Is it biblical to love the sinner and hate the sin?

Question 12064.

The phrase love the sinner and hate the sin has become one of those sayings that everybody quotes and nobody examines. It is not in the Bible, which surprises people. It comes closest to a line of Augustine’s about loving people and hating their faults, and it reached English through Gandhi of all sources.

That does not make it wrong. Plenty of true things are not verses. But a phrase doing this much work in Christian conversation deserves to be tested, and when I test it I find something half right and half rather badly misused.

Is it biblical to love the sinner?

The underlying idea is thoroughly biblical even though the wording is not. God loves the world while hating what is destroying it. He demonstrates His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, Romans 5:8. That is the whole gospel in a sentence and it holds both halves together without difficulty.

Scripture also uses the language of hatred about sin without hesitation. There are things the LORD hates, listed in Proverbs 6, and they are behaviours rather than categories of person. The psalmist says those who love the LORD should hate evil. So the instinct to love the sinner while hating what he does has genuine biblical grounding.

What complicates it is that Scripture also speaks of God’s wrath resting on persons, not only on their behaviour. The Bible does not tidily separate the sin from the sinner in the way our slogan implies, and any honest treatment has to reckon with that. I have written on it in whether God hates sinners or only sin.

Where the phrase does real good

Used properly, it keeps two things from collapsing into one. It stops us pretending that sin does not matter, which is where a sentimental church ends up, and it stops us treating people as though they were nothing but their sin, which is where a harsh church ends up.

It also reflects how any decent parent operates. You can be furious about what a child has done and still be entirely committed to the child, and nobody finds that contradictory. The capacity to love the sinner is not a theological trick, it is ordinary love applied consistently.

And it protects the possibility of change. If a person simply is their sin, there is nothing to be done for them. If the sin is something that has hold of them, then rescue is conceivable, which is precisely what the gospel announces.

Where it goes badly wrong

The trouble is that the phrase is almost always deployed about someone else’s sin, and usually a sin the speaker has no temptation towards. I have never once heard a Christian say it about greed, gossip or pride within the congregation. It gets reserved for sexual sins, which tells you something uncomfortable about how we are using it. We love the sinner most easily when his sin is one we were never going to commit.

It is also frequently a preface to unkindness. When a sentence begins with a claim to love the sinner, the listener knows something wounding is coming, and the claim has become a licence rather than a description. Love that has to announce itself before speaking is usually not love.

Then there is the way it lands on the person hearing it. Someone whose identity is bound up with a behaviour does not experience your careful distinction as care. They hear a person telling them that they are loved conditionally, with the condition placed exactly where it hurts most. Whether or not the theology is right, the pastoral effect needs to be understood.

Two words worth knowing

The New Testament word for the love in question is agape, which describes a settled commitment to another person’s good rather than a warm feeling about them. That matters enormously here, because you can love the sinner in this sense while feeling nothing pleasant at all, and while disagreeing with everything they stand for.

The other word worth knowing is hamartia, the Greek for sin, which literally carries the sense of missing the mark. It is a word about actions and about the condition that produces them, not a label for a category of human being. Scripture uses it of me as freely as it uses it of anyone I might be tempted to look down on.

Put those two together and the principle stands up rather well. A settled commitment to someone’s genuine good, combined with a clear-eyed refusal to pretend that what is destroying them is fine. That is what it means to love the sinner, and it costs a great deal more than a slogan does.

What this looks like when it is real

I think of an older member of a congregation I served who spent years quietly caring for a neighbour whose life was, by any biblical standard, a mess. She never once lectured him. She took him meals, remembered his birthday, drove him to appointments, and answered honestly when he asked what she believed. He came to faith in his seventies.

She would not have described what she did as loving the sinner and hating the sin. She would have said she liked him and thought he needed the Lord. If you want to know what it means to love the sinner, it looked like that. The theology was all there and none of it was announced, which is generally how the best pastoral work gets done.

That is the standard I measure my own conversations against, and I fall short of it regularly. It is easy to be right and useless.

Whose sin am I supposed to hate?

Here is the correction that transforms the phrase. Scripture directs my hatred of sin overwhelmingly towards my own. Jesus tells me to take the log out of my own eye before addressing the speck in my brother’s, Matthew 7:3-5, and Paul tells believers to put to death what is earthly in them.

Search the New Testament for instructions about hating other people’s sin and the material is thin. Search for instructions about mortifying your own and it is everywhere. The energy Christians spend hating the sins of the culture would be better spent on the sins in the mirror, and I include myself in that.

My answer on mortifying sin develops the practical side. The believer who is genuinely at war with his own sin tends to speak about everybody else’s with far more gentleness, because he knows the terrain.

What Jesus actually did

Watch how He handled the woman caught in adultery. He refused to condemn her and He told her to go and sin no more. Both halves of love the sinner and hate the sin are there, and notice the order. The welcome came first and the instruction came second, spoken to someone who had just been rescued rather than shouted at someone across a room.

Watch Him with Zacchaeus. He invites Himself to dinner before a word is said about restitution, and the restitution follows without being demanded. Watch Him with the Samaritan woman, where He names her situation with complete accuracy and without contempt, and she runs back to her town saying come and see.

If we want to love the sinner properly, that is the pattern to study rather than the slogan. Jesus never softened the truth and He never used it as a weapon, and the people who most needed to change were the people most drawn to Him.

Should we keep using the phrase?

I have largely stopped saying it, though I have not stopped believing what it means. It has been worn smooth by overuse and it now signals something to the hearer that I do not intend. When a phrase has become a flag rather than a description, it stops communicating.

What I try to do instead is simply behave that way without announcing it. Be the person who turns up, who listens, who is honest when asked, who does not pretend to agree and does not lead with disagreement either. Nobody needs to be told you love the sinner if you are demonstrably doing it.

And where the truth has to be spoken, speak it to a person you have earned the right to address, in private, with your own failures fresh in your mind. That is a long way from a slogan deployed on the internet.

So, now what?

Take the phrase and turn it around this week. Name one sin of your own that you have been tolerating rather than hating, and deal with it before you next tell anyone to love the sinner. That is the biblical use of the principle and it is the one nobody enjoys.

Then think of the person whose life you disapprove of most, and ask when you last did something kind for them without an agenda attached. If the honest answer is never, then whatever we are doing, it is not what the phrase claims. If you want to love the sinner, the sinner has to be someone you actually know.

Who would say, if asked, that you had loved them well while disagreeing with them plainly?

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8, ESV