The spirit of the age is tolerance.
Its counsel is predictable: Keep your options open. Don’t limit yourself. Play the field. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Keep an open mind. Never say never. Don’t lock yourself in. Hedge your bets. Be flexible. Don’t be rigid. Don’t be a fundamentalist.”
Fundamentalism is regarded by many as a dangerous social disease.
Some kinds of fundamentalism, however, are also part of the spirit of the age. Along with AIDS, STDs, and a drug resistant strain of TB, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, and Christian fundamentalists have become like ancient plagues to a new world order.
Our spiritual enemy is using a multiple strategy. The spirit of anti-Christ is split between: (a) secular confessions of tolerance and (b) religious strategies of control, intimidation and coercion. On one hand are the secular forces that want to purge the name of Christ from public life. On the other are the Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Christian fundamentalists who are attempting to impose their conclusions of faith on an unbelieving society.
Fundamentalism itself is not wrong. Jesus was a fundamentalist. He wasn’t a cultural fundamentalist (Matt. 15:1-9). He was a fundamentalist in the most reasonable sense of the word. No one was more radically conservative when it came to the foundational basics of truth and love. He taught the necessity of forgiveness, the authority of the Scriptures, and the certainty that the world would experience unparalleled trouble, at the end of the age, before his final return (Matt 24:1-31).
Christ also stood for a fundamentalism of nonviolence. He used a show of force only in clearing the money-changers from His Father’s house. He could have armed His men, and captured the surrounding culture. He could have overthrown Herod (the Jewish king) and Caesar (the self-professed Roman god-emperor by whose permission Herod reigned). But He didn’t. Someday He will overthrow all other lords and gods. But not yet.
His example is our light. It is an honor to be rejected for Christ-like fundamentalism (Matt 5:10). If we must be hated for reasoning against the kind of tolerance that makes open-mindedness the ultimate virtue, so be it. If we must be resented for loving our enemies, and for declaring that no one but Christ has ever died in our place to pay for our sin, let it be. But let us never be hated for the kind of fundamentalism that uses physical threats, guns, or votes to coerce unbelievers into accepting our conclusions of faith. That’s not the way of the cross (2 Tim. 2:24-26).
The mission of Christ is not to help the world by exercising our democratic rights. Our mission is to pay whatever price is necessary to courageously and lovingly invite people of all nations to Christ, and to urge those who do so to reconsider and depart from their dangerous, and self-destructive forms of tolerance (2 Tim. 2:19).
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