Is it good to be tolerant?

Don Carson points out that the old understanding of tolerance was summed up by a sentiment attributed to Voltaire (although not actually said by him): 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'  It is against this view of tolerance that I want to ask if Christianity is a tolerant religion.

Israel of the Old Testament was not particularly tolerant.  After the Hebrews left Egypt they became a nation.  The government of the nation might be described as a theocracy.  There was no separation between the religious and the secular life.  God's law was the nation's law.  If something was immoral then it was also illegal.  If you disobeyed God's law then you had to leave or were punished.

That been said, God reveals himself in the Old Testament to be something better than tolerant.  He is longsuffering.  He regularly forgives the evil of his people.  He persists with them even though they rebel against him.  He is always calling them back to himself.

Eventually, because of the repeated disobedience of the people, God allows them to be exiled from the land.  The prophet Jerimiah instructs them on how they should live as exiles.  They are to seek the good of the city in which they live (Jeremiah 29:7).  This is important for Christians to understand because we live as exiles in our lands (1 Peter 1:1), and so we are commanded to seek the good of the places where we are now resident.

In the New Testament Jesus is not always tolerant.  When it comes to those who claim to follow him, he does not allow for a diversity of morality and opinion.  Of course there will be room for Christians to disagree on certain secondary issues, but where the Bible is clear we are not given the liberty to disagree.  Jesus does not permit an a la carte attitude to his gospel.

In the book of Revelation the risen Jesus condemns the church for its tolerance.  He complains that the church at Ephesus is tolerating those who do evil (Revelation 2:2) and that the church at Thyatira is putting up with a prophetess referred to a Jezebel who is leading the people astray (Revelation 2:20).  However, again we see that God is longsuffering.  Jesus had given this woman called Jezebel plenty of time to repent (Revelation 2:20).

The apostle Paul shows a godly intolerance when he tells the church at Corinth not to associate with those who are claiming to follow Jesus but live lives of unrepentant greed, dishonesty or sexual immorality (1 Corinthians 5:11).  But it should be noted that if such a person repents they are to be welcomed back into the church (2 Corinthians 2:7).

So with regards to those who claim to follow Jesus the church is not to be tolerant, but it is to be longsuffering.

But what about the Christian church's attitude to those who live in our shared society but don't want to follow Jesus?  Here the church exercises a sort of tolerance that Voltaire might of approved of!

While the church is a new Israel it lives in the world as those in exile.  When Jesus was questioned about paying taxes to the emperor, he said to render onto Caesar what is Caesar's and render onto God what is God's (Mark 12:14-17).  While many people wanted Jesus to be a nationalist leader who would kick the Romans out of Palestine and restore a Jewish state, his kingdom was not of this world.  The apostle Paul is non-revolutionary when he tells the Christians in Rome that the governing authorities have been established by God and that we are to submit to them (Romans 13:1).  This was at a time when the vicious Nero was in power!  This is not to say that Christians are to be naïve about the fact that the state can also be a demonically inspired persecution power (Revelation 13).  The New Testament clearly anticipates the separation of church and state.

While the apostle Paul says that Christians should not tolerate unrepentant sin and false-teaching amongst those who claim to follow Christ, we cannot expect the world to obey Christ's standards for holy living (1 Corinthians 5:10).  This leaves us with an unanswerable question: 'what should be the relationship be between what is legal and what is moral?'  If a Christian politician is involved in legislation how far should they go in encouraging the state to punish those who do evil (Romans 13:4)?  For example, if adultery is an evil that wounds its victims, should adulterers be punished by the state?  

Sadly, the historical Christian church does not have a good record on issues of tolerance.  I use the term historical Christian church because sometimes it is hard to know when this institution was actually the body of Christ and when it was simply a power hungry and corrupt organisation run by people who had little true knowledge of God.

When the church was persecuted by the Roman state it saw the sense in pleading for religious tolerance.  For example, Tertullian wrote that 'it is a human law and a natural right that one should worship however he intends' and that 'it is no part of religion to coerce religious practice for it is by free choice and not coercion that we should be led to religion.'

