In an earlier post on Stephen Charnock (1628-1680), something of the simultaneous love and wrath of God toward the yet-unbelieving elect was said:
We now turn to a more anthropological perspective: our own simultaneous love and hate of the sinner.
This idea of loving and hating a person at the same time but in different respects is very old in church history, at least going back to Augustine. Here’s the same idea in Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274):
“It is our duty to hate, in the sinner, his being a sinner, and to love in him, his being a man capable of bliss. And this is to love him truly, out of charity, for God’s sake.”
– Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Summa Theologica, II-II, 25, 6
The slogan “love the sinner but hate the sin”, popularized by the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), is a distortion of the ancient truth that we are to both love the sinner and hate the sinner at the same time but in different respects.
Theologia est doctrina Deo vivendi per Christum - Theology is the doctrine of living unto God through Christ 