Wrath

Interestingly enough, the early writers on the seven deadly sins regarded wrath or anger as one of the worst sins.

But, Professor Cunningham, the bible makes mention of divine wrath, so why is god allowed to be angry, but we're not?

Well, the early writers on the subject they made a big distinction between indignation and wrath and they argued that it's perfectly appropriate to express indignation in the face of social injustice and that's a healthy thing. The preachers call that "righteous anger" whereas wrath eats at a person individually and poisons his or her relationships with every other person. Its synonyms would be something like resentment, a kind of smoldering constant bitterness.

So the sin of wrath is less about yelling and raging and more about internal anger?

Yeah. The distinction you'd wanna make is the distinction between the person who may erupt in anger without thinking about it too much and the person who is an angry person. I think that's the critical distinction. For example, just five days ago, I was turning into my driveway and some guy tried to pass me on the left and dinged the back of my car and then promptly zipped away before I could get his license plate number. I want to tell you that I was not a model of forgiveness at that moment. I was mad as hell. I'm still mad; I've still gotta work on it... But I don't think of myself as someone who constantly is in a state of rage and resentment because... resentment, if you hold it in, the tendency is that it feeds on itself so that a person who is deeply resentful, or a person who is deeply bitter, finds it increasingly impossible to forgive... much less to love.