THE LINK BETWEEN ANGER & LOVE

'Anger is energy released to defend something you love. God is angry toward the evil that dishonours him and ruins that which he loves. But the problem with human anger is this - we tend to overlove the wrong things.'

Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, The Way of Wisdom, p.120.

THE MORAL EMOTION

'...anger is always makes a value judgement. Anger is always a moral matter. It has rightly been called "the moral emotion" because it makes a statement about what matters. Human beings make moral judgments, therefore human beings do anger. Period. Like God, you come wired to size things up, to feel displeasure at wrong, and to act in order to do something about it.' 

David Powlison, Good & Angry, p.41. 

THE SIMPLICITY OF ANGER

'At its core anger is very simple. It expresses "I'm against that."' 

David Powlison, Good & Angry: Redeeming Anger, Irritation, Complaining, and Bitterness, p.39. 

THE GENTRIFICATION OF EMOTIONS

'There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that see to afflict us are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.' 

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.280. 

ANGRY LOVE

'Just as death achieves heights of fury in the work of destruction, so love achieves heights of fury in the work of salvation.' 

Augustine of Hippo in Robert W Jenson, Song of Songs, p.93. 

ESSENTIAL ANGER

'Anger is a crucial human emotion. It can be that which eradicates oppression, fuels social change, or rails against hypocrisy. Anger at the ill-treatment of others has led to the repeal of slavery, and the outlawing of exploitative child labour. There is much anger in the Psalms where the writers cry against injustice and shout about the way evil-doers seem to prosper. There is anger in the Gospels when Jesus sees that the place where God is to be worshipped has been turned into a "den of thieves". In its right place anger is essential.' 

Elaine Storkey, The Search for Intimacy, p.218. 

ANGRY PRAYER

'...the Psalmists insists that if the only prayer we have to offer is one of bitter anguish, we pray it nonetheless. The poet knows that in the release of anger, intimacy is realized. God longs for whatever lies in the depths of the soul.' 

Belden C Lane, Ravished by Beauty, p.95. 

LOVE & ANGER

'Great love is the root of great anger.'

Rebecca Konydyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices, p.121.

ANGER

'Once the punch in the mouth is part of your repetoire - once you've done it a few times as an adult - it never really goes away.'

Mark Edmundson, Why Teach? p.80.

RIGHTEOUS ANGER

'Not expressing anger in the presence of injustice is not a sign of godliness, but rather of moral weakness.' 

Mark Jones, Knowing Christ, p.71. 

ANGER

'Anger is most useful as a diagnostic tool. When anger erupts in us, it is a signal that something is wrong. Something sin't working right. There is evil or incompetence or stupidity lurking about. Anger is our sixth sense for sensing out wrong in the neighborhood. Diagnostically it is virtually infallible, and we learn to trust it. Anger is infused by a moral/spiritual intensity that carries conviction: when we are angry, we know we are on to something that matters, that really counts...

What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside or inside us. We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside us - our spouse or our child or our God has done something wrong, and we are angry... But when we track the anger carefully, we often find it leads to a wrong within us - wrong information, inadequate understanding, undeveloped heart.'

Eugene H Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, p.157. 

SIN

'One way to say it is that depression, rage, and other problematic emotions are always caused by sin; however, the sin is not necessarily that of the individual. Our bodies, designed by God in God's likeness, experience crippling fear, depressoion or rgae because they inhabit a sinful world. My own sin may cause me to become depressed, but so may the ways in which I am sinned against. To make it even more complicated, my depression may be caused by a combination of my own sin, the sins which have been committed against me and the general sin of a fallen world which gave me faulty genes.'

Michael Mangis, Signature Sins, p.129.

ANGER AT GOD

"'...our God came to be among us. Shake your fist at Him, spit in His face, scourge Him, and finally crucify Him: what does it matter? My daughter, it's already been done to Him."

Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, p.146.

ANGER

'Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over greviances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.'

Frederick Buechner, Wishing Thinking: A Theological ABC, p.2.

