C.H. Dodd contended that Paul speaks of ‘the wrath’ ‘in a curiously impersonal way’, Rom 2:5; 9:22; Eph 2:3.  More recently, Derek Flood (Healing the Gospel) has argued similarly.  Flood says that although Paul takes up the OT idea of the wrath of God, he can at the same time be seen to be moving away from it as being too much focused on a ‘problem’ with God (sin makes him angry) rather than with ourselves.

‘Because of this, I believe it is more helpful today to think of wrath in terms of the impersonal consequence of sin, rather than in terms of God’s anger. Doing so stresses that what we are dealing with is the inevitable consequence for an action. It follows from sin like falling is the consequence of jumping off a cliff.’

Flood appeals to the present passage:-

‘In Romans 1:18-32, the longest discourse on wrath in the New Testament, Paul retains the language of “wrath” from the Old Testament, but now speaks of us being given over to sinful desires (1:24), shameful lusts (1:26), and a depraved mind (1:28). In this way, Paul says, people “received in themselves the due penalty for their error” (1:27). That is, Paul describes how God’s wrath consists in leaving us to the consequence of our actions, rather than in God actively punishing us. The “punishment” is for God to step away and let us do what we want.’

We think that Flood oversimplifies the issue when he contrasts an emotional concept of God’s wrath (‘evoking a picture of self-focussed immaturity’) with this impersonal concept.

We agree that, at least in the present age, divine wrath is revealed in large measure by giving people over to the consequences of their actions, as the present passage teaches.  We agree with Stott that ‘When we hear of God’s wrath, we usually think of “thunderbolts from heaven, and earthly cataclysms and flaming majesty,” instead of which his anger goes “quietly and invisibly” to work in handing sinners over to themselves, v24, 26, 28. As John Ziesler writes, it “operates not by God’s intervention but precisely by his not intervening, by letting men and women go their own way.”‘

‘The history of the world is the judgement of the world.’ (Friedrich Schiller)

We also urge that God’s wrath does not suffer from the defects to which our own anger is so prone.  It is, in fact, far removed from the fitful anger to which we ourselves are prone, and which is always contains a greater or lesser element of malignity. Yet as human anger leads to the infliction of evil on its object, so does divine wrath. God has a calm and undeviating purpose to secure the connection between sin and misery, and this law has the same degree of consistency and inevitability as any other divine law in the physical or moral realm.

We think that the NT concept of divine wrath is clearly personal, Rom 1:18-22; 2:5-6; 3:5-6; 9:22. Cf. this last ref with 1 Tim 2:4, showing that both wrath and love are personal. And note the following OT refs: Am 3:6; Eze 7:8-9; Isa 63:6; Ho 5:14.

If wrath were impersonal, there could be no hope of divine mercy and forgiveness. Wrath would then be inexorable, and there would be no hope of escape from its consequences. But anger is an attribute of a living, personal God, who enters into personal relationships with us. It is this that makes propitiation, reconciliation and forgiveness possible, cf. Isa 12:1.