The Commination and the Doctrine of God

Some thoughts on the "denouncing of God's anger"

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. A day when, in Anglican tradition, we argue on social media about fasting (or not fasting), and about whether or not it’s wrong to share selfies of yourself wearing ashes.

In older Anglican tradition, it was a day when the Prayerbook mandated that morning prayer be followed by the reading of the Commination, “or Denouncing of God's Anger and Judgements against Sinners,” a observance still practiced in some places, in some places (including on social media) with a surprising amount of enthusiasm. And, inevitably, because this was mentioned on social media, some other Anglicans were perturbed by this, because they regard the Commination as unhelpfully and untruthfully focussed on God’s wrath. See, for instance, this exchange here.

Now, it is true that I am always a little suspicious when people are too enthusiastic about denouncing sin, because while can be, though it shouldn’t be, fun to denounce other people’s sins, if you’re enjoying denouncing your own sins, then I suspect you aren’t taking the whole thing entirely seriously (for the avoidance of doubt, I am absolutely not suggesting that this applies to Nell, tweeting for those purposes as OurCofELike). But there is, I think, a bigger issue at stake with the discomfort with the Commination, and I worry that if we reject it entirely, we’re rejecting a truth we need to hear, both about ourselves, and about God.

I will also be honest. I wouldn’t use the Commination in all contexts; I also don’t think it’s one of the top tier Prayerbooks services, and the preamble irritates me:

BRETHREN, in the primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that, at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world, that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend.

Instead whereof, until the said discipline may be restored again, (which is much to be wished,) it is thought good that at this time (in the presence of you all) should be read the general sentences of God's cursing against impenitent sinners,

“Much to be wished"?” Citation needed, say I - I’ve always thought that not having a “creepie chair” of repentance and public shaming was one of Anglicanism’s better features.

And, more substantively, I think it’s a problem that while the Commination concludes with two beautiful prayers speaking of God’s forgiveness and mercy, there is no absolution at the end - we are given reason to hope in God’s mercy and forgiveness, as is always the case in the Prayerbook’s handling of sin, but to my mind there ought to be a clearer and more pronouncement of forgiveness and absolution to the people “being penitent”, as the Prayerbook indeed says elsewhere. It’s true that - if the Commination is used as the rubrics direct - this has already happened, in Morning Prayer, but I still think it’s regrettable that that’s the note it ends on. It would be interesting to try altering the order, and beginning Ash Wednesday with the Commination, before moving on into Morning Prayer (or Communion?)

But. There is something about that pronunciation of God’s wrath, and proclaiming a curse on, those sins and those sinners, with all their sometimes strange particularity, that I think we need.

Minister.Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour's land-mark.

Answer.Amen.

Minister.Cursed is he that maketh the blind to go out of his way.

Answer.Amen.

As Nell observed in the thread I linked to, the “neighbour’s landmark” has applicability in foreign affairs, as well as the sometimes very nasty property disputes that still arise, and in a discussion with some students last term we wondered if it could also be usefully read metaphorically, as applying to the disregard for other people’s boundaries and consent.

But while we probably won’t have anyone in our congregation who has “tak[en] reward to slay the innocent” (although, again, the news periodically reminds us that this is a thing that happens, and you don’t necessarily know what people’s pasts are), I defy anyone to go through the list and not feel, uneasily, that they might be proclaiming a curse on themselves. Of course, that’s the point: the bit in the introduction to the service that doesn’t make me twitch with bad ancestral Scottish memories makes this clear. The point of all this is To the intent that, being admonished of the great indignation of God against sinners, ye may the rather be moved to earnest and true repentance. And the specificity is helpful, too - one thing about the list as it’s given is that it is particularly interested in sins that are motivated by malice.

But the talk of God’s great indignation is often where modern hearers/ readers start to get upset, unless they’re conservative Evangelicals, because outside those circles, talk of God’s wrath and anger is very unpopular. It’s seen as unpastoral and also untrue. It has to be said straight away, though, that the Prayerbook helpfully notes that its cursing were gathered out of the seven and twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy, and other places of Scripture, where the word “curse” is indeed used.

In fact, the Commination is rather closely modelled on Deuteronomy 27 - though the sin list is slightly different (the sexual sins are rolled into a single petition, kept fairly vague, and bundled in with other kinds of sins, such as drunkenness and covetousness, so you can be grateful to not be asked to denounce men who sleep with their “father’s wife”, thus “depriving their father of his rights” or their mother-in-law). The Prayerbook version is, in fact, more egalitarian and less focussed on sins against the paterfamilias - and it also removes the bestiality, possibly because one suspects that even in the sixteenth century, there was a real risk of sniggering from the back. The context of Deuteronomy 27 is interesting - it’s part of the extended narrative around the covenant that God makes with the Israelites as they are about to enter the land, and I suspect there is a Reformed theology that aspires to see the role of the national church as facilitating a covenant between God and the people of the nation lurking behind the Commination. There’s an irony here, of course, given the most obvious example of national covenants comes from Scotland, and a group of people who were extremely opposed to the Prayerbook. But that doesn’t, to my mind, invalidate the service itself.