REDEMPTION

'The more I reflect on the elder son in me, the more I realize how deeply rooted this form of lostness really is and how hard it is to return home from there. Returning home from a lustful escapade seems so much easier than returning home from cold anger that has rooted itself in the deepest corners of my being. My resentment is not something that can be easily distinguised and dealt with rationally.

It is far more pernicious: something that has attached itself to the underside of my virtue. Isn't it good to be obedient, dutiful, law-abiding, hardworking, and self-sacrificing? And still it seems that my resentments and complaints are mysteriously tied to such praiseworthy attitudes. The connection often makes me despair. At the very moment I want to speak or act of my most generous self, I get caught in anger or resentment. And it seems that just as I want to be most selfless, I find myself obsessed about being loved. Just when I my utmost to accomplish a task well, I find myself questioning why others do not give themselves as I do. Just when I think I am capable of overcoming my temptations, I feel envy towards those who gave into theirs. It seems that wherever my virtuous self is, there also is the resentful complainer.

Here I am faced with my own true poverty. I am totally unable to root out my resentments. They are so deeply anchored in the soil of my inner self that pulling them out seems like self-destruction. How to weed out these resentments without uprooting the virtues as well?

Can the elder son in me come home? Can I be found as the younger son was found? How can I return when I am lost in resentment, when I am caught in jealousy, when I am imprisoned in obedience and duty lived out as slavery? It is clear that alone, by myself, I cannot find myself. More daunting than healing myself as the younger son is healing myself as the elder son. Confronted here, with the impossibility of self-redemption, I now understand Jesus' words to Nicodemus: "Do not be surprised when I say: 'You must be born from above.'" Indeed, something has to happen that I myself cannot cause to happen. I cannot be reborn from below; that is, with my own strength, with my own mind, with my own psychological insights. There is no doubt in my mind about this because I have tried so hard in the past to heal myself from my complaints and failed...and failed...and failed, until I came to the edge of complete emotional collapse and even physical exhaustion. I can only be healed from above, from where the Father reaches down. What is impossible for me is possible for God. "With God, everything is possible."'

Henri JM Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, p.75.

ANGER & CHURCH

'Since we are called to work out our discipleship in these close relationships, it should not surprise us in the least that anger-producing situations will be close at hand as we seek to minister together. Working with people takes time and energy, and the resulting tiredness can easily cause anger. Mutual ministry means that we want people to express their opinions and make their contribution. This too can lead to friction. Since we want to encourage mature participation and not just a group of people who are yes-men (or women), we need to be able to handle anger, not to avoid or discourage people from expressing their opinion.

If anger is totally out of place in a Christian community, it will be "bad form" to express any contrary view, lest it lead to differences of opinion, which may cause anger. "Arms-length fellowship" is the only possible outcome. In this kind of fellowship, relationships become formal and polite, and superficial fellowship replaces close personal interaction. The source of life and vitality has been removed.'

Peter Brain, Going the Distance, p.86.

FEAR & ANGER

'Fear and anger can be the same words spoken with a different attitude.'

Edward T Welch, Running Scared, p.34.

GOOD ANGER

'How can you consider disease, war, and environmental distress and not be angry? How can you look at the fact that nothing in your world was exactly as it was meant to be and not be angry? You simply cannot look at the world with the eyes of truth and with a heart committed to what God says is right and good, and not be angry at the state of things in this fallen world. In a fallen world, anger is a good thing. In a fallen world, anger is a constructive thing. In a fallen world, anger is an essential things.

That is, if the anger is about something bigger than you.'

Paul David Tripp, Broken-Down House, p.128.

IDOLATRY

'When idolatry is mapped onto the future - when idols are theatened - it leads to paralysing fear and anxiety. When it is mapped onto the past - when we fail our idols - it leads to irremediable guilt. When idolatry is mapped onto our present life - when our idols are blocked or removed by circumstances - it roils us with anger and despair.'

Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods, p.149.

ANGER

'I'll tell myself that I didn't really lash out in anger; no, I was speaking as one of God's prophets.'

Paul David Tripp, Whiter than snow: meditations on sin and mercy, p.147.