Victor Clemente
The Spark of Anger
I have been harboring anger toward my God for some time.
The revelation came when I least expected it, as these things often do. If you can believe it, I was watching television. It was the second season finale of the engrossing post-apocalyptic thriller Silo on Apple TV.
The show, an adaptation of the book series Wool by Hugh Howey, follows the remnants of humanity living in a 144-level underground bunker after a mysterious catastrophe rendered the outside world toxic. They have lived this way for generations, and the current generation does not know who built the silo. They do not know who placed them there. And they do not know when it will be safe to go outside. Trapped in a harsh, hermetic world they did not create—where scarcity and claustrophobia nip at their heels—the citizens’ anger often turns on their neighbors or themselves. Fear, resentment, and rage simmer beneath the cadence of everyday life.
As tensions reach a violent boiling point during the second season finale, the show’s protagonist, Juliette Nichols, an inquisitive engineer exquisitely played by Rebecca Ferguson as a ferocious bundle of intellectual energy, makes a compelling observation.
“You want to be angry,” Juliette snaps at two bickering kids. “Be angry at the motherf—ers who built this place and put us in it!”
Upon hearing the words, I was surprised to find something stir in my heart. Had I known it was there all along? Maybe. Whatever the case, the thing made its presence known then, and there was no going back: It was anger—anger towards my creator. Suddenly, I had notes on how my life was going, notes which I wanted to share with the one in charge, the one who built the place and put me in it.
The Problem of Evil and the Question of Accountability
As a Christian, I believe our world and the people in it are the result of a creator’s will. This creator, an eternal being existing beyond time and space, also claims sovereignty over our reality. (In the words of theologian J. I. Packer, our creator “rules history.”) Christians also believe their creator is good, having great affection for his creatures and always wanting what is best for them. We worship this creator as a deity, and I am not in the habit of questioning his choices.
But having a powerful creator in the picture, especially one who “rules history,” opens the door to questions of accountability, questions about who is ultimately responsible for the state of the world. And the truth is that while the Christian God may be good, he also allows some truly awful things to happen under his watch. The late Rev. Tim Keller admitted as much in his essential book Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering when he stated that God “has now mapped out a plan for history that includes evil as part of it.” And to be clear, evil is not a rhetorical abstraction reserved for theodicy debates. Evil is real, and it packs a punch!
Evil tears and destroys. It breaks body and soul. Evil is sweatshops, slavery, lynchings, and genocides. Even now, as you read this, there are many, including people that I love, crushed by evil’s full weight: victims of sexual assault, parents of murdered children, and displaced families forced to flee their war-torn countries with only the clothes on their backs. All of it unfolding as part of God’s plan for history.
However, as I thought more about Juliette’s outburst and Keller’s words, I realized that my problem with the evil that God allows is not so much with the “why?” of it all, which is the purview of apologetics, but more with the “what now?” Specifically, what are we to do with all the anger that naturally follows in evil’s wake? After all, if anger, as commonly understood, is a strong feeling of displeasure and opposition to a perceived wrong, then anger is an entirely appropriate response to evil.
I can accept that in the otherworldly vastness of God’s inscrutable brain, allowing humans to torture and murder each other does not negate his goodness. (Though not humble by nature, I am not so arrogant as to think that if I cannot divine the logic behind the actions of an infinite being, there is no logic to be found.) I affirm the Christian belief that this allowance of evil is temporary and that, at the end of history, our God will provide an answer for all of it, which will be, as Keller writes, “completely satisfying, infinitely sufficient.” However, I find that this plan for the future does not dull the sting of present evil and the anger that results from it. And like Abel’s blood crying out from the ground, the anger that evil conjures demands a place to land.
Anger Misplaced
A glance at the day’s news confirms that not only is there plenty of anger to go around, but that our natural inclination, like that of the characters in Silo, is to make our neighbors the landing place for that anger. Consider my home country, the United States. From Capitol riots to the attempted murder of a presidential candidate, from mass shootings to the burning of police cars and Tesla trucks, the 2020s are shaping up to be a roaring decade of rage. When the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company was gunned down in broad daylight by someone with a beef against the industry, we couldn’t even agree that premeditated murder is always wrong. A New York Times headline three days after the shooting described the condition of our national soul succinctly: “Some on Social Media See Suspect in C.E.O. Killing as a Folk Hero.”
Anger at evil needs a place to land, but making our neighbors the landing place does not seem to be working out all that well in our new roaring 20s. And with Juliette’s outburst in mind, I wondered if perhaps our anger is misplaced. After all, if Keller is correct about God baking evil into history’s mix, then the violent dramas currently playing out in our world could be considered the inevitable result of the world he made. And if it is all part of the plan, then it also follows that there may be a legitimate place for anger at the architect of said plan.
In retrospect, the idea of being angry with my creator should not have seemed so foreign. Christians also believe that, as “children of God,” they enjoy an intimate relationship with their Maker, much like that of children to a good father. Still, my spiritual formation in the churches of my youth discouraged the expression of thoughts or feelings that cast God’s plan in any remotely negative light. My takeaway from those days was that, when thinking or talking about God, one should always accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative—no need to dwell on the particulars of unpleasant chapters like the killing of Egyptian firstborns or how the promised land was won.
