A Love That Can Hate

Introduction

A number of weeks back, some of the guys out at New Saint Andrews (NSA), a Christian college up in Idaho, released an advertisement geared toward attracting a certain kind of young man. The video was fashioned after an ad Ernest Shackleton posted in a London paper for his Antarctica expedition in 1913, which you can see to your right. Shakelton, too, was looking for a certain type of man, the kind that this ad would attract, and simultaneously filter out the kind of man that would be a liability to his goal of reaching the South Pole.

Below is the advertisement NSA released. It is short and effective, like a right cross, but there is one moment in there, and you will know what that part is, which also opens the skin.

NSA has taken no small amount of flack for this and for obvious reasons. If you are unfamiliar with men like pastor Doug Wilson, who helped found the NSA, and with his history of pugnacious Christianity, then you know this ad is on the upswing of a parabolic curve of saucy rhetoric. Collectively, the media and attitude coming from Moscow, Idaho, where all these institutions are located, has come to be known as the “Moscow Mood”.

Is a Christian college really suggesting young men follow Jonny Cash’s example of the lip-biting middle finger? This has been a bridge too far for many, even for those who have been on Team Doug through other racey language exploits. For those who already had beef with men like Wilson, it is a nail in the coffin for their respect, trust, and honor of the man, and a call to place him in the enemy camp. If you have not heard of him, here is a link to his blog.

To be clear, Doug Wilson did not write the ad, but being the functioning spokesperson for NSA, Christ Church where he ministers, and Canon Plus, the publishing and media platform he helped start, his lap seems to be where the onus lay.

I have followed Wilson for many years; he has been formative in my biblical worldview, my writing style, and the cartography of my life. I subscribe to Canon Plus, have read a baker’s dozen of his books, and have watched every interview he has done in the past decade. I attended a conference this past April where he spoke and I got to shake his hand. He is not as tall as I thought. So, if I were a juror candidate, the attorney for the prosecution could rightly strike me from the jury for lack of objectivity. However, I do want to be as objective as I can when evaluating who I associate myself with; it is always a good idea to keep one foot outside the circle.

Acknowledging my bias, and understanding that there is no such thing as a view from nowhere, I wanted to scribble a few thoughts about the ad, what I think was intended, and how it points to a large deficit in the collective cultural position of the American church.

Meaning of the Middle

Much ink has been spilled over the ad, both hot takes and cold takes, responses in good faith and bad. It poured gas on some detractors’ ire and caused other conscientious objectors to have solid, biblical concerns. NSA has not retracted the ad or apologized for it, and I am not here suggesting they do. I have listened to a fair amount of the interviews with Wilson where the Finger has been discussed, and he generally defends the position well. But I haven’t heard Wilson respond with what seems to me to be the most obvious question, which I would like to present here. 

We all know the Finger means ‘f— you”. I’m not sure if it is in the American Sign Language dictionary, but if it is, it is the most often spoken phrase in that language. The f-word itself has alternative meanings – it is an expression of hatred and a vulgar sexual verb.

Some commentators were saying that the ad, by using the Finger, was incorporating this vulgar sexual exclamation. I don’t think this is true. Though the f-word certainly does carry that meaning, no one who is the recipient of the finger, say, by cutting someone off in traffic, thinks that the other driver intends to vigorously bed them. So I dismiss that particular angle of the argument. But this is no boon; the hatred and anger stuffed into that twenty percent of a wave still must be answered for by a Christian college.

Leftover is the other meaning – the disdainful, abhorrent loathing of someone or something. It intends an active antipathy, not a passive disgust by neglect that we may show for things we don’t care about. There is an aggressiveness to it and in many circumstances is a throwing of the gauntlet to fight. The ad encourages young men to not only hold but express this antipathy. On the face of it, it is not the kind of lesson we want our cherubic little sons to hear. Hatred, as the yard sign reads, is not a family value. We raised them better than that.

Or maybe we raised them worse than that – maybe we raised our boys to hate nothing?

A Word On Hatred

Transitive verbs, like love and hate, need a direct object to act upon. Love and hate cannot be judged as good or bad until we know what is being loved or hated. If I love drinking the blood of puppies, this would be a bad sort of love. If I hate child pornography that would be a good, healthy hatred to be nurtured. Hatred is a family value when directed towards bad things, and love can be repulsive depending on what is being loved.

So hatred cannot so easily be consigned to the deeds of the flesh that need mortification. It can be good. The Bible commands it in certain circumstances. Indeed, a healthy, well-directed hatred must have a seat in the Christian’s hearts up towards the front.

The Bible helps us to balance our understanding of hate, which is peppered in its pages. Sometimes it is bad, sometimes good. The Old Testament, particularly the Psalms, is filled with imprecations, maledictions, and beseechings for God to rain blue ruin on enemies (Psalms 5, 11, 25, 106, 119, 139, and others). These verses list some things God actively hates and those that the psalmist hates on God’s behalf. Apart from these declarations of hatred, we have a bunch of other actions God’s people took on His behalf that carry hatred’s wrath without words. There is a breed of hate, it seems, that is as black and sharp as obsidian and condoned by God. How are we to square this with John’s declaration that God is love and the myriad texts that seem to run the opposite way?

