Love can forbear, and Love can forgive, though it can never be reconciled to an unlovely object.
These arresting warnings come from Thomas Traherne’s seventeenth-century spiritual classic Centuries of Meditations. They speak across the centuries (indeed) to our own time.
In our day, certain people mock the common churchly phrase “love the sinner but hate the sin.” To their ears, it sounds condescending, implicitly condemning, and strikes an odious note of false welcome. “I am what I am, so affirm me as I am—or stop pretending to love me when you hate a part of me, too.”
Here we come upon a nest of concepts that need very much to be sorted out if churches are going to function properly as communities of welcome, yes, but also of healing.
First, churches are not social clubs that welcome new members whoever and whatever they may be to enjoy whatever goods and services the church happens to offer. At least, churches are not supposed to be such—although many are, alas.
Churches are spiritual hospitals and, like hospitals, they accept anyone who comes in through the emergency room doors. They then get to work to assess what each person needs and provide it as swiftly and capably as possible. No one comes into a hospital perfectly healthy, and the ideal hospital treats everyone: restoring everyone to full health and helping everyone to peak fitness.
When I end up in the ER, I certainly hope this ideal hospital will accept me as a patient. But I certainly hope they won't then affirm my condition as perfectly fine. I want them to do all they can to diagnose and then treat all that is wrong with me.
Hospitals, therefore, distinguish between patients and their problems. Churches must do the same.
Second, God himself distinguishes between sin and the sinner. And we had better hope God does. For God cannot indefinitely endure sin, as sin is noxious and ugly to our entirely good God. Sin isn’t going to become something else, and God isn’t going to become someone else. So God and sin are intrinsically and forever hostile to each other. God being God, God will ultimately have his way, and sin eventually will be removed from God’s good universe.
So we had better hope that God makes that distinction between the sinner and the sin, or we will perish along with the sin with which God cannot ultimately be reconciled.
Third, some folks make crucial misjudgments, thinking that since they’re getting along all right just as they are, thank-you very much, they surely enjoy the favour of the universe.
Not so. As Traherne says, Love (and God is love) can forbear. God can, and does, put up with sinful sinners sinning for a while. And God calls Christians to practice forbearance with each other and with our neighbours.
Why forbearance? God is launched on a grand, global project to bring whomever he can to repentance, renewal, and rehabilitation. Such big changes normally take long times. No one becomes a saint in a moment. So God has to forbear our sin as the long processes of evangelism and sanctification take their courses.
Moreover, without all of us practicing forbearance, all our relationships will rupture. And if they do, we will lack the help from others we so desperately need—from the Holy Spirit to our fellow Christians to others through whom God helps us along the way.
So Love forbears. But that’s not the same as forgiveness. Forgiveness is the kind, conscious decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you. Forgiveness means you will no longer hold their failure against them.
Forbearance, therefore, is recognizing that someone is behaving badly now and deciding to put up with it for a while. Forgiveness is recognizing that someone behaved badly in the past and deciding to draw a line under it and move on with them. And neither of those is affirmation, but quite the contrary: they both recognize the difference between sin and sinner.
In both forbearance and forgiveness, one party can act regardless of the (bad) behaviour of the other party. In reconciliation, however, both parties must act well. God cannot be reconciled with people who do not want to be reconciled to God, just as we cannot be friends with people who refuse to be friendly.
If people are acting badly toward God and God’s world—and there are lots of ways of acting badly: from outright, injurious hostility to blithe, cool indifference to self-righteous spiritual posing—then God’s forbearance and even God’s forgiveness will not be enough. Those people are still headed for hell.
Hell, after all, is the outcome of bad decisions: the decisions to be bad, yes, but also the decisions simply not to be good, not to seek after the good, and not to be reconciled to The Good, who is God. Hell is what you have left when you have decided to do without God, which means doing without everything that comes from God, which means doing without everything good.
God can love you all he likes—and God apparently loves us all very much. But if you consider yourself all right without God and resolutely carry on without God—mistaking forbearance for forgiveness and, an even worse mistake, acceptance for affirmation—you are in peril.
Traherne again: He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because it may be restored and, which is an infinite wonder, to greater beauty and splendour than before.
So let’s go to church and seek God together, shall we? Not to be affirmed because of our supposed abiding wonderfulness, but to be affirmed in the abiding, wonderful love of God—love that welcomes us, yes, and lovingly refuses to ignore our wounds, our deformities, our pathologies, and instead gets right to work giving us the treatment we need.
Hating the sin, but loving the sinner. Thank God.
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