Check out this recent post from God’s Politics by Ryan Beiler, Does God Hate?
The crux is this: “As Stephen Colbert might say: ‘God hates or God loves? Pick a side � we’re at war.’ Or is such black-and-white, either/or thinking offensive to the nuanced and paradox-embracing mind of the progressive intellectual Christian? Discuss.”
And many did, here’s my response:
I think the problem with people’s perceptions of this is that they seem to think that God can only love or only hate. Well, Scripture seems to say he can do both. Why can’t we be comfortable with the idea that God loves the things that he created, and hates the perversions we’ve made of them?
The word nuanced is overused…in progressive circles it’s starting to translate to “convoluted”. The paradox-embracing Christian (progressive or conservative) should be perfectly at home with the idea that God is capable of both love and hate. If you can’t accept that how can you understand the tension between law and gospel, holiness and grace, and Jesus incarnation as fully God and fully man?
And my favorites from other readers:
As I understand it (but would appreciate if I was corrected), when the word “hate” is used in the bible it is taken as meaning “rejection”. Hence why God “loved” Jacob but “hated” Esau. God still blessed Esau, and didn’t hate him in a despicable way. He simply chose Jacob over Esau for his inheritance (since Esau treated it with contempt).
However I must say it is a simple and flawed theology to deduct that God must love everything because “God is love”. Love is not simply an emotion nor is it a wilfully naive. It is more of a choice, choosing to love something that is unlovely.
Perhaps study in to the original Hebrew and/or Greek texts would shed some light from time to time.
Alex Fear | Homepage
I agree with Alex on this point.
God is indeed love, but His love is very different from human conceptions of love. It is not mushy sentimentality, which is not to say that it is not personal and compassionate. But His love is indeed a different kind of “love” that is multi-faceted. A good resource for this would be D. A. Carson’s book ‘The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God’.
Another note - God’s love is informed (for lack of a better term) by His holiness. Holy love cannot “love” evil. It cannot “love” sin. God’s holiness means He cannot dwell with sin - and thus Christ’s atoning sacrifice is our entry into God’s presence because through His death, we have been clothed with His righteousness. God’s love was demonstrated in His dealing with the sin that separated us from Him through the death of His Son. But that sacrifice also demonstrated God’s justice, which will not allow sin and evil to go unpunished (Romans 3 is a good reference for this). You have to have both in mind to have a balanced view of God’s love.
That God hates sin is not a negative idea insofar as it speaks of the absolute holiness of God in which He will not “love” sin or evil.
We are informed by the Bible that when Christ returns He will judge the world for unrighteousness. We stand between the First and Second Advent of our Lord. Sin still dwells in the world, but God will deal with it definitively when Christ returns to consummate His Kingdom. We must keep that in mind when thinking of God’s hatred of sin and evil.
pollyanna | Homepage
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Hey,
Thanks for the link- sidekick status soon to be acknowledged!