The New Testament has two words that translate as hate. First, and most often used, is miseo, which means to detest or to love less than by comparison. In most places, the Bible uses this word to describe the world’s attitude towards Christians (John 15:18) or as an interdiction of the attitude among Christians (1 John 3:15). Jesus teaches we are not to miseo our neighbor but to love him instead by actions of goodwill (Matthew 5:43-48). In this second place, miseo means relative hatred; in comparison with obedience and deference to God, our love for them is like hate (Luke 14:26). Jesus is being provocative to make a point. Jesus praises the church in Ephesus because they “hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate” (Rev 2:6).

This kind of hatred, far from being the bromide seen on yard signs, is sometimes condoned, sometimes condemned by the Bible depending on the direct object.

The other word translated as hate is apostugeo which is only used once in the Bible. It combines apo “away” with stugeo “hate” implying something so abhorrent you back away from it in repugnance. Many versions translate the verb as “abhor.”

The etymology of the word is interesting. Stugeo is derived from Styx, as scholar Adam Clarke explains, “Styx, the infernal river (of hell) by which the gods were wont to swear; and he who violated this oath, was expelled from the assembly of the gods, and was deprived of his nectar and ambrosia for a year; hence the river was hateful to them beyond all things, and the verb stugeo, formed from this, signifies to shiver with horror.”

Paul instructs us to hate with this particular brew of hatred in Romans 12:9:

Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.

Romans 12:9 (ESV)

Now, I ain’t no grammar nerd, particularly in Greek, which I do not speak. But I do speak English which is what commentaries are written in, and it is worth noting some of the grammar here. Paul’s original letters had no punctuation, meaning those periods were placed in there by translators, giving it a three-hit combo feeling, which is powerful, but muddles the connection between them. Here it is in the Literal Standard Version

The love unhypocritical: abhorring the evil; cleaving to the good

The latter two clauses support the first and clarify the connection between love and the actions that support it. Paul is saying that Christian love can be false, it can be phony. For love to be unhypocritical, it must do two things: recoil from evil and cling to good. If either one is missing, then the sincerity of the love is compromised. A church cleaving to the good is essential, but when that same church’s love is not accompanied by an equal abhorrence of evil, the whole love is suspect and perceived to be fake, hypocritical, and putting on airs.

Say I am in a conversation with a friend praising the goodness of new life through marriage and having lots of precious babies. I gush about the importance of life to God as the giver of all life to the world and the miracle of a man and woman creating an eternal soul. Then a coworker hears our conversation and launches into a diatribe of how life is not sacred, that abortion is a positive good, and if it were up to her babies could be aborted through their second birthday. If I respond sheepishly, toeing the carpet, and dribble something about respecting everyone’s freedom to make their own truth, my friend could rightly call the sincerity of my love of life into question.   

In other words, the force of our recoil from evil must be equal to the firmness of our grip on the good. Nineteenth-century minister Alexander MacLaren (1826-1910) put it beautifully:

But it needs ever to be insisted upon, and never more than in this day of spurious charity and unprincipled toleration, that a healthy hatred of moral evil and of sin, wherever found and however garbed, ought to be the continual accompaniment of all vigorous and manly cleaving to that which is good. Unless we shudderingly recoil from contact with the bad in our own lives, and refuse to christen it with deceptive euphemisms when we meet it in social and civil life, we shall but feebly grasp, and slackly hold, that which is good. Such energy of moral recoil from evil is perfectly consistent with honest love, for it is things, not men, that we are to hate; and it is needful as the completion and guardian of love itself.

MacLaren’s Exposition Of The Holy Scriptures

Sincere love means a love that can hate. Love that only glues itself to the good but is silent on evil is fair weathered and yellow. A love that only steams at wickedness with no goodness found within a square mile has nothing to give and slips its anchor. Paul’s admonition is that we seek to establish the good with all our hearts and that our vehemence toward evil must be whole-souled and resolute.

Figurative Finger

To my knowledge, NSA was never asked if the Finger was intended to be literal. The assumption by the pearl-clutchers is the bird-flipping is meant to be an actual physical gesture directed toward individuals, as though the college funds field trips where young men find themselves a queer, hoist the middle finger in theys face, and write five pages on the experience in MLA format. I do not think this is the point of the ad at all.

As is made clear in the ad’s text, NSA is seeking young men who are “willing to hoist the Jolly Roger and Johnny Cash’s favorite finger whenever faced with idolatry” (emphasis mine). The target of the hate-filled finger is idolatry, not individual idol worshippers. These idolatries that the ad is referring to are orcish philosophies running rampant in our culture raising themselves against the knowledge of God.

NSA, whose mission is to graduate culture-shaping leaders, sees a forest of idolatry molesting minds and endeavors to train young men to swing an axe. The ad was a call for erstwhile lumberjacks. Of the myriad interviews with NSA representatives, however, the one question I never heard asked of their interrogators was, “You are taking issue with the finger, but what do you think of the spirit of the ad? Do you hate idolatry? If so, what does your hatred of idolatry look like?”

