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A conversation about true tolerance
Joel Edwards, former Executive Director of the Evangelical Alliance,
examines what looks like an intractable conflict…
(Idea magazine July/August 2008)
As I write this I am in the middle of a tour promoting my new book
An Agenda for Change. The tour is going well; we have put together
a multi-media presentation, and audiences have been engaging with the
issues. I feel I am starting what I wanted to start: a conversation
about the future of evangelicalism. It’s a future about grace,
Good News and long term social transformation. It’s an evangelicalism
that’s not afraid to talk about truth and absolutes and holiness,
because when it does so, it always does so in the gentle spirit of Christ.
The book and tour are addressing the big internal changes we face
as we move forward in the 21st century. But while the tour is consuming
a lot of my time, I am still making diversions into other territory,
which continues to remind me of one big external challenge our faith
is also facing. This is the challenge of tolerance. And while I am loath
to talk yet again about human sexuality, it seems that it is around
this issue where the tolerance debate is proving to be most starkly
illustrated.
When I was asked to speak in the University Church at Cambridge on
the Gospel and human rights, a leader of a gay and lesbian Christian
organisation said I had no right to do so. I presented material from
An Agenda for Change at an Anglican training college and was
also asked to say a few words at the European Forum Conference of the
Evangelical Fellowship for Lesbian and gay Christians. While I was received
graciously and with love, the discussions afterwards made it clear just
how easily I could be dismissed as intolerant because of my views on
human sexuality.
What struck me most at these events was that it was not just me who
was likely to be regarded as intolerant: it was also the God I was turning
up to represent. This is the God I believe is the God of the Bible,
a God who has an annoying habit of sometimes placing boundaries on our
moral behaviour. And this God has become something of an inconvenience
in the modern age. He just doesn’t quite fit in. And so the answer
is inevitable: either we get rid of this intolerant God altogether,
and in a somewhat strange perversion of the tolerance rhetoric refer
to His followers as deluded simpletons, or we redesign Him. It is this
redesign that troubles me when speaking with my friends in the gay and
lesbian Christian movements. Please don’t misunderstand me. These
Christians are totally sincere in their belief in God, and the fruits
of their lives in terms of service and grace put many of us to shame.
But their version of God is simply one that I do not recognise from
2,000 years of Scripture and tradition. I am convinced that there is
an attempt at trying to remake God in our image.
Our challenge in the years to come is how we resolve this tension
of presenting a God as we find Him in the Bible - who remains true to
Himself and His exclusive claims - but without being immediately dismissed
as the Intolerant Brigade. How do we communicate the fact that God is
passionate about justice, holiness and moral absolutes, as well as being
thoroughly loving and humanitarian?
I don’t think there are any easy answers. All that I know is
that the God I worship is a God of tolerance because He is infinitely
tolerant with me, my weaknesses and with the gross inadequacies of His
Church. Like any loving parent he is always pulling us up to something
better than we think we are. And yet, for reasons we cannot always work
through, He reserves the sovereign right to put boundaries around our
ethical, moral and political norms. God cannot be limited to my definitions
of tolerance without me, in the process, neutralising the idea of His
sovereignty.
This intractable conflict we come up against is presenting this God
in a context where politics, morality and ethics have all been made
relative. Even our medical ethics are becoming detached from the idea
of absolute and transcendent values. I suspect that we will face more
and more opposition over this issue in the days and weeks to come. We
will come under further attack, but like Christ, we will triumph not
by fighting back. This battle will be won in another way. If we want
to be worthy to talk about tolerance it will not be because people subscribe
to our God, our ethics or our morality in every instance. They will
not. It will be that they have heard a worldview which differs widely
from their own and have rejected it, and yet they continue to experience
an inclusive love and commitment to serve them whatever they believe
about our God.
Jesus did not say we would be known by the strength or cleverness
of our arguments. He did not say we would be known by the strident nature
of our protest or complaints. He said we would be known by our fruits
and how we love each other.
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