Mark 3:5 · Debate · Anger
Is Anger Ever Right?
Christian teachers have given three answers to whether a believer's anger can be right, and each reads Ephesians 4:26 its own way.
The King James Version of Matthew 5:22 carries the words “without a cause,” which the Berean text leaves out.
Jesus looked around at them with anger and sorrow at their hardness of heart. Then He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he stretched it out, and it was restored.
- The question
- Can a believer's anger ever be right, and on what terms?
- The texts
- Mark 3:5, Ephesians 4:26, Ephesians 4:31, James 1:20, Matthew 5:22
Summary
Scripture records that God is angry at sin and that Jesus was angry at what He saw, and it also tells believers to put away all anger. Thomas Aquinas and Joseph Butler held that anger against wrong, ruled by reason and soon ended, can be right. John Cassian taught that a believer should never be angry at all. Lactantius defended the anger of God against philosophers who denied it.
- Scripture calls the LORD slow to anger and also angry at sin, and Romans 1:18 says His wrath is revealed from heaven.
- The Gospels record the anger of Jesus, at hardened hearts in a synagogue and at the trade in the temple courts.
- In one chapter Paul both quotes the command to be angry and not sin and tells believers to put off all anger.
The Question Every Answer Faces
Teachers from Lactantius to Trench have weighed the question.
Is Anger Ever Right? weighs a question every angry believer meets in the trial of anger, and readers have long disagreed on where the line falls.
This study asks what Scripture allows a believer's anger, and what it forbids. It sets out what Scripture records of the anger of God and of Jesus, the line drawn for believers, and how teachers from the fourth century to the nineteenth have answered. It gives each answer in the words of the teachers who held it, and the limits on anger that every answer shares.
Three Answers to the Question
Each answer leans on its own verse and meets its own objection.
The three answers part over whether Paul's command to be angry permits anger at others.
| The answer | Held by | A verse on its side | The strongest objection |
|---|---|---|---|
| A believer may be angry at wrong, within reason's rule and for a short time. | Thomas Aquinas; Joseph Butler | Ephesians 4:26, "Be angry, yet do not sin." | James 1:20 and Ephesians 4:31 name human anger with no exception for a just cause. |
| Anger is to be put away whole, and the command to be angry means anger at one's own faults. | John Cassian | Ephesians 4:31, "Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger" | Mark 3:5 records the anger of Jesus, and Aquinas held that lacking the anger a just judgment needs is a sin. |
| The anger of God is real, and human anger is allowed but must not last. | Lactantius | Romans 1:18, "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven" | The philosophers he answered thought anger “so great and so pernicious an evil” that it must be absent from God. |
The Line Drawn for Believers
James and Jesus speak to the anger of believers, and one phrase of Matthew 5:22 is disputed.
for man’s anger does not bring about the righteousness that God desires.The verse stands here because every answer must account for it.
But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ will be subject to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be subject to the fire of hell.The verse stands here because each answer must say what Jesus forbids in it.
The King James Version reads, “whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.”
John Cassian, in his Institutes, wrote that the words “are superfluous, and were added by those who did not think that anger for just causes was to be banished,” though many copies carried them.
Aquinas quotes Jerome on the same verse: “Some codices add ‘without cause.’ However, in the genuine codices the sentence is unqualified, and anger is forbidden altogether.”
The Anger of God and of Jesus
The law, a psalm, Paul and the Gospels all record holy anger.
A psalm calls the LORD “a righteous judge and a God who feels indignation each day” (Psalm 7:11).
In the synagogue where a man's hand was withered, Jesus healed on the Sabbath before those who watched to accuse Him (Mark 3:1 to 6). Mark 3:5 is the one verse where a Gospel uses the noun orge of Him.
John Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), called this “the true standard of Christian anger,” anger at the sin and grief for the sinner. He then asked, “But who can separate anger at sin from anger at the sinner?”
When the disciples turned the children away, “He was indignant” (Mark 10:14).
At a Passover in Jerusalem He drove the traders out of the temple courts (John 2:13 to 15).
What Every Answer Holds
Butler, Lactantius and Cassian each set a limit on human anger.
All three answers condemn the anger that outruns reason. Butler counted it an abuse of resentment “when the indignation against injury and injustice rises too high,” Lactantius would have human anger end soon, and Cassian would have it gone entirely.
Each Answer in Its Holders' Words
Aquinas, Butler, Trench, Cassian and Lactantius state the three answers in their own words.
Anger against wrong can be rightThomas Aquinas, Joseph Butler, Richard Chenevix Trench
Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, question 158), held that “if one is angry in accordance with right reason, one's anger is deserving of praise.”
Anger that follows reason against vice he called zealous anger, and he wrote that “zealous anger troubles the eye of reason, whereas sinful anger blinds it.”
Joseph Butler, in his sermon Upon Resentment (Fifteen Sermons, 1726), wrote, “Resentment is of two kinds: Hasty and sudden, or settled and deliberate.”
In Paul's command to be angry and not sin he found “a distinction made, between anger and sin, between the natural passion and sinful anger.”
He called settled resentment “a weapon put into our hands by nature, against injury, injustice and cruelty.”
Richard Chenevix Trench, in his Synonyms of the New Testament, denied that Paul was “condescending here to human infirmity” in Ephesians 4:26. He read the verse as a command to be angry with no sinful element mixed in.
Anger is to be put away wholeJohn Cassian
John Cassian gave book 8 of his Institutes to the spirit of anger. On Ephesians 4:31 he wrote, “When he says, Let all anger be taken away from you, he excepts none whatever as necessary or useful for us.”
He read the command to be angry as a call to “be angry with your faults and your tempers.”
He concluded that “we ought never to be angry at all, whether for good or bad reasons.”
God's anger is real, and man's must not lastLactantius
Lactantius wrote A Treatise on the Anger of God to answer philosophers who held that God is never angry. “If God is not angry with the impious and the unrighteous,” he argued, “it is clear that He does not love the pious and the righteous.”
He defined anger as “an emotion of the mind arousing itself for the restraining of faults.”
He held that God “does not altogether prohibit anger” in people but forbids them to persist in it.
The Question of Cause
Each answer asks the angry believer what the anger is aimed at and how long it is kept. Paul closes Ephesians 4 with forgiveness “just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32).
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- The Holy Bible, King James Version (1769 text)
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, question 158, Anger, articles 1 and 8, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (second edition, 1920)
- Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726), Sermon VIII, Upon Resentment, in the edition of Hilliard and Brown, Cambridge, 1827.
- John Cassian, Institutes, book 8, Of the Spirit of Anger, chapters 5, 9, 21 and 22, translated by C. S. Gibson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 11 (1894)
- Lactantius, A Treatise on the Anger of God, chapters 5, 17 and 21, translated by William Fletcher, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7 (1886)
- Richard Chenevix Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, new edition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1901), §xxxvii, p. 127.
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), on Mark 3:5.
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