The phrase is not in the Bible. The closest precursors:
- Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1929), part 4 ch. 9: “Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which though easy enough to understand is rarely practiced.”
- Augustine, ~AD 424, in a letter about disciplining a wayward sister: “with due love for the person and hatred of the sin.” Context: how to report and correct wrongdoing in the cloister, not a general posture toward outsiders.
- Charles Wesley, 1779 hymn “Equip Me for the War”: “Oh, may I learn the art / with meekness to reprove, / to hate the sin with all my heart, / but still the sinner love.”
Wesley → Methodist → Pentecostal → American evangelical channels likely cemented the phrase in church culture; Gandhi’s secular popularity then sealed its broader currency.
The theological problem
Scripture does not restrict God’s “hate” to the act:
“The boastful shall not stand before your eyes. You hate all evildoers.” (Psalm 5:5)
“The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.” (Psalm 11:5)
Proverbs 6:16–19 lists seven things God hates — and every item is an attribute of a person, not a free-floating deed: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet quick to evil, a false witness, a person who sews discord.
The Dizzy Disciple framing: “If God only hated the sin, then the sin would be the one sent to hell, not the sinner.” GotQuestions: “God can hate the sinner in a perfectly holy way and still lovingly forgive the sinner at the moment of repentance and faith.”
Why the phrase quietly damages pastoral care
When a Christian uses it, the unspoken move is: I will keep my warmth toward the person by mentally extracting their behavior from them. The cost is that the gravity of sin gets relocated outside the person, so the person never has to face it as theirs. The Dizzy Disciple speakers’ worry: “we’re not helping them see the wrath of God… until they see that, they don’t see their true need for a substitute.”
This is the same failure mode as 2026-04-11-two-sides-of-love-compassion-and-accountability: compassion without accountability is “softness that enables; no path forward; protects but doesn’t grow.”
What this is not
This is not license to picket “God hates [group]” or to weaponize “God hates evildoers” against people we dislike. The biblical pattern is internal grief over our own sin and patient witness toward others. The video itself flags this:
“I don’t think we run around saying ‘God hates this particular sinner’ and hold banners up and parade up and down the street… that’s not the call for us, but neither do I think there’s merit in that phrase.”
The right correction is not adopting harsh language. It is refusing the easy phrase that pretends sin is detachable from the sinner, and telling the truth about both wrath and grace.