The New Tolerance – Final Comment

Final Comment

Occasionally, I receive a copy of a new book released by a Christian publishers requesting me to write a review on rupeba.se.

Some time ago I received a copy of "The New Tolerance" by Josh McDowell and Bob Hostetler.

I already know Bob Hostetler who served as a Salvation Army officer in the United States and as I had previously committed myself to research the new interpretation of the concept of tolerance, it was with great interest I read the book.

The authors reveal and challenge, using a plethora of examples, the post-modern thinking which, among other things, is identified by these two characteristics:

- There are no absolute truths.

In post-modern thought, it is the ‘feeling’, one’s senses, that determines what is right and true.

"If I ‘feel’ this way, how can it be wrong?" - "How can you have objections to how I feel about that?" (P. 75).

In this perspective, the consequence may be that if Hitler felt it was right to kill six million Jews, it must have been right for him. And how can we dare to say that Hitler felt he wronged?

- There are no absolute, comprehensive, universal values ​​except one: tolerance.

But the new tolerance proponents are only tolerant toward (of) what is politically correct. They can be totally intolerant of those who claim that there is one truth and that there is only one path to God.

The authors demonstrate how the ‘thinking’ that the new tolerance brings with it permeates more and more of western society:

- The educational system

- The State

- Society

- The Church

In the case of the Church it primarily takes the form mainly of a changed view of the Bible, love, sex and marriage, as well as an altered view of other religions.

When I began reading the book I sensed the impression that much of what the authors describe relates to the U.S. and not so much us in Sweden. Maybe it's because I myself have been blinded by common mindedness, because I'm so used to encounter the new intolerance in Sweden, I do not react as strongly when it shows itself. But the new tolerance is probably as widespread in Sweden as in the USA.

The book is really worth reading and an wake up alarm clock to Christianity in Sweden today. Read it, be shook up by the message in it and ask God what you can do about the problem.

Peter Baronowsky, translated by Sven Ljungholm on fsaof.blogspot.com