Author: Ava Tian, Independent Member of UHHC from Shenzhen
Introduction
Chapter 5 of the Book of Acts in the New Testament describes a couple, Ananias and Sapphira, who sold their land for money. While only donating a part of the sale to the Church, they lied about donating their entire sum. Their conspiracy risked misleading others in their community. In response, God struck them dead, presumably as a warning against hypocrisy because their deceit would undermine the unity and integrity of the nascent Christian community. The story of Ananias and Sapphira is not just about personal sins, but rather hypocrisy and deceit within the early Christian community. God’s actions warn His believers that dishonesty in spiritual matters can harm the faith of others, and He punishes those who push his boundaries.
But why should the Creator of trillions of universes be angered by the actions of tiny individuals? If He is truly powerful and is the origin of a vast and grand cosmos, why would He care about a lowly couple whose actions might seem to have little impact on the vast expanse of creation? Why would the Creator be angered at any action that may have little effect on His massive cosmos?
Indeed, if the Creator doesn’t value these galaxies, nations, societies, and humans He created Himself, then He would not have a reason to be angered by the actions of tiny individuals. But in this paper, I argue that the Creator would be angry at us for performing certain actions because He loves us, and our performance of certain actions results in the loss of benefits that we would otherwise receive.
Divine anger is not arbitrary, but a function of love—a desire to protect sentient beings from self-destructive choices. This follows from four premises:
1. If the Creator loves sentient beings, He desires what is best for them (Premise).
2. If He desires what is best for them, then He desires them to refrain from actions that detract from their net pleasure (Premise).
3. If the Creator desires this, then the Creator will be disposed to be angry when people act in ways that detract from their net pleasure (Premise).
4. If the Creator loves sentient beings, the Creator will be angry at certain human actions (From 1-3).
In this paper, I will simply assume that the Creator of a trillion galaxies, including ours, exists, is capable of being angry, and loves sentient beings like us. This is a common assumption among many theists, including contemporary philosophers, theologians, and anyone who agrees with 1 John 4:7, “Love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God” (New International Version, 2011). Moreover, some substantive assumption about the Creator of a trillion galaxies is needed to even begin to explain His anger. I suggest that His loving us is worthy of our consideration.
An argument from love
Why should someone believe Premise 1? In this paper, I simply assume that to love someone entails wanting what is best for them. This is related to an everyday notion of love. Parents love their children and, therefore, desire what is best for them. Spouses love their respective other halves and, so, desire what is best for them. And so too with friends.
Consider that Premise 2 mentions what is best for sentient beings. What is best for them entails accumulating the greatest net amount of pleasurable states over their lifetime. There are clearly various sorts of actions that detract from our net pleasure. Among them are actions that may appear to contribute to our net pleasure. Here, I have in mind actions that provide instant gratification: a person who always skips the gym to watch YouTube, partying rather than writing their homework, or watching TV rather than sleeping. These sorts of actions are ultimately bad for us and are the sort of actions that the Creator desires us to refrain from, as such actions do have an overall negative impact on our net pleasure. As not exercising contributes to obesity-related health concerns, not completing homework leads to academic failure, and not sleeping properly causes anxiety.
Turn now to Premise 3. Why would the Creator become angry if we failed to act in our own best interests? First, the kind of anger I have in mind is righteous interpersonal anger. It is anger at someone you are in an interpersonal relationship with or at something that has damaged an interpersonal relationship. Being angry can be defined as follows: it is a state where people feel offended by an action that prompts them to intervene on the subject of their anger and attempt to resolve what damaged the relationship. In other words, anger generates a desire for the Creator to be angered as a way to intervene in the subject of their anger to restore the relationship.
In interpersonal relationships, anger is consistently associated with positive outcomes, such as making amends and reparations (Karppinen, 2023). Considering that the Creator loves sentient beings and wants the best for them, anger is a way to help repair and maintain relationships by resolving issues. The Creator, who acts like a loving parent, desires that He need not be angry to help his children, but, just like us, it turns out that occasionally being angry is the best way to do so.
At this point, somebody might wonder why we need negative consequences. Colloquially, it’s “Monkey see, monkey do,” as actions performed by other members of society would be seen as normal, or even preferable, if no consequences are meted out. When the Creator intervenes and expresses anger, this demonstrates that if we break the rules set by the Creator, we will receive forms of punishment. These punishments, perhaps in His righteous anger, let people suffer the natural consequences of their wicked actions. As an example, the corrupt politician is exposed and sent to jail, where he would lose certain pleasures, he would have rather received in life. So, by being angry, the Creator signals to sentient beings that something was wrongly done, which motivates them to change and gives them a chance to restore their connection with the Creator.
