On God Loving and Hating

[[Sister Laurel, I was thinking what you said about God never speaking with a denigrating or sneering attitude. God judges evil and sin though. He clearly doesn't like these, so what is the difference? How about God hating sinners?]]

Good question, so thanks for that! My sense of the difference between the two is that saying no to sin and evil, and disliking or even hating these (meaning disliking completely with one's whole self), does not disparage or denigrate the person involved in the sin or evil. God does whatever God does with love and that means with respect.  So, while God may hate sin and evil, he loves his creation, especially including those who do and are therefore diminished by the sin. When we imagine God sneering at someone or something, it seems to me that we are coloring the images with our own emotions and feelings. Let me say that that, of course, is not unusual, but part of discernment (or preparing for discernment) is working with and through the feelings and emotions that color the way we perceive things so we can appreciate the situation in a more objective (and perhaps more Godlike) way. Feelings can cause us to react to things rather than respond to them. But God, who possesses himself perfectly and without distortion or diminution, for that reason responds with, and as, perfect self-gift. That means the One who is Love-in-act never simply reacts, and so too, never sneers nor denigrates even as (he) pronounces awesome judgments.

When we speak about having our responses touched with sin or evil (and this can certainly include various attitudes!), for instance, we are speaking about one being in some sense or another, in bondage to, tied to, or hampered by something that prevents us from truly being the person God has called us to be. It may be anger, fear, resentment, grief, or any number of things caused by woundedness, trauma, etc., that bind us, but these bonds will distort our responses to make them more reactive than they (or we) are meant to be. When that happens, our "no" to something we may (perhaps rightly) not approve of, becomes tinged with the colors of our own wounds and personal distortions. A simple "no" may become personal denigration, and a simple statement of disagreement morphs into a sneer.  I hope you see what I mean.

Does God hate sinners? Well, certainly the way our Bible translations go, some have them saying that God hates sinners. (cf Ps 5:5) But what is being said really? First, it is important to recognize that in Scripture often "hate" is used as a semitism, that is, a Semitic idiosyncratic form of speech that may not translate so directly into our own language. Thus, when we are told that in "coming to Jesus we must hate our father and mother, brother and sister. . ." (Luke 14:26), hatred really means to love less or, better, to love them in a secondary place. Secondly, there is a paradox involved in this as well, namely, that those who love God more than they love others (i.e., those who put love of God first!!) will discover they are empowered to know and love those others even better than they had before putting God first. 

So, when we speak about God hating a sinner we must see things similarly. First, because we are sinners capable of becoming righteous, we each have a true and false self. The true self is the "righteous" self, the one who is as God created them to be, the self that is full of God-given potential and possibility and is a true response to God's love and call. The false self is the self that falls short of all of that, the one that wants to create themselves rather than receiving personhood as a gift of God, that self that is in bondage to false gods and disvalues that are unworthy of being chosen, those less than truly real selves who are distorted in all of the ways the true self can become distorted. In terms of the Semitism explained above, God loves the false self less than the true self. That is, God always puts the true self first and loves it into existence. God empowers the true self and allows that true Self whom he loves with all his heart to replace the false and distorted self. I think it is important to remember that God loves things into existence so they can replace the untrue and less real. In this way, God's "hatred" really is about loving something better and wanting more for the partial and/or distorted reality to be replaced.

At every point, when we speak of God responding to reality we are speaking about God being true to it and to himself. We are speaking about God's love, about God always being Love-in-Act. We are also speaking, then, about God respecting the truth he sees so clearly even amid great distortions and partial reality. When I wrote that God NEVER denigrates or sneers at anything or anyone it was as a piece of this larger theology of God as creator and redeemer through unconditional, eternal, and (I believe) inescapable love. Love is the way God both creates AND destroys in a single act,. Meanwhile, to love in the way God does, also means seeing as God does, looking and seeing the deep potential for life and love that resides deep within everything that exists. The fact is, seeing in this way simply does not allow for approaching reality in a way that leads to denigration or sneering. 

We might also answer the question of whether God hates the sinner by asking someone to look at the crucifix and then see what they say. Paul's answer was simple: Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. (Rom 5:6) This is a love that creates even as it destroys (and no, I am not speaking about the destruction of Jesus, but of sin and death as God begins to create a new heaven and new earth with Jesus' resurrection). It is a love that does not sneer at or denigrate those who crucified Jesus but instead takes both sinful and true humanity with the utmost respect and seriousness. I think that sometimes when the word hate is used in our Scriptures, it indicates respect (which is NOT necessarily the same as approval), as well as utmost seriousness. In any case, whether we perceive this in terms of creation or destruction, God's judgment is always all about God's unfathomable love for the true and really real.