Wrath? Love? Which is it? (Brunner)

God’s wrath cannot be compared with God’s love; for God’s love is His nature, but His wrath is never, and in no sense, His nature. It is His relation to the sinner so long as the sinner does not believe. It is not an error about which man needs to be “enlightened”, it is not the product of a primitive “anthropomorphic” idea of God, but it is something real, which can only be removed by the real event of the death of Christ on the Cross, and by faith in Him. It is the reality in which sinful man lives, until through faith in the Cross of the Son of God he is actually led out of it. It has the same reality as the law, as the guilt and the curse of the law. It is as real as the Passion of Jesus. It is the effect of sin, that God must seem to the sinner to be angry, that he comes under the curse of the law. Sin creates a reality, which lies between the love of God and man, and man cannot remove this real obstacle; God alone can do this. This removal of the reality of wrath is the Atonement.—Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of Creation and Redemption, 297