It gets said across kitchen tables, by a parent to a grown child, with a hug and meant as love. It gets said in meetings too, about a person who is not there, and then everyone moves on. The phrase is not in the Bible. What Scripture asks of the one who says it is harder: take the beam out of your own eye first, and love the person in ways that bless and pray.
A rule for one house
The oldest Christian form usually cited is a line in a letter of Augustine’s, Letter 211, written to a community of women who were quarreling over who should lead them. Most of the letter is house rules: how to obey, how to own a fault, how to correct the sister next to you and how to take it when she corrects you. In the section on correcting faults, the standard English translation asks them to act “with due love for the persons and hatred of the sin.”
It was written for people under one roof, living with each other’s faults. It is a rule about the fault in the next room: the sister is corrected, and if need be reported, inside a house both of them would still share in the morning. The modern sentence travels much farther than that house, to people who share no roof and no rule, and it can be said without the speaker’s own fault ever coming up.
Gandhi passed on a form of it in his autobiography, in quotation marks, as a precept.
‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.
Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV
He wrote it in a chapter about officials whose corruption he had exposed. They were acquitted. When they later applied for other posts, he did not stand in their way. The precept cost him, and he admitted how seldom anyone keeps it.
The psalm that hates, and how it ends
God hates, though, and so do his people, and Scripture does not hide it. “Thou hatest all workers of iniquity,” says Psalm 5:5, and Psalm 11:5 says of the wicked and him that loveth violence, “his soul hateth.” Psalm 139 says it most plainly, near its end.
Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
Psalm 139:21-22 (KJV)
Them, not their deeds, and two verses earlier he has said, “Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God.” The psalm does not soften the hatred. It also does not end there. The man who wrote those lines spends his last two verses asking God to search him, the speaker. Whatever else the psalm teaches, it does not leave that hatred aimed only outward: it ends with the light turned on the man who hates.
Deeds hated by name
Scripture does sometimes hate the deed by name. In Revelation 2:6 Christ commends the church at Ephesus for hating what a group called the Nicolaitans did: “thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” Romans 12:9 puts it in one line: “Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.”
One Old Testament command comes close to the idea, and it is aimed at a brother you can look in the eye.
Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.
Leviticus 19:17-18 (KJV)
No hatred kept in the heart, a word said openly, no grudge, and love as for yourself.
What it asks of the one who says it
When Jesus speaks of enemies, every instruction lands on the person: “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you,” in Luke 6:27-28. Four instructions, and none of them is about sorting.
Jesus’ rule about the beam puts your own fault first, and Paul tells the Galatians to restore a fallen brother gently while keeping their own weakness in view.
Whatever a family believes about the question underneath, and this page does not try to settle that, the instructions for the one who says the sentence are the same. Has my own fault been on the table first? Does my love for this person look like blessing, doing good and praying, or only like a disclaimer? Asked honestly, those questions change how the sentence is said, and often whether it needs to be said at all.
The prayer at the end of Psalm 139 belongs to the one who says the phrase. The man who hated God’s enemies closed his psalm by asking to be searched himself.
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Psalm 139:23-24 (KJV)