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Tolerance

Friday, 03 June, 2005

Tolerance is one of today's most coveted virtues. But there are at least three different kinds of tolerance.

First, there is legal tolerance: fighting for the equal rights before the law of all ethnic and religious minorities. Christains should be in the forefront of this campaign. Second, there is social tolerance, going out of our way to make friends with adherents of other faiths, since they are God's creation who bear his image. Third, there is intellectual tolerance. This is to cultivate a mind so broad and open as to accommodate all views and reject none. This is to forget G.K. Chesterton's bon mot that “the purpose of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” To open the mind so wide as to keep nothing in it or out of it is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feebleminded.

(John Stott, quoted in an interview with Gary Barnes, “Why Don't They Listen? John Stott on the most pernicious obstacles to effective world evangelism”, Christianity Today, 2003:47/9 S: 51.)

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