The spirit of this ad is flipping on the light switch to the cellar revealing all the cockroach idols scurrying about, sassy as you please, because they know that ain’t no one in the house is going to lift a finger to deal with them. And no one is going to lift a finger because the love of the evangelical church is hypocritical, clinging to what is good while tolerating all sorts of turpitude, flagitiousness, and any other fun nouns for the idolatries that get nothing but pious smiles from us. But this is not how the saints of the Bible loved.

Hate Like A Saint

Old Testament saints teach us how to flip the spiritual bird to idolatry. David taunts the Philistine hulk defying the living God that he will cut off his head with his own sword and the birds will fatten themselves on his carcass (1 Samuel 17:45-47). Jehu turned the high places into a latrine, directing people, that if they had to poop, to poop over there on yonder pile of idols (2 Kings 10:25-27). Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal asking them if their god hadn’t shown up yet because he was on the can (1 Kings 18:27). Phineas pierced the disobedient Israelite and his foreign wife through with a spear halting the plague sent by God (Numbers 25:7-8).

Jesus, addressing the church at Ephesus, commends them for hating the teachings of the Nicolatians, which He also hates (miseo).

Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

Revelation 2:5-6 (ESV)

Ephesian hatred arrives only to find Jesus already there. Conversely, a few verses later, Jesus rebukes the Church of Thyatira for tolerating the teachings of Jezebel within their midst (Revelation 2:20). Brazenly defying the teachings of God, this woman (either an actual woman or symbolic, we don’t know) flaunts her decadent falsities in the church unchecked. They did not hate Jezebel as the Ephesians hated the Nicolatians, and because of this Jesus threatened great tribulation upon them (v 22).

What The NSA ad is seeking are young Christian men who understand that idols are meant to be hated with the ire and imagination God intends. The cult of the Self in all its queer and kink, the pornographic raping of Beauty, the burning of the Creator in effigy, a cancerous totalitarian state, and anti-natal feminism devouring its own young, are a few of the obvious ones. However, idolatry is not limited to culture. The church, too, is not exempted from parading idolatries in our midst with our niceness, addiction to comfort, overindulgence in piety, tolerance of feminism and effeminacy, and the unshakeable worship on the high place of cultural neutral space. In the spirit of niceness, the church has incubated the cuckoo egg of culture, which has hatched, and grown to eat our children.

It is customary with this type of talk to immediately rebut with “they will know we are Christians by our love” (John 13:35), and “he who does not love does not know the father” (1 John 4:8), and similar texts. Very true. But what kind of oncologist shows his love to his patients by tolerating stage 3 breast cancer? His actions, even though they may seem harsh, are to poison the cancer and save the individual. Massaging melanoma is hating the wrong thing. In other words, our hatred is meant to be for sinful ideologies, not individuals. Hatred is not for dudes named Kevin who live down the street and dress up like brassy dames on the weekends. Neither are they your Democrat uncle, the waif holding the pro-choice sign, or the president of your church’s denomination who is flirting with female ordination. Idols are the pretensions, the arguments, and every lofty thing that raises themselves up against the knowledge of God.  

And so our fight is spiritual, and this practically means we are praying and then speaking against the false ideas to abolish and dismantle idolatry. We cast them down and pee on the ashes. This may look like calling out a certain person representing the ugly idol, but this is not synonymous with hating that person. It may be calling out the perversity of the act and the soul rot that will spread endemically if allowed to crossbreed. This is precisely what the ad was going for, and is precisely what American Evangelicalism needs to hear: You do not hate evil as you ought and because of this your love is hypocritical. 

Conclusion

It is more than likely that, had you not seen the NSA ad here, you would not have seen it. They are a tiny college in a state with more cows than people. But it is more than a marketing gimmick; it is calling American Christianity out.

For Christians’ love to be without hypocrisy, it must be a love that can hate. Tolerance of idolatry, allowing it to walk unopposed in our hearts, church, family, or culture, brings the same judgment Jesus leveled against the Thyatirans: you tolerate idolatry. This idolatry is the cancer infecting the lymph of our nation, and to love means to cut back the hateable parts of the tumor to the healthy flesh of the good we cling to. Grace without truth is love without boundaries, which is to say, it is hate – the bad kind. If we do not hate ideologies and evil, then we are hating individuals.

We have a predisposition towards being liked, being proper, respecting the myth of a neutral space, and committing ourselves to be “gospel-centered”, which avoids naming evils in the name of winsomeness. The effect is to preach a resurrection without death, goodness as a preference, and avoid naming the very sins for which Jesus died. When love grows cold the watchtower for idolatry is abandoned; there the orcs roam freely pillaging and looting our minds and children and feasting on the souls of the lost.

Ideas and ideologies that have been slowly simmering for decades have raised the temperature in our frog pot slowly and we have grown accustomed to the heat and have subsequently made our love tepid. Where is the Phineas, the David, and the Jehu spirit? Awake, Christian, and rouse the passion of your love by holding the sword of truth with both hands, one which champions good and the other with a vendetta for idols.