Understanding Tolerance vs. Universal Agreement

Today, pluralism is an ambiguous concept that confusingly uses “tolerance” to shield certain religions from scrutiny and to assail other religions for having the nerve to claim that they’re actually true. Regaining clarity requires four important realizations.

John 3:16- For God so (greatly) loved and dearly prized the world, that He (even) gave His (One and) only begotten Son, so that whoever believes and trusts in Him (as Savior) shall not perish but have eternal life.

John 8:58- Jesus replied, “I assure you and most solemnly say to you, before Abraham was born, I Am.”

1st Corinthians 8:6- 6 Yet for us there is (only) one God, the Father, Who is the Source of all things and for Whom we (have life), and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through and by Whom are all things and through and by Whom we (ourselves exist).

1st Timothy 2:5- For there is (only) one God, and (only) one Mediator between God and mankind, the Man Christ

Jesus.

Note: Where atheism tells us that we are the measure of all things, the gospel tells us that God is the standard by which we are measured. Where pantheism tells us that our problem is that we have forgotten that we are God, the gospel tells us that our problem is that we wanted to be God rather than commune with God. Where Islam tells us that we can earn God’s forgiveness, the gospel tells us that such a view is self-contradictory and only Jesus’

payment for our sins solves the contradiction.

1. Tolerance simply cannot mean universal agreement with everyone’s different beliefs. To claim that all

roads lead to God isn’t only illogical, it’s disrespectful.

2. Only by recognizing the world’s fundamental disagreements can we respect different faith systems. Rather than express a deep understanding of world religions, today’s popular claims, like All roads lead to God, end up disrespecting the world’s religions. Giving each other “the dignity of difference” is crucial if we’re to have genuine tolerance and a sincere journey to truth. 

3. The problem today is that the public square isn’t very civil. In the past few decades, religious rhetoric in our culture has become so heated that all we ever seem to do is inflame each other’s anger. Accordingly, the culture has shunned almost all religious debate, even at the cost of remaining ignorant about the richness of the various religious traditions. That self-imposed ignorance gives birth to a confusion with many heads. We confuse engaging in argumentation with quarreling. We confuse disagreeing with someone’s beliefs with disrespecting the person. In fact, we’ve confused the difference between people and

ideas altogether. We wrongly believe that challenging a person’s beliefs is the same thing as denigrating that person himself.

4. believing that Jesus is the only way to God is a claim that’s worth personally investigating. Every religious system claims to have the exclusive truth. If we are to show respect to each faith, it’s critical that we understand this.

Truth, by definition, is exclusive; every truth claim necessarily excludes its opposite as false. Even religious views that claim to be all-inclusive—like Baha’ism and some forms of Hinduism—are exclusive in that they claim that the exclusivists are wrong. If we confuse universal agreement with tolerance, we end up indicting every single religious (and even nonreligious) view as intolerant. This is why Jesus’ claim to be the sole means of salvation (John 14:6) doesn’t put him outside the realm of tolerance, but squarely within it. Where other religious founders claimed to have the way or to have the truth, Jesus claimed to be the way and the truth, vindicating that claim in an objective manner through His bodily resurrection from the dead.

Challenge: Be willing to understand people through Godly love as we pursue after them for the cause of Christ instead of insisting on ignorance.

Talking Points:

Atheism claims that humanity is the measure of all things and that we have the sole and ultimate authority for morality and destiny because there is no God. Likewise, pantheism teaches that we are the measure of existence because God is all there is. How are these different worldviews similar in their glorification of humanity?

One’s choice to accept or reject Christianity is based on propositions that we can know are either true or false. How does this demonstrate the uniqueness of the gospel among different worldviews?

The fact that nearly every other worldview seeks to make humanity the achiever of salvation or utopia suggests that they are human-made worldviews. But the gospel tells us that our self-aggrandizement is the very thing that gets us into trouble. We need someone who is not us to save us from ourselves. Jesus is that someone. Jesus is the centerpiece—the way, the truth, and the life. He is all three and offers them to us so that we don’t need to forge them ourselves. The Christian message is that there is an exclusive way to get to God, and that one way cost God more than it will ever cost us. But the invitation to accept it includes us all.