Last night at Chi Alpha\u2019s weekly meeting we had a guest speaker \u2014 missionary Mark Orfila. He\u2019s been serving for over a decade in eastern Europe and has been thinking very deeply about American cultural values and how they relate to the Kingdom of God.<\/p>\n
He said a lot of very helpful things last night, but I think the most helpful went along these lines (the thoughts are his but the words are mine):<\/p>\n
\nIf I had to choose between tolerance and hatred, I\u2019d choose tolerance hands-down. <\/p>\n
But we\u2019re not facing a binary choice \u2014 we have a whole range of options available to us. And tolerance can\u2019t be the ultimate good in a society for two reasons: one philosophical and one practical. There must be something higher of which tolerance is a special case, because if tolerance is the highest good then you have a real problem \u2014 how do you handle the intolerant members of your own society? If you tolerate them, then you allow intolerance to flourish. If you don\u2019t tolerate them, then you promote intolerance yourself. Either way intolerance sneaks into your society. That\u2019s the philosophical approach. But there\u2019s an even bigger practical problem. Who wants to be tolerated? Don\u2019t we all want more than to be put up with? Tolerance is a negative virtue \u2014 it\u2019s about what we don\u2019t do to people. I won\u2019t hit you, I won\u2019t insult you, I won\u2019t stigmatize you. It\u2019s a peculiar inverse of the golden rule \u2014 tolerance tells us not to do to others what we don\u2019t want done to us. It creates a distance between us and never forces us to cross it.<\/p>\n
The problem with tolerance for a Christian is not that it sets the bar too high but that it sets the bar too low.<\/strong> We are called to love one another; in fact, we are even called to love our enemies. And rather than merely respecting the distance between us, we are called to treat them the way we wish they would treat us. Tolerance is a poor substitute for love. If it\u2019s the only offer on the table I\u2019ll take it, but in most situations we should demand more (especially of ourselves). <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Thanks for the clear thinking on a crucial subject, Mark.<\/p>\n