Christianity brings equality and tolerance...
Posted: March 2nd, 2009, 3:19 am
In the all too brief time I had for personal reading while on a business trip last week, I ran across this thought provoking assessment on Christianity's role in fostering equality and genunie tolerance. Apologies for the length, but I can only edit very little and still convey the message:
From Anthony Esolen - The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (2008)
"Sometimes in the history of may one idea, well expressed and preached by people afire with zeal, makes all the difference. Consider the ringing cry, a garbled echo of Moses and Jesus and Paul, 'All men are created equal.' The affirmation that man is saved by Christ, in Christ, is such an idea. For most pagans, this made no sense. You were created chosen or not. For an athiest, this makes no sense. In our material selves (our atoms, our genes, our muscles) we evidentially are all different from birth. But Christianty affirms that in our dignity before the Lord, we are equal.
That faith is meant to leaven one's life, and in this way the new Christians are at one with their elder brothers, the Jews. But it is not a set of cultural rules. It is a relationship to the person of Christ, adaptable to all cultures, at all times, everywhere. It could be Jewish or Armenian, Ethiopian or Persian, Greek or Roman, and soon after Paul, it would be all these. We now preach 'tolerance' by which...we mean two contradictory things: a refusal to distinguish between true and false and good and evil, a supine submission to the politically correct rules of an intelligentsia. It is intolerance, with hair spray and a smile.
The first Christians, who endured periods of persecution and long ages of contempt, set upon by spies after their property or emperors after their blood, learned tolerance by living it. They dwelt among people who traded in slaves, exposed babies on hillsides, seduced young boys, and made homicide into daily entertainment in the arena. And they brought them to the faith without making them a whit the less Roman or Greek, rather returning them to the noblest virtures of their own traditions.
For Christianity, rightly understood, fairly invents the virture of tolerance, precisely because, as Saint Paul says, the Lord wants sons (and daughters - my insert), not slaves."
Esolen goes on to make this distinction between Christian tolerance and the forced external submission/compulsion of the Roman Empire and Emperor prior to Constantine and Islam from its early years under Muhammad to this very day. He also makes the same case against the Political Correctness philosophy rampant in in much of academia today. While an English Professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, his history and current assessment of postmodern concept of equality and tolerance vs. genuine equality and tolerance rooted in the Christian faith are very much on target.
From Anthony Esolen - The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (2008)
"Sometimes in the history of may one idea, well expressed and preached by people afire with zeal, makes all the difference. Consider the ringing cry, a garbled echo of Moses and Jesus and Paul, 'All men are created equal.' The affirmation that man is saved by Christ, in Christ, is such an idea. For most pagans, this made no sense. You were created chosen or not. For an athiest, this makes no sense. In our material selves (our atoms, our genes, our muscles) we evidentially are all different from birth. But Christianty affirms that in our dignity before the Lord, we are equal.
That faith is meant to leaven one's life, and in this way the new Christians are at one with their elder brothers, the Jews. But it is not a set of cultural rules. It is a relationship to the person of Christ, adaptable to all cultures, at all times, everywhere. It could be Jewish or Armenian, Ethiopian or Persian, Greek or Roman, and soon after Paul, it would be all these. We now preach 'tolerance' by which...we mean two contradictory things: a refusal to distinguish between true and false and good and evil, a supine submission to the politically correct rules of an intelligentsia. It is intolerance, with hair spray and a smile.
The first Christians, who endured periods of persecution and long ages of contempt, set upon by spies after their property or emperors after their blood, learned tolerance by living it. They dwelt among people who traded in slaves, exposed babies on hillsides, seduced young boys, and made homicide into daily entertainment in the arena. And they brought them to the faith without making them a whit the less Roman or Greek, rather returning them to the noblest virtures of their own traditions.
For Christianity, rightly understood, fairly invents the virture of tolerance, precisely because, as Saint Paul says, the Lord wants sons (and daughters - my insert), not slaves."
Esolen goes on to make this distinction between Christian tolerance and the forced external submission/compulsion of the Roman Empire and Emperor prior to Constantine and Islam from its early years under Muhammad to this very day. He also makes the same case against the Political Correctness philosophy rampant in in much of academia today. While an English Professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, his history and current assessment of postmodern concept of equality and tolerance vs. genuine equality and tolerance rooted in the Christian faith are very much on target.