IF THERE'S ONE THING I CAN'T

STAND IT'S INTOLERANCE

Most Australians regard tolerance as a virtue. Live and let live. Give everyone the legendary 'fair go'.

Yet, like any virtue, tolerance can become a vice when taken too far. Tolerance is a good servant but a bad master. Done to excess, tolerance turns into arbitrariness. This is well captured in the popular catchcry 'It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere'.

The result is the postmodern doctrine of relativism: the mistaken idea that all personal beliefs are in some sense equally valid. That there is no such thing as 'God's truth', no absolutes, only my perspective and your perspective. (The irony is that this central idea of relativism is itself an absolute statement.)

Relativism has existed since Adam and Eve, but there is a sense in which it is now becoming more seriously and openly mainstream. The courts are less sure about right and wrong. There is talk of pardoning murderers on the grounds of 'gender envy' or having the violence gene. Newspeak is redefining guilt as 'negative self-esteem', corruption as 'morally challenged behaviour', and calling looters 'non-traditional shoppers'!

Even Hollywood is changing. Once upon a time, the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore black. Nowadays, in films such as Falling Down with Michael Douglas, it is not always clear who the real villain is--or whose side we, the viewers, are meant to be on. Clint Eastwood has exchanged Dirty Harry's search for truth and justice for the confusion and despair of Unforgiven.

In the private sphere, relativism finds expression in the oft-heard claim that my lifestyle is 'true' simply on the grounds that it 'works for me', regardless of any external test.

Seen from the standpoint of Christianity, this prevailing commitment to relativism--while seemingly gentle and superficially attractive to many--is fatally flawed.

When taken to its logical conclusion, relativism becomes outrageous. For example, the killers of innocent children in Rwanda and Bosnia in this decade no doubt sincerely believed their actions were justified--the act of murder is 'true for them'. But does that mean their personal beliefs should be tolerated and go unchallenged?

Or if a man deserts his wife and children, refusing to pay alimony and leaving them emotionally destitute, it might feel 'true for him'--he's in love with his secretary, but is that enough to make it right? Is relativism still the 'gentle' philosophy at this point?

Relativism brings with it not just a mistaken sense of gaining tolerance, but also a real sense of losing values such as love, courage and commitment.

Douglas Coupland, who coined the phrase Generation X, struggles with this in his book Life After God where he sadly concludes that "the price we pay [for losing belief in God] is our inability to fully believe in love". Relativism isn't the kind of philosophy anyone really wants to live out.

In the Bible's terms, the biggest failing of all with relativism is that it takes insufficient account of the absolute reality of God, in the person of Jesus Christ. It is here that Christianity stands out: Jesus is our one sure standard.

At the heart of the Bible's world view is the uniqueness of this extraordinary God-Man, and his claim on each one of us. The Bible teaches that Jesus is distinctive in his identity as the Son of God--a bold assertion, but one well supported by the evidence. He represents a unique wrinkle in time, a conundrum, a challenge, the one to be reckoned with.

The implications of the Christian claim are huge. If 'Jesus Equals God' is the truth in a person, it means there is such a thing as a universally-valid world view, namely biblical Christianity. It means that not all beliefs are equally true. It means God does not speak through all ideologies and religions but only through his Son, Jesus Christ. And it means we can--indeed we must--choose commitment to absolutes over relativism.

The truth about tolerance is that, at the end of the day, we are not only accountable to ourselves, but to God.

Copyright 1998 Matthias Media. All rights reserved.