Recollections

In an article in Harper’s magazine last year, Bill McKibben reported this disturbing figure:

“three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture.”

Of course, the phrase “God helps those who help themselves” doesn’t appear in Holy Scripture. But it’s only one of myriad cliches that have migrated into the biblical consciousness of Christians anyway.

Another such phrase is the supposed injunction to “hate the sin, but love the sinner.” Like Ben Franklin’s dictum, it’s a statement that doesn’t appear in the Bible. (Though it does appear in the works of the Bard, who quipped in Measure for Measure, “Condemn the fault and not the actor of it.”) But also like Ben Franklin’s dictum, the Bible would be a lot easier to live with if it did contain such a pleasing qualification. For both of these cliches artfully dodge some of the most uncomfortable and most central demands of Scripture. As McKibben notes, “God helps those who help themselves” takes the edge off of the radical command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Likewise, “hate the sin but love the sinner” dulls the force fo the even more radical command to “love your enemy.”

It’s telling that Jesus never qualified his commands to love in this way. He did not say “love your neighbor, if he helps himself.” And easy as it would have been, he did not follow his command to “love your enemies” with a fine distinction about which parts of an enemy his disciples were still allowed to hate. It’s striking, in fact, that Jesus never even describes his attitude towards the sins of sinners with the word “hate.” More often, he describes sin as a sickness that needs healing, and sinners as the sick who need a physician–and those metaphors make it much easier to see how one can love a sinner. At the very least, Jesus never used the word “hate” and “sinner” in the same sentence, never allowed those words to get as close to each other as the common cliche does.

To be sure, other parts of the Bible (particularly in the Old Testament) talk about the things that God “hates.” (Although beware about citing these passages as proof texts for the cliche, since there are also verses in the Old Testament that seem to collapse the distinction between sin and sinner.) And there are plenty of passages that urge Christians to “abhor evil” and “cling to what is good” and the like. But in almost every case these passages that come closest to an instruction to “hate the sin” direct our attention to the evil within ourselves. There is no passage that conjoins hating evil and loving the evildoer the way the cliche does, and perhaps there’s a reason. We are usually oh-so-adept at making the distinction between our evils and our selves, but when it comes to regarding the sins of others, we are hardly ever so discriminating.

Although, as I’ve said, Jesus’s teachings offer precious little in the way of support for “hating the sin” and “loving the sinner,” there is a way in which those phrases do describe what God does and who God is. He hates sin. He loves sinners. But a fuller and more accurate description of God is that he hates sin because he loves sinners, and sin both destroys sinners and stands as an obstacle to a reconciled relationship between God and his beloved. If God hates sin, it is because sin is an expression of hatred directed at him–or at least a choice to love something other than God. God hates that his beloved creatures hate him, not because he is an offended and capricious God, but because he craves relationship with sinners so much. For human beings, I suspect that “hating the sin and loving the sinner” serves as an excuse for supping sinners with a long spoon — for their own good, as it were. But for God, hating the sin is only always a sign of his loving the sinner. To hate the sin and to love the sinner are not two distinct attitudes vying with one another for the control of his affections, but two different ways of saying the same thing.

Perhaps the fundamental error in the cliche “hate the sin and love the sinner” is the way it reifies sin as though it were something that could be excised from a person and seen alongside him or her, so that we could regard one “thing” differently than the other. But sin is fundamentally a breach of relationship, as Lee has recently suggested. It is a relational problem that God solves by loving even those who are his enemies, a solution enjoined on us as well in our dealings with our enemies. And perhaps nothing underlines that “sin” is a broken relationship more than this fact: when the word “hates” appears in the New Testament (see here), it is used, almost without exception, to describe the world’s attitude toward God, not God’s attitude toward the world. It is not God’s hatred that needs to be defused in order for relationship with the sinner to be restored; it is ours.

So when we, as children of God, say we hate the sin but love the sinner, there is only one justifiable reason for such a statement: that we long passionately for the loving reconciliation of sinners, first with God and also with ourselves and others. Unless that longing for love is evident in our avowals of “hatred” for sin, I suspect there are darker motives for such avowals — motives that, far from drawing the sinner closer to ourselves and focusing our ire on the sin within ourselves, serve as excuses for avoiding reconciliation with others.