How we got here

 Despite the storm of flack Molly Slag has received from commenters to her article at the American Thinker entitled The Tragedy of Tolerance, she actually makes a number of good points. First, that the current protesters do indeed act like children thowing a tantrum. Second, that sparing the rod indeed spoils the child, just as the Biblical book of Proverbs says. Third, by giving into so many false teachings in the name of "tolerance" the Church of whatever denomination has basically said to members that what they have always preached was never true.  They have shown that they do not believe was is written in the Bible.

I recently attended a Catholic mass with my granddaughter who is away at college for the first time. While I am Lutheran, I felt it was important to show solidarity with her in her faith, and to point out that many of the pieties shown in Catholic churches are things that are rightly owed to her Creator and God. I even gave her a rosary that had been blessed by a priest locally. One of the things that struck me was that the church building was solidly packed. It had three masses, and easily held 200 congregants. There were at least 200 people in attendance. Whatever you think of Catholic theology, (and I have some problems with it) they have hewed closely to it all these years (at least until recently.)

The problem with many protestant church bodies is that they have bowed to secular culture, in the name of tolerance. They tried to accommodate, one thinks innocently enough, the abortion activists and the gays and lesbians. We can be compassionate, and we should.  We should also be clear that they too can be saved if they repent.  But as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6:14 "Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers; for what fellowship does righteousness have with lawlessness? And what partnership does light have with darkness?"

So, what’s the takeaway from this? The takeaway is that we got ourselves into today’s American mess by toleration, by trying to be nice. We didn’t want the idiots to hate us, so we chose tolerance over discipline. We failed to realize that the idiots would not be satisfied with tolerance; that they would next demand acceptance, then celebration. We stepped onto the slippery slope and now find we have slid to the bottom.

Contemporary American Christianity got itself into its current big de-churching mess the same way: by trying to be nice. On the road to niceness, the church made the enormous theological blunder of teaching that “salvation is by faith alone.”

I do have a bone to pick here with Ms. Slag. At least in the Lutheran church, we teach that salvation is by grace, a gift from God. Faith is also a gift from the Holy Spirit, but it is not what saves us. What saves us is that God sent His Son into the world, despite our sinfulness, to die on a cross for us, because we could not do it. Christ's death and resurrection gives us the promise that we too can be His children, and brothers and sisters of Christ.

But aside from that "bone," Slag is correct.  If you want to know how we got here, it was when being nice became the highest virtue.  But Jesus wasn't always nice.  Remember that he called the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the High Priests vipers.  I am sure he probably used even more colorful insults.   As the images of God on earth, perhaps we should be more discriminating too.