Give Place to the Anger in Your Injured Mind: An Anthropological Reading of Rom 12:19?

Abstract

Paul exhorts his audience in Rom 12:19 to “give place to anger.” In today’s exegesis, there is a consensus to understand this term as God’s wrath. This article questions the complement of the missing attribute with “God” and proposes other options. Drawing on evidence in reception history, two anthropological alternatives are presented – the anger of the enemy or the anger of the addressees themselves. It is shown that Origen already presented an anthropological reading as the anger of the enemy. In the early modern period, the passage could be understood in a threefold way. The interpretation as one’s own anger has its roots in monastic interpretations like those of John Cassian. These observations in the history of interpretation prompt exegetical inquiry into whether the passage could have been understood in a similar way in the 1st century CE. As anger is a widely worked-on philosophical matter in antiquity, Seneca and Plutarch are examined to comprehend their strategies of anger control. Both contemporaries of Paul provide conceptions of anger that would enable one to understand Rom 12:19 as speaking of an anthropological anger.