God's Hatred

There is an objection I have heard when discussing the Biblical fact that God hates at least some sinners [1]--that humans do not or cannot hate with perfect righteousness like God does and thus humans should not hate other humans at all, only love them.  This might sound appealing to some people, particularly those who find the concept or experience of hatred unpleasant.  But it is neither a Biblical nor a rational position to hold.

First of all, the idea that redeemed humans cannot actually be morally perfected on earth, at least in some compartment of their lives, is foreign to Scripture.  Secondly, the claim that we should not hate as God does but we should love as he does is inherently illogical and unbiblical.  I never hear or see anyone say that if humans cannot love others perfectly then we should not love at all.  I exclusively see this extremely fallacious argument leveled against those who draw attention to the Biblical fact that God hates, a thing that does not logically exclude or diminish the fact that God loves.

The reason for this disparity is not because the Bible does not teach that God hates, or because hatred really is intrinsically wrong (it isn't, as I've explained before), but because people either 1) don't understand what love and hatred are, thus erroneously seeing them as logically incompatible, or because they 2) have some emotionalistic objection to all hatred rooted in the subjectivity of their consciences.  But love and hate are not logically incompatible, and hate is not identical to malice.  And conscience is an utterly useless tool in itself; at most it tells us how we feel about or have been conditioned to react to something, not if the thing itself really is wrong [2].

If anti-hatred Christians used the same fallacies with their positions on love that they do with their positions on hatred, then they would argue that Christians cannot or should not love because they cannot love exactly like God does.  But even if it truly was logically impossible for Christians to ever perfectly imitate an aspect of God's nature (and it is not), that would not change the fact that Christians are still obligated to love as God does.  Obligations don't disappear simply because someone doesn't carry them out fully.

The reason that some Christians object to the doctrine of divine hatred is because they have a faulty understanding of Christian theology and/or they are not acknowledging that God's moral nature is the only standard for right and wrong.  Love is good and obligatory on the Christian worldview only because it conforms to God's nature.  Likewise, just, legitimate hatred is non-sinful--and even obligatory--because it conforms to God's nature.  A rational person will not see that the Bible teaches that God both loves and hates and then insist that people, who are called to imitate God (Ephesians 5:1), only partially imitate God's attitudes.  To do so would be inconsistent with what the Bible actually teaches.  And to deny that the Christian God hates is to reject what is plainly described in Scripture (for more information on that, see the first link at the bottom).

There is a specific word for any claim that denies or contradicts a part of God's nature: heresy.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/does-god-hate.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-nature-of-conscience.html