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“Should Christians be tolerant of other people’s beliefs?”
Some questions have no easy answers, not because the Bible is unclear, but because we cannot be sure what is really at issue. Provided we are paying attention, answering today’s question requires asking several more:
If we cannot first answer these secondary questions, we will not be in any position to answer the primary question.
The following list is the merest starting point. The moment you begin reading it, you will notice all the verses I’ve missed, which is inevitable. Lord willing, I will keep adding to it as I come across more. I’ve barely touched the Old Testament and the Gospels.
The idea started with two friends of mine who grew up among Christians with a bent for legalism. Their upbringing fixed in their minds an image of God their Father as wrathful, implacable, enthroned and distant, while Jesus in his role as advocate and intercessor constantly appealed to him to restrain his abiding anger from breaking out against his children. That image has been difficult to shake off, even with repeated readings through the scriptures.
That’s not the picture I grew up with. Not one bit. How do we get that from a God who so loved the world and a Son he gave, in what may be the single most well-known verse in all the Bible?
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Not all long-term friendships get off on the right foot.
The relationship between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin is a fascinating historical study. Israel’s second king, our beloved psalmist, was from the more dominant, numerous and historically significant tribe of Judah, while its first king, Saul, hailed from the comparatively tiny tribe of Benjamin.
What Benjamin lacked in size it made up in pugnacity. “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf”, prophesied the original Benjamin’s dad, and so it came to be.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Jonathan Merritt contributes to The Atlantic and has been named one of “30 young influencers reshaping Christian leadership” by Outreach Magazine. All good so far, provided you don’t mind your “Christian leadership” flavored with a big honkin’ tablespoon of social justice.
Tom: He also just called Doug Wilson an “unhinged racist”, and Doug has sensibly called foul right here in one of the funniest posts I’ve read in a long time.
IC, these accusations of “racism” are getting so common today as to be almost meaningless.
Immanuel Can: Yes, along with the words, “sexist”, “homophobic” and “Islamophobic”, they comprise today’s “Four Horsemen of the Horse Manure”.
“In a post-Christian society, all faithful people begin to look a little Amish.”
— Ken Myers, host of Mars Hill Audio
Nice quote, Ken. Love the way you put that.
He’s got a point, though. In the ongoing moral and cultural decline of modern society, there must surely come a point at which the difference between how Christians live and how their neighbors live becomes too great to escape notice any longer.
And then, in a sense, we will all be “Amish”. I mean those who actually care to be Christians will be.
“A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.”
A couple of months ago I discovered a new word. Don’t laugh. It was “autodidact”.
It’s not a difficult concept. An autodidact is simply a person who is self-taught rather than formally schooled. Despite being a voracious reader for six decades, to the best of my recollection I had never come across “autodidact” before a friend used it in conversation, prompting me to inquire, “Er, what is that?” I was embarrassed, but only slightly. English has an awful lot of words. I have a decent vocabulary, but some of the words I know are only useful in limited, very specific contexts. Autodidact is certainly one of those.
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Partial Preterists argue that Futurists misinterpret the symbolic language of scripture. Where a Futurist understands imagery like that of Matthew 24:29 (the darkening of sun and moon, stars falling from heaven, etc.) to refer to the apocalyptic finale of our present age, Preterists exhaust the meaning of the Lord’s words in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. For Preterists, most or all of the events prophesied in that chapter have already taken place.
The issue, Preterists say, is that Futurists fail to understand “Old Testament prophetic
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“How should Christians react to doomsday predictions?”
You know what’s worse than nuclear Armageddon, for me at
least? The prospect of ending life in an old folks’ home while succumbing to Alzheimer’s just
slowly enough that I occasionally notice my mind’s merciless and
inexorable deterioration. Of the various fates that might turn me
into a quivering bag of
Yeah, as I have said about a few of the questions we’ve handled here over the years, I might be the wrong guy to ask. I’m not exactly the median respondent in any survey you might conduct.
Once upon a time, I had a conversation with a former co-worker about a friend who had just passed away. The Lord gave me the opportunity to share with her how he came to faith.
For years, his family prayed for his salvation, but he was a decent fellow with morals and principles and couldn’t see what all their concern for his soul was about. Looking at the way other people lived, he estimated that if God existed and he found himself standing before him one day, he would probably make out okay. Despite attending church regularly with his family and despite seeing the changes in their lives, he felt no particular personal need of Christ or his salvation.
Then one day on his way to work, he was involved in a catastrophic car accident.
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Because so many psalms are prophetic, we are wise when we come to them to ask the question posed to Philip by the Ethiopian eunuch concerning the prophecy of Isaiah that he was reading at the time. He inquired, “About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”
It was an excellent question. We must ask it of ourselves (and of the scriptures) today.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Canada’s former Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland once noted that Russia had a chance to get on the “right side of history” and help negotiate a political end to the reign of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad. Former president Obama loved the expression, and Bill Clinton used it more than 20 times in his speeches. Writer Ben Yagoda says the phrase — whether it’s “right side” or “wrong side” — has been in use for over a century.
Tom: I can vaguely understand what a Christian might intend by the use of the expression, Immanuel Can. But what on earth does “the right side of history” mean in a post-religious, thoroughly secular context?
On September 9, 1939, The Telegraph reported that a woman from London, England named Frances Fripps was accidentally struck by a local bus. Taken to Middlesex hospital, Miss Fripps awoke to find someone bending over her bed. To her utter astonishment, she recognized her visitor as none other than the Queen of England, there for a surprise tour of the hospital.
“They told me I had been trying to knock down a bus,” gasped Miss Fripps, “and now I find you here, your Majesty. What a day!”
What a day indeed.
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I don’t love boring post titles like this one. However, in this case the alternative was my working title, Babylon 5. You can thank me later.
Yes, this series has run longer than expected. We are done today. In yesterday’s post, we briefly examined the current frontrunners for the real-world, present-day religious and political entity toward which scripture’s “mystery Babylon” symbolism is pointing us. Eschatologists in the Reformed tradition put forward apostate Judaism as its prime candidate, while the more popular names in the Dispensationalist school have historically envisioned Roman Catholicism in the role of the great prostitute seated on many waters or, as John refers to her, “Babylon the great”.
Hey, we’re Protestants. We have to protest something. Or someone. And yes, I know more than a few saved Catholics. Let’s not go there.
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The New Testament writers reference Babylon 11 times. The first four mentions are purely historical, denoting the ancient city and its empire. My interest today is in the final seven, which talk about a Babylon that has endured throughout history. Six of these are in Revelation.
Few attentive readers of scripture doubt that John’s usage of “Babylon” in Revelation is primarily or exclusively symbolic. It has to be. The city was a ruin then and remains one today, buried under millennia of dirt. The empire is long gone. To the extent that Babylon continues to be a factor in our world, it is primarily a spiritual and philosophical influence rather than a visible political entity. I’ve been calling her “mystery Babylon”, not least because interpreters of scripture struggle to determine exactly where and how the Babylonian spirit currently manifests and how it will manifest in the end times. That is certainly mysterious.
Of course, there are always opinions about it. One favorite speculation over the centuries has been that Roman Catholicism is mystery Babylon.