But let’s turn back to this question of God’s wrath. Most of the church prefers to talk of God’s love and mercy, for understandable reasons (you can do a lot of damage by bad preaching on divine wrath); but as noted, often the concept is just rejected out of hand. One of the most common liberal objections to “In Christ Alone” is not simply that it presents a penal substitutionary theory of the atonement*, but the line about “the wrath of God was satisfied” in Jesus’ death - at which point someone is almost bound to start muttering about “cosmic child abuse.” I hold no particular brief for that hymn, and I don’t generally find the forensic imagery underlying PSA helpful, but I do think have got ourselves into a theological mess by misunderstanding the doctrine of God, and what the Prayerbook means when it talks about God’s anger. I think pastoral caution is still indicated in this, but the language is not irretrievable - indeed, I think it’s important.

Turning to that historically very important Anglican statement of belief, the Thirty-Nine Articles, we read in the very first article that

1. Of Faith in the Holy Trinity.

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

The emphasis is mine, because that clause is crucial, even if the technical language (very much the language of mediaeval academic theology/ philosophy of religion, of course - the articles choose to start in a place that Aquinas would cheerfully have endorsed) is likely to be opaque. But the basic meaning is simply that God is not like us. To say he is without “passions” means that he does not have changeable emotions like us - God is eternal, consistent, and unchanging. So if we do speak of God’s anger, not only do we not mean the petulant anger of someone who has been crossed, we also don’t mean the righteous anger of a good person who is sparked and aroused into action by witnessing injustice. One of those emotions is sinful and the other is not, but either way, they are passing and dependent on externals. But God is God and God does not change in response to passing things.** Similarly, “God is without parts” - God is one. It makes sense to talk about us as being made up of conflicting impulses - we can separate out our desire to hurt and punish form our desire to forgive and reconcile. We have a rationality that we understand, but we can be surprised, in good ways and bad ways, at the things that bubble up from underneath. But God is, as the theologians say “simple” - he is all one and all the same and you can’t meaningfully separate out his mercy from his judgement, his love from his wrath, because they are the same thing.

It’s in this sense that we can properly understand “God’s wrath,” and, as a consequence, why unrepentant sinners are rightly said to be cursed. God’s wrath is, it turns out, the same as God’s love - but as that love is experienced by those who reject it, because in the end that is what it means to be an unrepentant sinner.

Why are unrepentant sinners cursed? Because to be in sin is the curse. It is to be alienated from God, alienated from others, alienated from ourselves. Even where sin may appear, in that first consent we make to it, to be pleasurable, its fruits are always bitter. And, as we look at our world, at the children dying in war zones, at the greedy grabbing of land, at the despoliation of the earth and the oceans through selfishness and indifference, at the victims of violence and those whose lives are blighted by an economic system that works for a few, can we really doubt that sin is a curse? Or the damage we do on a personal level, through our own selfishness, or pride, or malice? To be brought face to face with that, and to know that our conduct is a rejection of God, and goes against his will, is obviously unpleasant. But do we acknowledge that, and turn and face God?

This, incidentally, is where we might bring Julian of Norwich’s famous line (cited by Michael Sadgrove in the exchange with Nell Burnham that I linked to earlier) back in. Julian says - and it’s worth remembering that she was ‘troubled’ by this, and by the revelations she received about the role sin plays in the divine plan - that “there is no wrath in God.” And in a sense there isn’t. “God is love”, as Scripture teaches us, and that is the truest and most adequate thing we can say about God. If we experience God as wrathful, then that is because of the distorting effects of our sin, and our lack of repentance. Turn around, and we see the truth. We encounter, not a destroying fire of wrath but a refining fire of love. But we must turn - and we need God’s grace to do so.

And that is what the Commination does for us.

After the recounting of sin, and of God’s anger - and note that the way the service asks us to agree that those who do these things are cursed is, fundamentally, about agreeing that doing those things puts us in a state where we are alienated from God - we recite that great psalm of repentance and seeking of mercy, Ps 51, the Miserere, we find this prayer:

TURN thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned. Be favourable, O Lord, Be favourable to thy people, Who turn to thee in weeping, fasting, and praying. For thou art a merciful God, Full of compassion, long-suffering, and of great pity. Thou sparest when we deserve punishment, And in thy wrath thinkest upon mercy. Spare thy people, good Lord, Spare them, and let not thine heritage be brought to confusion. Hear us, O Lord, for thy mercy is great, And after the multitude of thy mercies look upon us; Through the merits and mediation of thy blessed Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Turn us. Because often we are so bogged down in our sins we cannot do that. We are paralysed by shame, paralysed by guilt, afraid to face the truth about ourselves, and still more afraid to face God, who knows the things about ourselves we can’t articulate to anyone, even ourselves.

Turn us to you, O Lord, for you are merciful.

Turn us, this Lent, and the God we will encounter is the God who dies for love of us on the Cross, and who triumphs over sin and death in the Resurrection, and whose love is stronger and greater than any power in the universe.

Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so we shall be turned.

Amen

*I have come to the conclusion that CS Lewis was right about theories of the atonement: none of them are completely adequate, all of them have problems, really we need to keep all of them in our mind, but devotionally one is probably going to be more helpful to us than the others, and that will vary from person to person.

**Caveat: of course this is talking about God in the sense of what we can say about the Godhead, the holy and undivided Trinity. If we are talking about God as we see him revealed in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Second Person of the Trinity, true God and true man, then we have to say that Jesus did experience human anger in the second sense. But that is true of his human nature, not his divine nature (see! Chalcedonian Christology ftw!)