Tag: Christian worldview

Work Out Your Salvation

obedience

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.
~Philippians 2:12-13 NKJV

“Sin is what bubbles up unbidden from the depths of the human heart, so that all one has to do is go with the flow. That has the appearance of freedom, but is in fact slavery, as Jesus himself declared. True freedom is the gift of the spirit, the result of grace; but… it isn’t simply a matter of being forced now to be good, against our wills and without our co-operation, but a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the spirit is at work within, that God is doing himself that which I too am doing. If we don’t believe that, we don’t believe in the spirit, and we don’t believe in Paul’s teaching.”
~ N.T. Wright, “Justification~God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision”, pg. 164

The Edict of Intolerance

OKCupid Mozilla
A wise man once said, “All we know from history is that we don’t know from history.” In AD 311 emperors Constantine and Galerius signed an edict of toleration ending the persecution of Christians. The other religions were not done away with, but Christianity was allowed into the pluralistic worldview of the time.

The agenda of this edict was not to usher in some golden age of toleration. It was a transitional time where one worldview was replaced by another. The pluralistic worldview was being replaced by the Christian worldview. The time of tolerance was only temporary.

Today in the west we see something similar going on. One worldview is being replaced by another. All this talk of tolerance is, again, just a temporary time of transition. Anyone who thinks that this time of tolerance is a permanent thing is fooling themselves. In fact, the time of tolerance has already passed, and the incident with Mozilla shows that.

With Mozilla you have a situation where a man holds to traditional beliefs and he was punished for it. He was punished because his beliefs don’t conform to the new worldview.

Some would say that the Mozilla incident is simply the free market working as it should. That is true, but it is only true as a secondary issue, it is only true because of everything I mentioned above. In a true free market capitalist system no one would care what the CEO’s personal beliefs were. They would only care about how much money he could make the company.

As a Christian I am not tolerant. I don’t defend tolerance and I stand for what I believe in. I am very intolerant regarding abortion for example; in fact I am guilty of hate crime when it comes to abortion. That does not mean I am going to go around planting bombs in abortion clinics or anything–I have no desire to hurt anyone. But, if possible, I won’t support a business, or a politician, or a special interest group that supports abortion.

If, in this day and age, a CEO is punished for not celebrating gay marriage, so be it. But don’t tell me that is tolerance–that would be akin to doing something like pissing on my leg and telling me it’s raining.

image credit:
http://mashable.com/2014/04/03/mozilla-ceo-steps-down/