.16.11. For more, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill and F. L. Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960). If hell is believing the lie that God is angry, then in Christ, God has entered that lie, felt it himself, descended into our hell, in order to prove to us once for all that we need not stay there. If we follow Christ, we can descend into our own hell of believing this lie, and ascend back out into the truth: that God adores us, and always has, and always will.For more on Christ’s descent into hell in Calvin and its implications for suffering and trauma in the Christian life, see Preston McDaniel Hill and John Swinton, “For Us and Our Traumatization: Toward a Modern Promeitic Christology,” in The God Who Is For Us: Explorations in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Oliver Crisp and Paul T. Nimmo (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2025).
04. Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God
In 2017, pastor and theologian Brian Zahnd published a book whose title gives a clever spin on the “fire and brimstone sermon” from Jonathan Edwards. The book is titled “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.”Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News (New York: Waterbrook, 2017). That’s it. God is not angry, and we are not sinners in the hands of an angry God. We may be sinners, but we are held in the hands of a loving God.
For me, learning from Calvin has been a surprising journey of coming to terms with my own God-image. I want to invite you on that journey too. You may have been taught that God is angry with you. But what if that isn’t true? That’s what Calvin thinks. The real God is gentle and lowly. And he adores you. Lessons like these are part of the life-long journey of reconstructing and rehabilitating our perception of God. After all, perception very often really is reality. Many of us have spent a lot of time worrying what God thinks about us. But like any friend, God is concerned with what we think about God. I hope you’ll take the invitation to be spiritually formed by the Reformation, and consider more deeply just how gentle and loving the God and Father of Jesus really is.