Thanks for posting an apt and timely reflection that helps dispel the notion that the crucifixion of Jesus display’s God’s anger.

You might appreciate William P. Brown’s essay, “‘In him all things hold together’: An ecology of atonement,” *Ex Auditu* 26 (2010): 1-25. Here are two memorable paragraphs (pp. 16-17):

“The blood of the cross, though freely given, was shed in violence, Just as Abel’s. As the first ‘sin’ was committed in violence, so Christ’s atonement was occasioned by violence. On the cross Christ bore the violence of the world, thereby breaking the death-wielding power of sin and liberating the world from ‘futility’. Christ’s death was the sign of God’s willingness to suffer and die by human hands. The cross is the sign of God’s incarnation in the victim of violence. On the cross God in Christ takes on the violence of sin and does not retaliate. God does not strike back. That itself is an astonishment! . . . . The cross is the ultimate act of God’s forbearance, of God’s unilateral disarmament, first enacted with Noah and all creation. God’s abiding, grief-stricken concession to human wickedness in Genesis becomes in the Gospels a death sentence. The Lion is the Lamb.

“Yet the cross also unveils the passion behind the concession: a love whose ferocity is unleashed in the resurrection, God’s power ‘made perfect in weakness’ (2 Cor 12:9). On the cross God does not push back but reaches out, meeting coercion not with coercion but with a suffering, empowering love that embraces the world to transform the world. On the cross God does not take *on* the world but takes it *in*, death and all. With the temple’s curtain rent in two, all creation is claimed anew as God’s holy sanctuary, and the ‘gospel’ gets ‘proclaimed to every creature (pase ktisei [Col. 1:23] under heaven’! The atonement does not command sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. It is not the mechanism of satisfaction. The atonement, rather, is the purgative and liberative way of God’s passionate love most fully expressed, most fully embodied, a love that advances inexorably from cross to tomb, to hell and back, given to all the world for its reconciliation and renewal. The Lamb is also the Lion.”

“Blake Ostler announces his purpose as “a rescue operation to save the heart of God’s revelations to the Hebrews from the Greek mind.” The direct and powerful experience of the mysterious God that characterizes Hebrew religion was, he asserts, taken captive by the Greek fascination with intellectual puzzles. And the result was the complicated and unsatisfactory doctrine of the Trinity that has dominated traditional thinking ever since.

Ostler steps through the common complaint that Mormons aren’t Christian because they believe, not only in three separate individuals in the Godhead, but also in the deification of human beings. He demonstrates the clear biblical understanding, both in the precursors of the Old Testament and the New, that Jesus and God the Father were not one in some incomprehensible “substance” while separate in person, but were actually distinct individuals. What made them one was their indwelling love. It is that loving unity into which they invite human beings.

A major contribution of this volume, the third in Ostler’s series Exploring Mormon Thought, is his reconstruction of the Hebrew view of a council of gods, presided over by the Most High God. In the oldest Hebrew sources, Yahweh was one of these gods. Thus, from the beginning of the Christian revelation, there was no confusion about a shared identity, although Ostler’s discussion of the king/vizier relationship in the honor and shame culture of the ancient world explains how the confusion could have arisen.

In language and thought accessible to the lay reader but simultaneously rigorous and scholarly, Ostler analyzes and responds to the arguments of contemporary international theologians, reconstructs and interprets Joseph Smith’s important King Follett Discourse and Sermon in the Grove just before the Mormon prophet’s death, and argues persuasively for the Mormon doctrine of “robust deification.”