After the Edict of Milan (A.D. 313), Christianity was tolerated in the Roman Empire, but by the eleventh-century 'Christian' Europe had become a persecuting society.  

Maybe the most famous example of 'Christian' persecution is the Spanish Inquisition.  During the later middle ages many papal inquisitions were set up in Europe.  In 1478 King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabelle I of Castile believed that the Papal Inquisition was too weak, and this led to them setting up the Spanish Inquisition.  This was designed to enforce Roman Catholic Orthodoxy, so Jews and Muslims did not come under its mandate.  This inquisition did not formally end until 1833!

It was not only the Roman Catholic Church that did not allow religious freedom.  The main reformers (including Luther, Calvin and Zwingli) are amongst those called 'magisterial reformers', which refers to the fact that they saw a close connection between the church and the local magistrates.  We can see that Calvin's Geneva and Zwingli's Zurich did not permit dissenting religious voices.

In Britain (and Ireland under its rule) there were some steps towards religious tolerance in the seventeenth-century.  For example, in England in 1689 there was the Act of Toleration.  This allowed non-conformists to worship, provided that they pledged allegiance to the crown and rejected transubstantiation (this act was not going to allow Catholics freedom of religion).  The movement for Catholic Emancipation in  eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved reducing many of the restrictions against Roman Catholics.   

Is modern Ireland a tolerant society?

There are many examples of religious intolerance on both sides of the border in the twentieth century.  Mostly between Protestants and Catholics, although many of our new residents have experienced hateful attitudes and words.  But a new type of intolerance has emerged in our post-modern society.

At the beginning of this essay I mentioned that the old tolerance involved recognising the right for people to hold different views.  Of course there should be limits to this tolerance, for example, no society should tolerate Holocaust denial for it is so obvious false and dangerous.  Now tolerance is defined in terms of accepting a prescribed set of values.   There is no longer freedom to say 'I disagree with you, but respect you right to hold that opinion.'  If you say that you believe that marriage should be between one man and woman woman you are simply labelled 'homophobic'.  If you disagree with someone's lifestyle choice you are accused of not accepting them.  This acceptance is not shown towards those who do not agree with the majority opinion on issues such as sexuality.

Behind this new tolerance are a few assumptions.  It is assumed that those who claim to believe in absolute religious truths are dangerous, which leads to a patronising attitude towards those who take seriously any of the world's major religions (all of which make absolute truth claims).  It is believed that religion should be kept to the private sphere of life, which assumes that humankind can create it's own goodness without God (which most theists will disagree with).  In essence there is no religious tolerance for serious religion is not tolerated.

I want to finish with a few examples of the intolerance of western tolerance.   

In 2019, RTE's Primetime did a feature on transgenderism.  It was a fascinating feature because it actually raised some concerns about the issue of gender reorientation.  You would normally expect that RTE would be unquestioning of the sexual consensus.  However, this programme did highlight that our educational institutions in the west are beginning to censor anything that does not fit with the new tolerance.  A masters student, James Caspen, who happened to be involved in transgender advocacy wanted to write his thesis on gender reassignment regret.  His university in Bath told him that he could not for such research would lose funding if it was considered not to be fully supportive of all things transgender.  This attitude has also been seen in the 'cancel culture' whereby even feminists like Germaine Greer have been banned from speaking at university societies because they have expressed doubt about whether a sex change operation really makes a man and woman and visa versa.  

It should also be noted that such intolerance is often selective.  Across the United Kingdom there have been attempts to close Christian Unions in certain universities and colleges because they will not allow anyone who is in an unmarried sexual relationship serve on their committees and that they define marriage as been between one man and one woman.  However, it is hard to imagine that society would be happy if an Islamic society was shut down for the very same reasons.             

             

        

        

Should God always heal?

