Hate the sin, love the sinner?
Tobias suggests that we stop using the old saw “hate the sin, love the sinner”. He does this because, he believes, it goes against the very nature of Christianity. First, he says, it’s not biblical – both because it’s not explicit anywhere in the Bible and because it actually goes against the teachings of the Bible. Sin is more than just something that we do. We are not told merely to avoid killing our brother but to avoid hating him, not merely to avoid adultery but to avoid lust. How, then, can we separate sin from sinner in the way that this aphorism requires?
How does one separate the two, if sin involves more than behavior, as both the Law and Jesus maintain? Jesus does not deal with sin apart from sinners. Without a word about hatred, Christ on the contrary tells us that we should love the sinner and forgive the sin…
It is impossible to “hate the sin” apart from the sinner, as if sin had some reality apart from the desires and actions of fallen human beings, as if you could somehow extract the sin from a person and vent your purifying fury upon it. Such a notion is very far from the Gospel.
pax et bonum
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If he did not, it changes nothing of his teachings; his lessons still stand.
Ruth ()
5:09pm on 10 May 2007
Once that’s clear, it’s easy to see how you can hate someone as a sinner and love them as someone God created. What you hate about them is their stubborn and deliberate evilness and resistance to all that’s good, and what you love about them is that they don’t have to be that way, that God can transform them, and that they can be the kind of person God created them to be. You’re right that hating what they do amounts to a kind of hatred toward them, since they’re the ones doing it. But what they’re doing is deserving of hatred, as what we all do is deserving of hatred. Since God’s love is totally undeserved, our imitation of God’s love runs contrary to any notion that people in themselves deserve our love. We love them not because there’s something love-worthy in them but because that’s how we imitate God, who loves the unlovely. He loves despite his despising of everything we do. This explains why you can see godly people expressing hate for those who hate God’s people in the psalms in a way that’s consistent with loving your enemy. You don’t have to treat those psalms as less-inspired or as simply reporting on bad motives of the psalmists. You can see them as motivated by a love of all that’s good and thus a resistance to all that’s opposed to good.
I highly recommend D.A. Carson’s Love In Hard Places as the best book I’ve ever read on Christian love. It deals with this issue, among many others.
Jeremy Pierce () (URL)
5:31pm on 10 May 2007
Jeremy Pierce () (URL)
5:34pm on 10 May 2007
The thing with Jesus’ teachings is that focusing on them alone misses the point of what He was saying. I don’t think that we can listen to “Blessed are the meek” and “Turn the other cheek” without also listening to “Before Abraham was, I AM” and “No one comes to the Father except through me.” There’s more to Jesus than just a moral teacher – radical as His moral teachings were.
As for “did Jesus rise from the dead” – this is the historical assertion of the Church. This single incident is the defining moment of the Christian faith. Without it, there is nothing resembling Christianity, and nothing truly resembling what Jesus talked about.
The problem, of course, is that it’s impossible and ludicrous. Traditionally, the answer is twofold – it explains the existence of the Church as nothing else can, and it explains our experiences as nothing else can. Without a risen Christ, it’s pretty much impossible to account for the actions of the apostles and the authorities who had to deal with them. Plus, we meet the risen Christ in our prayers and meditation. How we understand that reality is less important, fundamentally, than the fact that we believe it (where “believe” means something like “live as though it was real”). Unlike some visitors here, I’m willing to accept those who “spiritualise” the resurrection as fellow Christians, although I’d maintain that the physical resurrection is what’s intended by the records. (And that, if we can accept a spiritual resurrection, I don’t really see that it’s actually any more miraculous to accept a physical one!)
Hope that helps, at least a little.
pax et bonum
[John] () (URL)
7:31pm on 10 May 2007
“The whole problem arises only because people have some notion that you cant love someone whom you also hate.“
I don’t think that’s the point. The suggestion is simply, first, that “hate the sin, love the sinner” is not taught anywhere in the Bible and, second, that it’s actually antithetical to much that is taught there.
“what you love about them is that they dont have to be that way“
In other words, you hate what and who they are, and love only what they might become in the future. That’s not loving the sinner, I’d suggest – it’s “loving” our picture of what a perfect human being would be.
“We love them not because theres something love-worthy in them but because thats how we imitate God“
This, though, is bang on the mark. Love is what God is – nothing else in the Bible is equated as closely with God as is Love. That being so, it’s hard to understand how hating (the opposite of loving) can be godly. And, more particularly, how we can hate a person that God has made (because sin is not merely an external, separable thing – it’s part of our very fallen nature).
pax et bonum
[John] () (URL)
7:37pm on 10 May 2007
But when you say:
“Since Gods love is totally undeserved, our imitation of Gods love runs contrary to any notion that people in themselves deserve our love. We love them not because theres something love-worthy in them but because thats how we imitate God, who loves the unlovely. He loves despite his despising of everything we do.”
... I can’t help but think that you have a pretty dim view of humanity. I despise some of the things that some people are capapble of doing. I question whether we might ALL be CAPABLE of doing some awful things (look at Nazi Germany and the history of slavery, for example), but I do err on the side of believing that people are, in fact, at least basically reasonable / decent, if not quite philanthropic.
