Anger may point to the reality of God - Gareth Black

It was a bright Sunday morning in June 2017 as I stood contemplating the disquieting, charred husk of the Grenfell Tower building. Four days earlier a raging inferno had ravaged the 24-storey apartment block, killing 72 people, including 18 children. I was on the ground that morning working with churches that had been at the forefront of the efforts to try to provide support to displaced residents and anxious relatives. As I navigated the pavements of North Kensington, littered as they were with candles, flowers and images of the missing, the mood was almost universal: a bitter cocktail of profound sorrow mixed with rumblings of anger. Further details of the social determinants of the tragedy that emerged over the proceeding days only compounded this indignation.

Well-wishers leave flowers and write messages on a wall of condolence following the blaze at Grenfell Tower in 2017.

Anyone with any experience of supporting grieving people will know that anger is a prevalent factor in experiences of suffering. Whether at the macro levels of public reactions to systemic racial discrimination and issues of climate change, or at the deeply personal levels of things like relational unfaithfulness or diagnoses of illness, anger is a common and profoundly human response to suffering and disappointment.

Of course, not all expressions of anger have a legitimate basis, yet what can account for this intuitive and ubiquitous human response to suffering? After all, our anger is not merely the pain-fuelled cry of sentient beings in reaction to distressing stimuli, but a phenomenon deeply rooted in the uniquely human search for meaning and justice: our sense that something has gone wrong and things are not the way they are supposed to be.

We should, rightly, expect that any worldview that purports to offer a reasonable framework for understanding ultimate reality ought to be able to make sense of these empirical realities in human experience. Yet all too often we find our worldviews lacking a coherent explanation for these phenomena. Take, for example, the worldview of Naturalism, the belief that only natural – as opposed to supernatural or spiritual – laws and entities exist in the universe. If there is no transcendence and human beings are ultimately just atoms who have learned to think, made in the image of an amoral universe, it is not simply God who might be a delusion, it is also those instinctive assumptions of our inherent human value, as well as our appeal to an objective standard of justice, that grounds our intuitive responses to suffering with meaning and legitimacy. Consequently, our frustrated cries that something has gone wrong is simply an evolutionary anomaly, voiced to a deaf and indifferent universe.

Gareth Black for Solas

That is why, for me, the Christian worldview makes the most sense of our human experience. Rather than ask us to short-circuit the significance of these intuitive phenomena, it endows them with legitimation, meaning and value. Christianity’s account of a cosmic fracture between a loving God and our world gives coherent explanation as to why we might rightly sense that our experiences of brokenness in this world are not the way things are meant to be; that our cries for justice are not misappropriated pleas to a morally-vacuous universe, but meaningful appeals that we should expect of human beings made in the image of a God of justice, whether we believe in that God or not. Contrary to shutting down our anger towards evil and injustice, the world of the bible corresponds with our human instincts. Its pages and personalities are filled with narrative, poetry and songs that give voice to the full gamut of human response to suffering, be it rage, despair or the search for explanation. Rather than undermine important aspects of our humanness, the Christian story earths the sacredness of our lives and loves, even to the extent that God himself would become human, a human who is seen to rage against the brokenness and injustice of our world.

Thus, our intuitive response of anger towards suffering and evil, rather than undermine belief in God, may, in fact, point towards that God’s reality.

Gareth Black for Solas