A number of years ago someone gave me a video of an English-based preacher speaking in Uganda.  This man stood before a small congregation and made an outrageous claim.  He said, ‘I have an anointing, and because I have this anointing I can heal you.  I don’t care whether its AIDS or TB, today you will be healed.’

Imagine those dear people putting their hope in him.  Think of those people who stopped taking their medication because of what he said, only to find their condition deteriorating.  I do believe God can, and does, heal today.  But I don’t believe that healing is something that can be presumed upon.  I believe that even the faithful get sick and die.

What is the relationship between sickness and sin? 

Sometimes people are quick to assume that the reason a person is ill is because of some unconfessed sin in their life.  I am not doubting that this can be the case.  In 1 Corinthians 11 the apostle Paul says that there were people getting ill and dying because they had a loveless and irreverent attitude towards the Lord’s Supper.  However, we must not make the mistake of assuming that every illness is the result of some specific sin.

The disciples made this mistake in John 9.  They approached Jesus with a blind man and asked: ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’  Jesus replies that his blindness was not the result of either his or his parent’s sin.  Similarly, at the end of 1 Timothy, Paul tells his young disciple Timothy to ‘stop drinking only water and take some wine for your stomach’ (1 Timothy 5:23).  If Timothy’s stomach problems were caused by unconfessed sin in his life, then Paul would have simply told him to repent.  The whole book of Job deals with the issue of the fact that bad things happen to faithful Christians.

Can we always expect healing? 

More than once, I have witnessed people claim that an ill person would be made well, only to see that ill person die shortly afterwards.  Why weren’t they healed?  Was there something wrong with their faith?  It is interesting that some people who pray for the healing of others will blame the sick person if they don’t get well, rather than assuming that there may be something deficient in their own faith (see Mark 9:14-29).

Contrary to what these people think, the New Testament does not present us with a picture of everyone who was prayed for being healed.  Surely Paul prayed for Timothy’s stomach before he told him to take some wine for his illness.  Paul had to leave Trophimus behind in Miletus because he was sick (2 Timothy 4:20).  Surely Paul prayed for him too.  Indeed, in 2 Corinthians 12 the apostle Paul pleads with the Lord three times that his thorn in the flesh (whatever that was) would be removed.  However, the Lord had a purpose for the thorn and replied, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness (verse 9).  The Lord didn’t remove the thorn but did give him the grace to sustain him and worked out his purpose through Paul’s suffering. 

In the Old Testament, the story of Elisha is very interesting.  Elisha had a significant healing ministry, but then we read that that he got ill and died (2 Kings 13).  He healed others, but a time came for him to get ill and die.    

The mistake of thinking that the prayer of faith will always heal people has lead to needless suffering amongst those who already enduring the pain of watching a love one struggle with terminal illness.  In the first church I worked with, there was a fine Christian man who was dying of a brain-tumour.  The pain his wife was enduring was made worse by well-meaning people promising he would be healed if they prayed with enough faith.

But what about all those promises about the prayer of faith?

For example, in Mark 11 Jesus declares to the disciples, ‘Have faith in God . . . I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain “Go through yourself into the sea” and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him.  Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ 

I am glad that Jesus healed in situations where faith was far from perfect.  Where our faith seems weak we can pray those great words, ‘I believe, help me in my unbelief’ (Mark 9:24).  But what is going wrong when we pray in faith and a person is not healed?  Why was Timothy not healed of his stomach problems?  Why was Theophimus not healed of his illness?  Why did Elisha die of his illness?  Why did God refuse to remove the thorn from Paul’s flesh?

Jesus’ teaching on the prayer of faith is meant to remind us that God delights ‘to give good gifts to those who ask him’ (Matthew 7:11).  We should not think that he is reluctant to respond.  Jesus is also teaching that we should show confidence in God’s ability to do anything we ask.  However, I think that he assumes what is taught elsewhere: that we subject all our prayers to the will of God (e.g. 1 John 5:14).  Later in Mark’s gospel we see this attitude on the lips of Jesus when he prays, ‘Father, all things are possible with you … Yet not what I will, but what you will’ (Mark 14:36).  Sometimes God’s will is to bring healing for his people as he brings them home through the valley of death.

