Sean Johnson - Intentionally Brief

Jesus didn't preach tolerance

dannydb:

It’s been interesting to observe the conflation of American and Christian “values,” and the naming of such values to marshall opposition to Jones’s primitive xenophobia: respect, open-mindedness, freedom of conscience.

But Jesus didn’t preach such things. Jesus preached — embodied, actually, in a way that got him killed – love. Risky, radical, costly, inconvenient love. Messy, complicated, difficult, demanding love. Love of neighbor, of stranger, of enemy.

Tolerance costs me nothing. Loving others — seeking their good, willing their prosperity and happiness, genuinely desiring their companionship — this is the hazardous business of community, of relationship-building, of making and sustaining friendships for the long haul. Tolerance is all too happy to avoid all this. Tolerance turns out to be a means for keeping us estranged from one another while we pride ourselves on our progressive politics or our general open-mindedness whatever our politics.

(Emphasis mine)

And so we find that even as we strive and fail to satisfy the standards of our American Christian notions of tolerance, our sights are set too low. The true metric for Christian response is something far more difficult.

(Source: christiancentury.org)