The Intolerance of Tolerance

Grace Church Eden Prairie

When I talk about Jesus being the Messiah, Jews being wrong for rejecting him. If you object to the second thing, you're violating the first thing. You see that this is not a possible proper definition because it's self contradictory and it's self contradictory in practice. And that's what all the illustrations I've given you so far are demonstrating. And probably a massive number of folks here in this room this morning has bever seen that before. And this is an insight. You can see that there's a trick being played and it's because people have the wrong definition of tolerance. Tolerance is a nice word. It's a word about a virtue because of a different definition, the classical definition of tolerance. So I asked the student, do you wanna see how to fix this problem? Okay? And then I erased the board and I wrote something up on the two other things up on the board. And notice in this case, I'm giving the classical definition of tolerance. And I've got these characterizations from Peter Kraft. Okay? The first one is be egalitarian regarding persons. Now, they didn't know what egalitarian was. I said, you see the word equal kind of in there. Alright? Treat people equally with equal respect and dignity. Why? Because human beings are made in the image of God. That notion that we should treat people that way is grounded in a Christian worldview. It is not grounded in atheism, it's not ground in humanism, it's not grounded in just about any other worldview.