Am I just dampening your enthusiasm for healing?

I hope not.  That is not my intention.  I actually believe that praying for healing should be a vital part of the life of any church.  James pictures a person calling the elders of the church to pray with them.  I have been a part of a team that was gathered by a church to pray for a particular healing, and it would appear that God responded to that prayer by healing them.

We have the gifts of healing in 1 Corinthians 12.  At certain times God uses particular people as an instrument of bringing his healing.  Notice the plural—it is not ‘the gift of healing’ but ‘gifts of healing.’  That fact the Apostle Paul of ‘gifts’ rather than ‘the gift’ seems to suggest that each healing occasion is the result of a gift being given for that particular situation.  The author Michael Green writes of a man he knows who prayed and laid hands on someone who had been told that they must spend the rest of their life in bed, immediately that person got up and was instantly and permanently healed.  But that man who was only used in that way on that one occasion.

I love the attitude of one person with a notable ministry in this area.  He acknowledged that God does not always heal the way would want him to.  But he said, ‘I’d rather pray with a hundred people and see one healed, than pray with no-one and see none healed.’

Conclusion – ‘Now and not yet’

Finally, some people claim healing on the basis of Isaiah's prophecy that 'he took up our infirmities and carried our diseases' (Isaiah 53:4 and Matthew 8:17).  They say that 'there is healing in the atonement'.  That is true.  The cross is the source of all the blessings we experience as followers of Christ.  But not all the blessings secured by Calvary come to us now.  For example, no-one in their right mind would claim to have their resurrection body already!  God often heals in this life, but we have to wait until the New Heaven and the New Earth for that time when there will be no more sickness for Christ's people (Revelation 21:1-4).

Don’t believe anyone who says that it is God’s will that his people should not suffer illness.  Freedom from illness and an end to suffering is a ‘not yet’ for the Christian.  We experience sickness and death in this life.  In his mercy God often does amazing things, we shouldn’t ignore the role of healing in the Christian life, but we should see these only as a foretaste of what is to come.        

Thank God for healing in whatever form it comes!  Pray with faith.  Be open to the fact that God will sometimes use particular people in certain situations as a channel of his healing mercy.  But these are first-fruits of the healing to come, when we will be given an imperishable body that will never perish or spoil.

The Gospel and Suicide

‘We must seek a balanced picture on this issue. We ought not to beat up on those who have attempted to end their lives, nor offer no hope to those who have lost those who have ended their lives. There but for the grace of God go we. Compassion and understanding are the order of the day. That said, we must not lose sight of the grievousness of this sin. Suicide is shameful, selfish, destructive’ (R. C. Sproul).

I started to write this post the day after attending the funeral of a young man who died by suicide.  It was a deeply moving occasion.  The speaker was brave enough to talk about how the deceased had died, that suicide is never the right thing to do, and that the young man who had taken his life had grown up with great parents who loved him deeply.  I watched my pastor friend weep with the lad’s mother and I thought that that is the sort of empathy I want to have.

The young man who died professed to be a Christian, and it was not long until someone asked me, ‘if a Christian commits suicide, will they go to heaven?’  I am always a bit frustrated when someone asks me that.  It suggests that the questioner hasn’t fully understood the nature of the gospel.  When someone is brought to faith in Christ the verdict that God places over them is ‘now no condemnation’ (Romans 8:1).  That verdict stands even when the Christian sins.  I am not saying that sin does not matter.  In fact, if you think that sin does not matter to God you probably don’t know him.  However, God holds on to his people even when they temporarily fall and fail.

I am aware that the young man whose funeral I attended suffered from deep anxiety.  I know that he had no intention of hurting anyone, and he was not seeking to rage against God.  He had simply lost all sense of hope and felt that he could not live with the pain.  Indeed, many people who die by suicide actually think that those they love would be better off without them.  Similarly, in the midst of their despair, many Christians struggle to have any realisation that God cares for them.  What this young man did was wrong, but he was not thinking clearly about the wrong he was doing.

