Hate is a Christian Virtue

Let me from the start confess to not being very original.

I borrowed the concept of the title of this piece from a recent column from Douglas Wilson–though I use it differently. We’ll return to it in a little bit after I work through a couple of things.

The first is the White Horse Inn, out of California, which self-identifies as being “for a modern reformation.” It recently ran an article by two women–one of them its digital editor, The Sacred Vagina? Nadia Bolz-Weber and Sexual Purity. Bolz-Weber is the Lutheran minister who recently sculpted a bunch of molten purity rings into a golden vagina and presented it to Gloria Steinem.

Let me quote from Bolz-Weber’s speech then quote some of the White Horse Inn’s article:

Bolz-Weber: So much of religion and spirituality feels like it’s all a program to make ourselves into something less janky and like more pure–like it’s all designed to sand down our edges, to make us more smooth. And really be it evangelical purity culture–was anybody raised in evangelic– does anybody have a purity ring? … I basically want to instigate an art project in which girls–women actually–mail me their purity rings to be melted into a sculpture of a vagina.

White Horse Inn: What should grab our attention isn’t the display of female anatomy, but the way she is addressing a very real brokenness in the Christian community.

Bolz-Weber: Does anybody have a purity ring? Anybody made to–raise them high. You know what this is? It’s where conservative churches have girls pledge to not have sex till they’re married. And then, they put a little ring on, a purity ring. And I–yesterday, I finished the revisions on my latest book, which is basically a book long take-down piece of the church’s teachings around sex.

White Horse Inn: While I disagree with Bolz-Weber on a number of theological and biblical points (her ideas about sin being prominent among them), I do share her concern about purity culture. 

Bolz-Weber: The church wants to control and decide what is powerful, spiritual, and transcendent. Sex can be all those things, too. That’s threatening if the church wants to be the exclusive answer to our existential loneliness.

White Horse Inn: The leaders of the purity movement rightly take these admonitions seriously, and their motives are good.  The problem is not with sexual purity per se, but in the manner and emphasis of the movement’s message, the brunt of which tends to fall disproportionately on young women—“Don’t go out alone at night,” “Dress modestly,” “Don’t be a stumbling block,” etc.  

Bolz-Weber: I realized that’s the way it feels about the church’s teaching around sex, is that if you happen to be planted in the center, if you happen to be a cisgender, heterosexual person who didn’t have sex before marriage, who’s only had sex with your one true love and you’re totally flourishing within that, then the teachings of the church are really OK for you. But so many of us were planted in the corners.

White Horse Inn: Bolz-Weber understands the value of symbols.  Her sculpture acknowledges the wrongs inflicted upon earnest Christians, affirms the beauty and worth of the female body, and asserts a woman’s value as being more than simply sexual. 

Bolz-Weber is attacking the Bible’s teachings on human sexuality. And the response from the White Horse Inn? An attack on the efforts of some in the church to promote those biblical teachings to women in the church. Not having a daughter, I don’t have a lot of knowledge about those who promote purity rings. I do know they are all sinners, just like the rest of us. But to equate the efforts of Christians promoting virtue in women with the efforts of Bolz-Weber to destroy biblical teaching on just about everything leads me to believe that at best the modern world has passed the White Horse Inn by.

Let’s travel from the West Coast to the Midwest and Covenant Theological Seminary, the denominational seminary of the Presbyterian Church in America, in St. Louis.

Earlier this month, Covenant President Mark Dalbey released a video statement distancing the seminary from the Revoice Conference held in St. Louis last summer. The focus of Revoice is “Supporting, encouraging, and empowering gay, lesbian, same-sex-attracted, and other LGBT Christians so they can flourish while observing the historic, Christian doctrine of marriage and sexuality.” What Revoice won’t do, however, is acknowledge that same-sex attraction–much like heterosexual lust–is sinful.

And neither, for a while, would Covenant. When it first came under questioning for several connections it had to the Revoice conference, Covenant released a statement from Dalbey and the faculty affirming “God’s intent for sexuality, laid down in creation and reaffirmed by our Lord, is that it be expressed in marriage between a man and a woman (Gen. 1-2; Matt. 19:4-5). Outside of this context, sexual activity is sinful—whether heterosexual or homosexual—and requires wise pastoral care and discipline when committed by those in the church.” However, the statement did not address the issue that was at the heart of the controversy over Revoice: whether or not same-sex attraction itself is a sin.

In his recent statement, though, Dalbey finally came out and said what everyone has been waiting almost a year for him to say: “Homosexual desire is a result of the fall. It is a sinful desire that is to be mortified and resisted. And in no way dignified.”

But that wasn’t all he said. He went on to attack “slanderous assaults” on Covenant. “A lot of what’s being mentioned about Covenant Seminary is sinful, slanderous, violation of the ninth commandment which teaches within the Larger Catechism that we must always promote and preserve the good name of our neighbor and ourselves when necessary,” Dalbey said.

I don’t know what everyone has been saying about Covenant–and Dalbey didn’t specify any of the statements to which he was referring, but I do know that if Covenant would have come out with this clear statement last year about Revoice most people wouldn’t have been saying anything about Covenant. The focus, instead, would have been on Revoice. And the PCA church that hosted it.

Now back to hate.

Despite its bad rap, hate is an important Christian virtue. We should, like John Owen, hate sin. Particularly our own sin. We should hate murder, adultery, theft, idolatry, gossip, lust, drunkenness, covetousness, etc. And we should tell those who are engaging in these sins–especially ourselves–that if they/we don’t repent of them, ask God for forgiveness, and seek our identity and righteousness only in Christ, then they/we are going to go to hell for eternity.

Which make the actions of The White Horse Inn and Covenant Theological Seminary very sad to me. Because their failures to quickly and clearly pronounce their hatred for the teachings of Bolz-Weber and Revoice are leaving a lot of souls in eternal peril.