For example, in biblical studies, let’s take study of the gospel of John. Up until 25 years ago in Society of Biblical Literature or something like that, the vast majority of papers were either doing exegesis or they were doing recreation of the Johannine community or they were doing source criticism or they were comparing the theological emphases of this book with that book, or something like that. In America, the drive came much more through the social sciences: cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, and so forth. I’ve long told students in this country the most dangerous departments for their faith in current Western universities are not science departments. Science departments have far, far more Christians in them than the arts departments.

In that sense, there are quite a few people … popularizers like Tom Oden, but also more serious analyses like that of Netland and a number of others as well … who are convinced that postmodernism is not really a useful label. It’s really modernism gone to seed. There’s some truth to that. We advance a new conception of the phenomenon in question and define tolerance as a value orientation towards difference. The fundamental question is not whether one puts up with something disliked but how one responds to the existence of diversity itself. This definition is abstract and analytically distinct from other concepts. Footnote 4 Our focus is on subjective reactions to difference; thus, this conceptualization does not require dislike of or identification of potentially objectionable groups, ideas, or behaviors. In practice, this definition is consistent with the approach to tolerance that does incorporate forbearance into its definition. I shall argue that although a few things can be said in its favor, the notion of tolerance has changed, and the contemporary tolerance is intrinsically intolerant and is blind to its own shortcomings because it erroneously thinks it holds the moral high ground. It does not. Worse, this tolerance is, perhaps, socially dangerous and is certainly intellectually debilitating. There are better structures of thought for achieving the desired ends. Coffey, John (2000). Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689. Longman Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-582-30465-9. Political scientist Andrew R. Murphy explains that "We can improve our understanding by defining 'toleration' as a set of social or political practices and 'tolerance' as a set of attitudes." [1] Random House Dictionary defines tolerance as "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, beliefs, practices, racial or ethnic origins, etc., differ from one's own". [2]

Intolerance

If I have the right tools as I approach the biblical text, if I ask the right questions, if I bring the right rigor and the right discipline, then as I approach the text, I will ask certain kinds of things and it will give me true answers. If I ask the wrong kinds of things, or I don’t have the right kind of rigor, then it might give me wrong answers, so you’ve got to keep refining hermeneutics.

John, Gray (2015). Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-138-17022-3. OCLC 941437450. Dworkin, Ronald (14 February 2006). "Even bigots and Holocaust deniers must have their say". The Guardian . Retrieved 2 January 2023. Of course, the Indian has his greeting ritual, and the Japanese is bowing. So many complicated rules! How far down you go. It all depends on age and education and seniority and who’s up and who’s down and who’s president and who’s not. You sort of aim to bow in roughly the right measure. It’s complicated. In his 1882 essay " What is a Nation?", French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan proposed a definition of nationhood based on "a spiritual principle" involving shared memories rather than a common religious, racial, or linguistic heritage. Thus members of any religious group could participate fully in the nation's life. "You can be French, English, German, yet Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or practicing no religion." [14] In the twentieth century [ edit ]In a highly diverse culture, like that which dominates much of the Western world, the plausibility structures are necessarily far more restricted for the very good reason we don’t have all that much in common. The plausibility structures that do remain tend to be held with extra tenacity, almost as if people recognize that without such structures the culture would be in danger of flying apart.

Once you’ve moved to “I” being the beginning point, then it’s no longer quite so sure how you get there. You’re no longer appealing to revelation. There was equal certainty that in fact human beings can know the truth, can know it truly, and thus, the pursuit of truth is still held up as a desideratum, as a summum bonum.… It’s something to pursue. Truth is both desirable and attainable. Well, it seems to me that, perhaps, we might consider the possibility that the blessed apostle Paul might, perhaps, have been construing things in a slightly different way. He might, perhaps, have been thinking such and such.” The brother from Norway weighed in, “Of course, that’s not what he thought! I mean, anybody can see it means such and such! After all, Luther said it!” Meanwhile, my Japanese brother is wondering what group of barbarians he’s fallen into. All of this is before you get to any of the substance. You can be ever so religious on Sunday; it just doesn’t matter a fig. In a culture in which evangelicals now have the same divorce rate as the rest of the culture, that’s secularization. I don’t care how many people go to church. It’s secularization. It doesn’t matter what you believe anymore. It just doesn’t matter. It’s still worth using the postmodern label, in my judgment, because there are some differences that can usefully be talked about that need to be understood. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing that postmodernism is the fruit of modernism in many respects. It is exposing the instability of modernist epistemology.Laursen, John Christian; Nederman, Cary, eds. (1997). Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-3331-5. As Gaede puts it in his very useful book, When Tolerance is No Virtue, he writes, “In the past political correctness generally centered on issues that were quite substantive. The Victorians were prudish about sex because they were enthusiastic about bourgeois morality. In the fifties, many Americans were intolerant of any notion that seemed remotely “pink” (socialistic) because they assumed communism to be a major threat to their economic and political freedom. If you discover the water molecule has two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen in Lima, Peru, low and behold, the same is also true in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Truth is truth. It’s true everywhere. With that kind of perspective, you want the same thing to operate in every domain. That, of course, was at the heart of Marxist historiography in the days of the Russian Empire. a b Walzer, Michael (1997). On Toleration. The Castle lectures in ethics, politics, and economics. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300070195. OCLC 47008086.