Jesus is a compassionate man of sorrow and was familiar with grief (Isaiah 53:3), who knew such anguish that he despaired of life (Matthew 26:38), nevertheless he says that we are not to take life (Luke 18:20), even our own.  He longs for you to access the truth that God will never forsake you if you trust in him (Hebrews 13:5).  He longs to hold you in your pain and bring you through the storm.  Of course I don’t want to be naïve, I do realise that even those who trust the Lord can find ourselves in that place where we feel that darkness is our closest friend and the darkness feels like it will never lift (Psalm 88:18).  But in that darkness we should be seeking to honour Jesus and resist the temptation to do what he forbids.

Ireland has a bad history on suicide.  There was the idea of consecrated ground, as if where your body is buried actually mattered to God.  Those who died by suicide were excluded from such ‘holy’ soil.  How harsh such thinking was!  We must deal with this issue in a way that reflects our compassionate and forgiving Saviour.  

The city of Limerick has a painful history of suicide.  Drive through town any weekend and you will see people patrolling the rivers ready to rescue those who have thrown themselves in.  Everyone in this city knows what you mean when you say that someone went into the river.   In such a dark society Christians need to be people of the light.  To those who are racked with guilt, we can talk of how Jesus came into the world to save sinful people like us.  To those who despair, we can speak of a love that will never let us go.  We must seek to befriend the isolated and lonely.  

As I attended the funeral of that young man who took his life, I thought back to a couple of times in my life when I felt hopeless and anxious.  I am sure that my pain was not as dark as his.  I couldn’t say that I was fully suicidal.  Yet I do remember wanting to die.  But I am glad I didn’t.  Now I can look back from a much happier place.  That’s what makes the funeral of suicide so tragic.  If only he could have made it through that day, that week, that month or that year.  The light might not have come quickly, but I am sure it would have.  If he had lived, I know that he would have arrived at a place where he was glad to be alive.

Rick Warren is a famous pastor in America whose son, Matthew, died by suicide.  He shares a few words with those of you who are tempted to take your life.  He says that if you are contemplating suicide, you need to remember that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.  Most people who are suicidal do not want to end their life; rather they want to end their pain.  Suicide is not the right way to do this.  Warren points out that the emotions you are feeling at the moment will pass.  No emotion lasts for ever.  You will not always feel the way you feel now.  Indeed, even if the pain doesn’t lift, you are called to honour Jesus by resisting suicidal temptations.  Warren also reminds his listeners that God does not want you to travel through the pressures you are facing on your own.  Find someone who cares and tell them how you feel.  Never try to face suicidal feelings on your own.

Finally, you need to hear the gospel if you have lost a loved one who has died by suicide.  I have listened to a friend who feels guilt over their loved one’s death.  Maybe he wouldn’t have done it if she had been better at being there for him.  I told her that God did not want her to live with that guilt.  None of us are perfect husbands or wives, parents or children, neighbours or friends.  But God wants us to know his forgiveness.  I have also listened to a friend who feels angry that her loved one inflicted such pain on her through his death.  Such feelings are normal, and need to be worked through, but if they are not dealt with they will damage you.  The gospel enables us to forgive the inexcusable in others as the Holy Spirit shows us how God has forgiven the inexcusable in us.

John Newton, the writer of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, was a great friend of the poet William Cowper.  Cowper struggled with terrible mental health, felt utterly forsaken by God and was often tempted to take his life.  Newton once wrote to Cowper with the following advice:  ‘I can only advise you to resist to the utmost ever dark and discouraging suggestion ... Take encouragement hence to hope that he will not forsake the work of his own hands … though He may hide himself from us for a moment, He has given us a warrant to trust in him …’  Suicide is never the right solution to your pain.   For those of you who are grieving a suicide, I hope that you might experience the truth that the psalmist speaks of when he claims that the Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18).