For two weeks, two icons of horrific violence have dominated the news: the August 22 murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was peacefully checking her phone on a Charlotte commuter train when the black man sitting behind her stabbed her in the neck; and the September 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot in the neck during a rally at Utah Valley University. Like the dismembered body of the murdered concubine in Judges 19, both icons indict not only the individual murderers, but American politics and society. A supposedly liberal society has grown rotten when it can no longer protect young women on public transport or take free speech on university campuses for granted.
Some Christians propose a solution: Christians must learn to hate. An increasing number of pastors condemn soft, effeminate Christianity and urge the church to embrace manly combativeness. “You don’t hate the government/the left/Big Eva enough” hums like a mantra on Christian social media.
Christians who recoil at any suggestion that we should hate haven’t spent enough time reading their Bibles. David loathes those who rise against the Lord: “I hate them with a perfect hatred” (Ps. 139:22). Solomon’s “turn, turn” poem finds a “time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace” in the rhythm of life (Eccle. 3:8). Elsewhere, Solomon says Yahweh hates seven things: He hates haughty eyes, lying tongues, hands that shed innocent blood, hearts that devise evil, feet that run to wickedness, false witnesses, and those who spread strife among brothers (Prov. 6:16–19). Most famously, pithily, and chillingly, Yahweh himself declares, “Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated” (Mal. 1:2–3). Theologians—the best of them—offer clarifications, but they don’t try to escape the dreadful truth of Scripture: God hates, and wants us to hate too.
God hates, but he isn’t hate. God is love, and his hatred expresses the love he is. His wrath breaks out against rebels to guard and avenge the holiness of his own name, and his fire consumes enemies to protect and restore his people and his world. The consuming fire of God is love stronger than death, more jealous than the grave. His hatred of sin comes to a cunning climax in the cross, when he overthrows sin, death, and Satan in the very act of submitting to their assaults. Properly, for both God and for us, hate flows from love, as the zealous readiness to kill and die for what and whom we love.
Love, and the hatreds that accompany it, take different forms in different settings. Civil authorities love their people by firmly opposing evils that threaten them. Love doesn’t tolerate or accommodate to evil. Yet, we need to be careful with such qualifications, critical though they are. Hate comes easily to fallen men and women, and we can find all sorts of rationales to prove our hatred and cruelty are actually expressions of righteous love. That’s one reason the New Testament again and again spells out the specific contours of love. “I say to you, do not resist by evil means,” Jesus says, “If anyone wants to take your shirt, let him have your cloak also” (Matt. 5:38–40). “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Tax collectors love those who love them, and Jesus calls his disciples to greater righteousness (Matt. 5:44–46). If you want to burn your enemy, if you want to heap up coals on his head, feed him, give him a drink, never return evil for evil. Appeal to God to take vengeance, including through public authorities, but meanwhile overcome evil with good (Rom. 12:14–21). That’s how Christian love expresses its righteous hatred.
Saying the church needs to teach or learn hatred misconstrues the nature of love. It concedes love and compassion to the softies who equate love with sentimental toleration of evil. It also misconstrues the nature of hate. To make hate the foundation of Christian ethics or politics, to turn it into the animating impulse of life, is evil. Godly hatred never stands alone, and cultivating hatred as such is demonic.
Which leaves us with what appears to be a paradox, but isn’t. Properly ordered hatred depends entirely on properly ordered love. We respond to the hateful violence and perversion of our world not by stoking hatred, but the opposite. To combat the world’s hatred, we need to cultivate love and learn to love as God loves. Our hatred is disciplined when we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We need to hate evil enough to take up a cross.