John – yes, that you say is helpful to me. At the moment, I am debating the question of whether the resurrection was literal and bodily, literal but visionary only, or not at all, on another blog, and I wonder if I might lift a point from that blog and present it to you for comment:
“If you look at the first Gospel to be written, Mark, there is no reference to any physical resurrection appearances by Jesus. All we have is an empty tomb and the woman fleeing it. I think that if you look the New Testament references to this subject in the order they were written, you can see a progressive evolution and enhancement of the story.
I actually would start with the epistles of Paul, which were written before the gospels and which also make no mention (that I am aware of) of bodily resurrection appearances; Paul says that Jesus “appeared” to him in the same way that he appeared to the apostles. How did Jesus appear to Paul—in bodily form while walking on the earth, or in a vision? And if Jesus appeared to Paul in a vision, and it was the same kind of appearance as what the others before him experience, what does that say about what Paul thought?
Then if you look at Mark, the first Gospel to be written (some 40 years after Jesus died), as I mentioned, you will note that there is no mention whatsoever of any bodily appearances by a physically resurrected Jesus. Matthew, written later, has the disciples going to Galilee and Jesus appears to them there. Luke has the disciples staying in Jerusalem, with Jesus appearing to them in Jerusalem.
The resurrection stories are mutually contradictory and can’t be reconciled with one another. They also show a progression over time. They move Jesus’s appearances from Galilee to Jerusalem. John’s Gospel, which is latest, is just in general the most ethereal, and the most mythological of the four, and in my view is the least credible witness to something like this. John was written some 60-70 years after the crucifiction by a non-witness, and aside from the resurrection it has Jesus in his lifetime making all sorts of statements about himself that clearly reflect late fist century theology but have little credibility as having been anything that he would have actually said. So I would not take John’s resurrection story seriously as a literal depiction of events.
This evolution of the resurrection stories corresponds to the evolution of the birth stories and the evolution of when Jesus was declared to be the Son of God. In every case, there was a tendency to push the envelope of Christology in more elaborate directions.”
Ruth ()
10:04pm on 11 May 2007
Jeremy Pierce () (URL)
04:10am on 12 May 2007
Back a little to the original post.
I must admit, I was pretty fired up about Tobias’ statement and your concurrence. My initial reaction was, “There go the liberals minimizing sin and individual responsibility yet again.”
Yet, as I meditated upon the statement that “Hate the sin, love the sinner” is wrong, I found that I agreed. Let me throw out there why.
I think that Jeremy has hit something very relevant with his discussion of why it is so difficult for us to imaging hating the sin yet loving the sinner, and perhaps it can be maintained. Yet for the majority of us, it should be restructured to:
Love the sinner. Forgive the sin. Hate sin.
You see, we have a tendency to make “the sin” external to ourselves and “the sin” is something we see others do. It becomes an excuse to avoid dealing with sin in my heart and my life. I can point to the homosexual’s sin and “hate it” precisely because I don’t struggle with that particular sin, yet I avoid “hating” the pride, sloth, and lust in my own life. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” has become a mantra not for godly living, but merely for pointing out the ungodliness of others. if you don’t hate sin in your own life, you are almost incapable of hating sin in another’s.
Love God. Love your neighbor. Hate sin.
Hammertime () (URL)
4:11pm on 15 May 2007
Again we see the same errors we discussed in our last exchange.
The person you quoted obviously doesn’t understand what a contradiction is. There is no contradiction in the accounts. this is even more clear than in our last discussion. Second, there is no evidence that John was written by a non-eyewitness,or that Jesus’ statements in John “have little credibility to anything he actually said”. Third, his claim about Mark presupposes a critical approach to the texts that is far from universal, and ignores that Mark’s Jesus is declared in verse one to be “the Son of God”, who heals lepers, casts out demons, stills a storm, has the power to forgive sin, meets with Moses and Elijah in the transfiguration, predicts his death, burial and resurrection and second coming, and proclaims he is the Christ. Fourth, the nonsense about “evolution of stories” and “push the envelope of Christology” completely abandons the evidence he is attempting to use, as the Pauline epistles and the other gospels contain as high a Christology as John.
In short, your commenter is making it up. he has the right to make it up, but picking and choosing which scripture you “take seriously” isn’t Christianity – it’s idolatry.
Hammertime () (URL)
4:27pm on 15 May 2007
You hint at a point that Tobias mentioned in his comments on his original article – that the only sin we’re supposed to hate is our own. Our neighbour’s sin, we’re supposed to forgive.
There’s no question about “accomodating” sin. The issue is our attitude towards our neighbour. To the extent that our feelings about (“hatred” of) our neighbour’s sin prevent us loving her fully, we must repent of them.
pax et bonum
[John] () (URL)
4:49pm on 15 May 2007
While I wouldn’t put it quite as strongly, I’d agree that your sources here have opinions that are (shall we say?) far from universal. There’s pretty good evidence that all 4 Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or by people who had spent lots of time with eyewitnesses. One crucial point against that position is that Paul does, in fact, have some strong things to say about the resurrection – most particularly, that if there is no resurrection (meant generally but obviously therefore also of Christ) Christians are to be pitied more than any other people.
pax et bonum
[John] () (URL)
4:53pm on 15 May 2007
Ruth ()
6:27pm on 15 May 2007