As my defense of the premises shows, there is an explanatory relationship between the Creator’s love and anger. The Creator is angry at humans for performing actions that detract from the well-being of some sentient beings. For example, if someone murders another person, they forcibly take away the right to live and the time spent with their loved ones from others. Therefore, the Creator will be mad at us when our actions detract from the net pleasures we might have received because, ultimately, the Creator loves us.
Objections and Further Upshots
One might argue that Premise 3 is plausible for us, but what if divine psychology is different than ours? Perhaps the Creator can motivate us to stop acting sub-optimally without being angry at us. Couldn’t the Creator be a Stoic lover of sentient beings? However, the kind of love I am presupposing is a holy, jealous love, at least akin to that found in Christianity. As C. S. Lewis describes, the Creator’s love is “Hot wrath, hot love. Such anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it.” Meaning, that with the existence of intense love, intense wrath comes with it out of necessity. If the Creator has this type of love, it’s impossible for Him not to get mad when those He loves are doing something that harms His relationship with the perpetrator.
So far, I have argued that the Creator will be angered by certain actions because the Creator has a righteous love for us. Here, I suggest why some of those actions, including acts like eating meat or having premarital sex, will enrage the Creator. To some, these acts seem to lack immediate negative consequences and so seem morally permissible. In short, I deny this argument, because these actions contribute to systemic harm–whether to animals, partners, or future children–which angers the Creator. Eating bacon contributes to the factory farming of pigs, which in turn contributes to their painful deaths. The level of demand for factory meat is deeply correlated with the amount of killing in factory farms, as more animals need to be killed to increase the supply of meat. The suffering of factory-farmed animals, even if foreseen rather than intended, is not morally permissible because the supposed gustatory pleasure does not outweigh the intense suffering of animals involved in the process (Norcross, 2004). Moreover, some human beings do understand that eating bacon contributes to this, so it seems like these people are morally culpable.
To add on, premarital sex hurts current relationships as well as new relationships in the future. Author Jesse Smith finds that having premarital sexual partners other than an eventual spouse is strongly associated with higher odds of divorce, particularly for those with nine or more premarital partners. Those with more premarital partners may have a more permissive attitude toward sex outside marriage, increasing the likelihood of infidelity, which breaks the bond in a relationship. Or it hurts future children who, we might suppose, might have been born into a loving two-parent household but are instead born into a loving one-parent household. Absence of parental care in childhood is associated with severe mental consequences, such as depression and anxiety in young adulthood (Annor, 2024).
The smaller details for this paper do not matter. What matters is that our actions impact others and have a likely chance of influencing others negatively, of depriving them of joy. In addition, there is a unique kind of joy that comes from creating joy in others. But instead, if you are the source of some pain for another, then you may not receive this joy that originates from contributing to the joy of others.
Conclusion
The story of Ananias and Sapphira illustrates that the Creator’s anger stems not from vindictiveness but from love–a desire to protect the integrity of the community and the well-being of individuals. If the Creator loves sentient beings, His anger serves as a corrective response to actions that undermine human flourishing and maintain His relationship with the people. By being angry, the Creator reinforces the moral basis necessary for lasting pleasure, as well as deterring behaviors that harm both individuals and the collective. Therefore, the Creator’s anger calls people back to good, performs pleasure-promoting action, and repairs our source of good–namely, our relationship with the Creator.
Reference
Annor, Francis, et al. “Parental Absence as an Adverse Childhood Experience among Young Adults in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 150, 1 Nov. 2023, pp. 106556–106556, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2023.106556.
BibleGateway. “New International Version (NIV) – Version Information – BibleGateway.com.” Biblegateway.com, BibleGateway, 2011, www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-International-Version-NIV-Bible/.
Karppinen, Helena, et al. “Hostile Emotions and Close Relationships: Anger Can Be Related to Constructive Responses.” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 212, 1 Oct. 2023, p. 112258, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886923001812?via%3Dihub, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2023.112258.
Lewis, C. S. “Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer”. Gutenberg.ca, gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-letterstomalcolm/lewiscs-letterstomalcolm-00-h.html.
Norcross, Alastair. “Puppies, Pigs, and People: Eating Meat and Marginal Cases.” Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 18, no. 1, 1 Nov. 2004, pp. 229–245, spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/readings/norcross.pdf, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2004.00027.x.
（Edited by Peter Tian from UHHC, The picture is from the Internet. If it infringes any rights, we will delete it immediately. All the copyrights of this article belong to the author Ava Tian. Anyone who infringes will be held accountable by both the author and UHHC to the fullest extent.)