Good and tolerant Christians

A few days ago, I sat through a lecture in a graduate class that was discussing how to deal with death. As a physical therapy student, it is a topic we are consistently exposed to during our time in the program. But what made this lecture different was something the speaker said within the opening minute of his presentation.

He was referencing a particularly difficult situation in which a mother was forbidding the nurses and doctors to tell her child that he was dying. This caused division between the health care team and the mother. The speaker realized something after talking to the mother — she was trying to protect her son one last time from bad news. In short, from her perspective, she was loving him. The takeaway, the speaker said, was to “assume that whatever decision a person is making, whether you agree with it or not, is rooted in love.”

To be honest, I stopped paying attention after this comment because my mind began to tie his comment together with something I had been experiencing for the last two years. Something we all have been experiencing the last two years — the disruption and fracturing of our churches and faith families. The last two years I have witnessed the bitterness, frustration, and anger that has impacted our society making its way into churches and inflaming the divisions that have always been quietly present. And at the root of it? Love.

That’s right — the thing we profess to have, share and worship God in the spirit of. That is the thing that is now dividing us. How? How could our seemingly universal idea of love drive us into division? I’d argue it is because we are choosing what we love instead of Who we love. 

Let's look at this idea:  good and tolerant Christians. How do we define good? It is very likely that we subconsciously borrow the Greek concepts of good and evil, where we ascribe good as something morally positive and evil as something morally negative. How we determine if it is morally positive, or negative is largely up to our own devices.  Again, subconsciously, we are likely borrowing from other philosophical systems. The interesting thing is that we somehow miss asking ourselves what God calls good. Indeed, the idea of what God calls good gets pushed further and further into the back of our minds the farther we get from Sunday.

Now let’s look at the second term — tolerant. To say it is a semantically overloaded word is an understatement. So instead of dissecting its meaning, I’ll ask two questions. What should we be tolerant of, and what is the purpose behind our tolerance? It is likely that our answers have to do with validating our sense of goodness or being rooted in the idea of being kind to one another. Again, we tend to bend toward what we think loving others looks like. If these are our answers, we now have two problems.

First, we have elevated our idea of goodness to surpass what God calls good. Probably not on purpose, but in practice we have all developed ideas of what goodness looks like and we seek to practice it in the world around us. But if we stray from seeking to imitate Christ or the Father — we are no longer being biblically good. We have imposed our idea of goodness over what God calls good.

Second, we must ensure we aren’t tolerating things that God has called evil or forbid, in ourselves or others. If we choose to reject God’s definitions of right and wrong, we are no longer living in grace — we are living in rebellion. And while those two words are very different on paper, they are becoming increasingly hard to tell apart in practice. But the root of the two is the same — love.

So, the issue that has been burning in my heart for the past two years finally revealed itself when I heard the speaker say, “assume that whatever decision a person is making about their loved one, whether you agree with it or not, is rooted in love.” Because I realized the question every Christian needed to ask themselves is what they loved most. Because answering this question reveals a simple fact. When we say we love something, we are compelled to serve it, protect it, and fight for it.

When we couple this realization with the understanding that very few of us love God above everything else, the reason for our disunity becomes clear. Our spouses, children, family, and best friends have become the great loves of our lives. And to be good and tolerant agents of love, we must do what makes them feel valued and respected, even if that comes at a substantial cost.

But the truth is we have made ourselves the new masters of reality, dictating for ourselves what is good and evil, what is love and what is not. And that is what modern rebellion has become; a war about what you love most.