Hatred

Hatred, in Scripture, is the settled rejection of and ill will toward a person or thing — a disposition of the heart that shows itself in speech and action — and it appears in the text both as a human sin to be put away and as the posture of the world toward God and his people. The psalms do not treat all hatred as evil: Psalm 45:7 says of the king, "You have loved righteousness, and hated wickedness. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows," so that hating wickedness is set alongside loving righteousness as a single moral orientation, and the New Testament applies that verse to the Son (Hebrews 1:9). In that frame hatred is not mere emotion but the refusal of what is contrary to God.

Turned against a neighbor, the text treats hatred as sin. First John 4:20 states plainly, "If a man says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar," and the same letter places the one who does not love his brother among the children of the devil (1 John 3:10) and says he "remains in death" (1 John 3:14). The command of Jesus pushes further: "love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who mistreat you and persecute you" (Matthew 5:44), a demand set within his warning that the unforgiving will not be forgiven (Matthew 6:15). The letters echo the same call to put away the cluster of attitudes that breed hatred — "all bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander… with all malice" (Ephesians 4:31; compare Colossians 3:8).

Scripture also speaks of hatred that falls on the disciple from outside. Jesus tells his followers, "You will be hated by all men for my name's sake, but he who endures to the end will be saved" (Matthew 10:22), and in John's Gospel he grounds that hostility in belonging: "because you are not of the world, since I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you" (John 15:19). The same passage locates the hatred squarely against the Father as well: having seen the works no one else did, "they have seen and also hated both me and my Father" (John 15:24). Endurance, not retaliation, is the response the text commends.

Christian traditions read this material with different emphases rather than different texts. Traditions that stress God's settled opposition to evil speak readily of divine hatred of sin and read Psalm 45:7 as revealing God's own character, while others, stressing divine impassibility or the priority of love, prefer to speak of God's wrath as his settled "no" to evil and treat "hatred" as accommodated language. On the human side, traditions shaped by perfectionist teaching read the command to love enemies as a real possibility in this life, while others read it as the unending direction of repentance and dependence on grace; and the test of love for the brother in 1 John is read by some as a mark of assurance and by others primarily as a summons to examine oneself. Christian readings also diverge on how far the world's hatred of the church should shape withdrawal from surrounding culture and how far it should shape patient engagement with it.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.