Practical Theology by Kreeft Peter

Author:Kreeft, Peter [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586179687
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2014-10-17T06:00:00+00:00

178. HATING SINS WITHOUT HATING SINNERS

What is the key to understanding, accepting and practicing the old adage, “Love the sinner, hate the sin”?

It is lawful to hate the sin in one’s brother . . . but we cannot hate our brother’s nature . . . without sin. Now it is part of our love for our brother that we hate the fault and the lack of good in him, since desire for another’s good is equivalent to hatred of his evil (II-II,34,3).

One wonders why this adage, “love the sinner, hate the sin”, is so often disputed; for it would seem obvious that the only two possible alternatives would be either (1) to hate the sinner as well as the sin or (2) to love the sin as well as the sinner, i.e., to love the sin that is harming the sinner (and that too would be hating the sinner rather than loving him, for it would be loving his harm). Both of these alternatives are forms of hating the sinner instead of loving him.

The analogy is often made with cancer. If sin is to the soul what cancer is to the body, then to love someone’s body is necessarily to hate the cancer that is killing it.

The reason this is disputed is that the sinner is so addicted to his sin that he cannot or will not distinguish himself from it. He says that he is what he does, that his very identity consists in his sin, so that to hate his sin is to hate him.

This is an extremely dangerous attitude. It hardly ever attaches to any other sin except one, and is never heard from any organized group of people except one.

And if we refuse to speak the truth to them, out of human respect, that proves that we do not really love them, just as they accuse us of not loving them, but for another reason (because we do not accept their sin).

St. Thomas notes that “it is part of our love for our brother that we hate the fault . . . in him.” If we accepted the self-justifying sinner’s demand to stop hating his sin, we would have to stop loving him. Moral relativists cannot understand this, for they do not believe that there is such a thing as a natural law, or natural vs. unnatural acts, or sins against human nature itself, or often even any sin at all (for if there is no absolute moral law to sin against, how can there be any such thing as sin?). They reject the analogy with cancer because they think of the soul as wholly different from the body, or even nonexistent; or because they reject all natural analogies. But such analogies are so commonsensical and obvious that the reason for rejecting them is almost always moral rather than intellectual: the will not to be judged, not to be wrong, not to have to feel guilty about or give up one’s precious sins.

So the strife between

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