As recently as 2022, a prominent evangelical reformed pastor advised listeners of his podcast—by way of Romans 11:33—that a Christian’s proper posture when faced with incomprehensible evil is to “put our hands on our mouths and kiss the rod and say with Paul, ‘Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!'” This is the culture that formed me, and its roots run deep, which may also explain why it took a 21st-century dystopian sci-fi TV show to expose my anger at God and, in the process, reintroduce me to myself.
As I drop the pretense of not being frustrated about the way God’s plan is unfolding and the evil he allows to come my way, I am also coming to see myself as but one in a long line of God’s people who have experienced frustration with the creator’s mysterious ways.
Learning to Lament
I understand that the ancient Israelites, who also considered themselves God’s chosen people, wrestled with similar questions during their turbulent history. According to the Old Testament, the story of God’s people was marked by several periods of intense suffering at the hands of foreign powers, such as the Egyptians, the Philistines, and the Babylonians. During these periods, the Israelites would cry out to God in visceral lament prayers, many of which were collected in the Bible’s book of Psalms.
These psalms were not skittish about painting vivid pictures of Israel’s suffering or those responsible for it. Psalm 44, for example, finds Israel once again in the crosshairs of powerful forces. With striking language, the author laments how God’s people have been given up “to be devoured like sheep” and scattered among the nations. “You crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals,” the author elaborates, “you covered us over with deep darkness … for your sake we face death all day long.” But the most striking feature of the psalm may be that the “you” blamed for all of these calamities was not the Philistines or the Babylonians—or any other earthly power—but God himself. “Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep?”
The posture of frustration with God in Psalm 44 is not unprecedented in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Both the Old and New Testaments record the anguished cries of God’s people to an inscrutable deity who claims to be on their side. “God’s terrors are marshaled against me,” laments the long-suffering Job (Job 6:4, NIV). “O God, why have you rejected us forever?” Psalm 74 asks. A prophet likens God to “a deceptive brook” (Jeremiah 15:18, NIV) that only provides the illusion of relief. And an abandoned messiah cries out to the heavens: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, NIV)
This practice of lament, in which God’s people boldly bring their grief and anger before their creator, has been a staple of Christian prayer and worship since its inception. However, its prominence has varied across different periods and traditions. Speaking from within the conservative evangelical tradition that formed me, Keller admits in his book that there is “seldom a place provided for lamentation.”
For instance, when the new roaring 20s got off to an explosive start with the twin shocks of a global pandemic and widespread protests for racial justice in the United States, lament seemed to experience a resurgence in evangelical churches as they scrambled to meet the angry moment. Suddenly, lament was the subject of sermons, Bible studies, articles, you name it. For a hot minute, lament was all the rage, the feeling of novelty surrounding the topic underscoring its rarity.
In my story, the mothballing of lament during my spiritual formative years was unfortunate as it left me unprepared to meet my angry moment. Now, I find the “biblical witness of lament,” as Keller puts it, deeply reassuring. The inclusion of angry prayers in the biblical record points to the ever-present reality of this emotion in the lived experiences of God’s people. Writing about the prominent role of rageful lament in African American exegesis, theologian Esau McCaulley points out in his fascinating book, Reading While Black, that these prayers are “the words of a people who know rage.” This rage is shared by all those who have been burglarized and brutalized by the world.
I believe God has allowed rageful prayers in the biblical narrative to let his people know there is no need to stand on ceremony before him. He knows when we are angry; there is no point in pretending otherwise. And being sovereign, I don’t believe he is surprised when we direct some of that rage his way. I think he would be disappointed if we didn’t. After all, any relationship worth its salt must be able to process anger. Writing on this issue a few years ago, Professor of Theology J. Todd Billings noted in Christianity Today that “it takes a deep and durable trust to complain directly and openly to the person with whom you are angry.”
I also find rageful lament essential to the Christian work of loving our enemies as our Lord commands. Without it, all the rage generated by the evil surrounding us will continue to land on flesh and blood individuals, fueling the never-ending cycle of retribution that has plagued humankind since Abel’s brother decided to prune his family tree the hard way (Genesis 4:1-9). Like Juliette’s outburst, I believe the rageful laments in scripture are God’s invitation to let our waves of rage break against his immovable will and steadfast love rather than on our neighbors’ backs. As McCaulley puts it, the answer to the Christian’s anger must begin with “the knowledge that God hears and sees our pain.”
The religious teachers of my youth feared that expressions of doubt and frustration with God would inevitably lead to apostasy. While I cannot speak for others, in my case, anger with God has led me to press into his presence rather than pull away. And while some Christians may have enough faith in the tank at the moment of deepest pain to draw comfort from God’s promise to make “everything new” (Rev. 21:5, NIV) at the end of history, others will only have enough faith to believe God is big enough to absorb their rage. Thankfully, our God is gracious enough that sometimes a little faith is all he asks of us.
Victor Clemente is a church elder and writer residing in New York City. His work has appeared in Christianity Today, Comment, Christ and Pop Culture, and PopMatters. Find him on X (@The_Wait_Room), Threads (@the_wait_rm), or Bluesky (@thewaitroom.bsky.social).