The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate.
Interpretation
Tolerance has shifted from allowing rational debate to silencing differing opinions.
Nancy Pearcey highlights the changing definition of tolerance, suggesting that it has evolved from an encouragement of rational discourse about differing beliefs to a state where opposing convictions are no longer open for debate. This perspective invites us to reflect on the implications of this change for public discourse and societal engagement with differing views.
In practice
This quote could be used in a debate about freedom of speech at a university event.
The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.
It is the task of youth not to reshape the church, but rather to listen to the word of God.
Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do.
Conservatives and liberals understand the Christian faith as a set of ideas because, so understood, Christianity seems to be a set of beliefs assessable to anyone upon reflection.
It is very remarkable, that in the book of life, we find some almost of all kinds of occupations, who notwithstanding served God in their respective generations, and shone as so many lights in the world.
According to the law of nature, wherever there is an awakening of a new and stronger life, there it tries to conquer and take the place of the old and the decaying. Nature favours the dying out of the unfit and the survival of the fittest. The final result of such conflict between the priestly and the other classes has been mentioned already.
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