We’ve all heard it said, “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” It sounds like a good Christian thing to say doesn’t it? As Christians we are anti-sin and pro-love so this seems to make a lot of sense. We’ve probably all heard it said, “As it says in the Bible, ‘hate the sin but love the sinner…’ The problem is that it’s not in the Bible.
It’s actually something that Gandhi wrote in 1929 when he wrote, “Hate the sin and not the sinner.” St. Augustine expressed a similar thought back in AD 424: “With love for mankind and hatred of sins.” The thoughts were close but not Biblical and not, exact.
Some have used Jude 1:22-23, 22 And have mercy on some who are wavering; 23 save others by snatching them out of the fire; and have mercy on still others with fear, hating even the tunic defiled by their bodies, as something of a proof text for this, but, alas, it’s not even close.
There are a bunch of problems with this statement and good reason why it’s not in the Bible.
For one, when we begin to entertain the thought of ‘hate’ it blurs the line between love and hate. Hating the sin allows us to judge people by their sins. Hate is something we are called, specifically NOT to do. God is love and we who abide in love abide in God. When we venture into the world of ‘hate’ we are moving in the wrong direction.
Secondly, it gives us permission to judge one another. Have I ever judged another person? Yes. Did I have any right to judge another person? No. Have I ever looked at the speck in another person’s eye and missed the plank in my own eye? Far too many times. When we begin to think we have the right to ‘hate the sin,’ we go down the path of judgment and judging others, from a Biblical perspective, is most definitely a sin.
Thirdly, it puts us into a position of determining sins. Sin is classically seen as moving away from God or living outside of God’s will or God’s way. The difficulty in determining ‘sins’ comes from the fact that we have to determine what God’s will or God’s way happens to be. It means what my conscience determines is sinful or not supersedes your conscience. That ultimately leads to judging one another and, again, that is most definitely a sin.
So, how do we treat sinners?
Love everyone. That covers it.
1 comment:
Love that - it explains why living in the South is hard for me.. Much too much definition of sin by my Christian friends, including things I've always been taught to be accepting of and loving toward (homosexuality, e.g.).
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