Loving a Total Sinner
Sin is a crime against the law of God. The Church says it is not merely breaking
a rule but also doing damage to yourself and making yourself a threat to God and
others. To love a threat to you and others and God would be to hate yourself and
others and God so you would end up evil. It is different if the sinner has
repented and tried to rebuild the ruined relationships.
The doing of damage to yourself is unintended. When you steal £50, you do it for
the £50 and not to hurt yourself and you don't want to hurt others by them
finding out. So any damage done must be attached to the sin by God but it is not
intrinsic to the sin. That is why Amy can be as bad of a prostitute as Tammy and
yet have less damage done to her personality. God obviously wants to reinforce
and sanction and honour the rules by attaching a price to them and that price
differs from sinner to sinner though one may be as bad as the other. So the rule
comes first not the damage. The damage is the servant of the rule.
It would be strange to be as worried about people harming themselves by sin as
you are about the rule being broken. It would be stranger to be more worried
about people harming themselves than about the rule being broken. Both would be
sinful with the second option being the bigger sin. In that light, loving the
sinner and hating the sin would be absurd. You would worry about the rule being
broken more than the person. Thus you could not claim that hating the sin does
not mean you hate the sinner. You would be in denial about your hate for the
sinner if you did.
How can you wish evil on a sin (hate) and love the sinner?
The notion that a sinner has a good side and we must see them more as good
people than as sinners does not help. It is still saying you must hate them in
so far as they are sinful.
To see them as good really means to see they should be given the reward of love.
But that presupposes a person having the ability to deserve hate. You cannot
regard love as legitimate without automatically sanctioning hate.
If you say you love the sinner for the sinner is not all bad and hate the sin,
that implies that if you met a person who has hardly any good qualities at all
you would have to hate that person. It is saying you condone and encourage that.
Even if you think no such person exists, the fact remains you hold hate in your
heart. You would hate them if they did exist. You still have the intention to
hate. Religion gives you the potential to hate. An atheist might have a great
potential to hate but a Christian person has an even bigger potential for she or
he regards sin as such a grave insult to God that it merits everlasting torment
in Hell.
Love the sinner and hate the sin is as silly as love the nurse and hate the
woman who is the nurse. The teaching that we must love the sinner and hate the
sin because we are sinners ourselves suggests that hating the sinner is good but
only if you are not a sinner! It involves wishing you were in a position to be
able to hate the sinner! That is a fine love - it is really a demonstration of
how we prefer looking good to being good.
The Bible says we are sinners by nature. We are not sinners because we sin. We
sin because we are sinners. We are sinners by nature like a frog is a frog for
it is made that way. This doctrine that we are by nature sinners means that
there is no part of us that is really good. The good we do has mercenary
motives. Perhaps we only help the poor for the sake of the principle of helping
others that we cannot live without. It is about us not them so our kindness has
self-interest all over it. Doctrines like that encourage hatred towards the
sinner.
BOOKS CONSULTED
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, Friedrich Nietzsche, Penguin, London, 1990
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, Veritas, London, 1995
ECUMENICAL JIHAD, Peter Kreeft, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1996
GOD IS NOT GREAT, THE CASE AGAINST RELIGION, Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic
Books, London, 2007
HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Monarch,
East Sussex, 1995
HOW DOES GOD LOVE ME? Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986
IN DEFENCE OF THE FAITH, Dave Hunt, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 1996
MADAME GUYON, MARTYR OF THE HOLY SPIRIT, Phyllis Thompson, Hodder & Stoughton,
London, 1986
MORAL PHILOSOPHY, Joseph Rickaby SJ, Stonyhurst Philosophy Series, Longmans
Green and Co, London, 1912
OXFORD DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY, Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1996
PRACTICAL ETHICS, Peter Singer, Cambridge University Press, England, 1994
PSYCHOLOGY, George A Miller, Penguin, London, 1991
REASON AND BELIEF, Brand Blanschard, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1974
REASONS FOR HOPE, Ed Jeffrey A Mirus, Christendom College Press, Virginia, 1982
THE ATONEMENT: MYSTERY OF RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Archbishop of Dublin,
Veritas, Dublin, 1987
SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD, Jonathan Edwards, Sword of the Lord,
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, undated
THE BRIEF OF ST ANTHONY OF PADUA (Vol 44, No 4)
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, Thomas A Kempis, Translated by Ronald Knox and Michael
Oakley, Universe, Burns & Oates, London, 1963
THE LIFE OF ALL LIVING, Fulton J Sheen, Image Books, New York, 1979
THE NEW WALK, Captain Reginald Wallis, The Christian Press, Pembridge Villas,
England, undated
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, CS Lewis, Fontana, London, 1972
THE SATANIC BIBLE, Anton Szandor LaVey, Avon Books, New York, 1969
THE STUDENT’S CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Rev Charles Hart BA, Burns & Oates, London,
1961