If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Culture in this first part of the twenty-first century might be described as “politically correct” or “tolerant.” According to this paradigm a garbage man is a “sanitation engineer,” a short person is “vertically challenged,” and a thief is “ethically disoriented.” Inclusive cultural practices can border on the insane when traffic signs are printed in 5 languages and also marked in Braille!

Tolerant rhetoric can even seem as though it belongs in the evangelical Christian church under the scriptural colors of “judge not lest ye be judged.” That is, many feel as though the church should make no judgments and that “love” prohibits intolerance. Surely no true Christian desires to unnecessarily judge anyone, but if professing believers tolerate what God does not the culture has infected the church rather than the church affecting the culture.

Many evangelical Christians would never tolerate impure moral behavior in the church (at least ideologically). Under the flag of “grace,” however, I’m convinced we allow a host of doctrinal impurities to corrupt the church. “Contend earnestly for the faith,” insisted the apostle Jude, but because we’ve bought into the tolerance of our age I fear many would rather comfort than contend. In harmony with Jude, but discordant with the creedal tolerance of today, however, Paul also contended for the faith:

Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple (Rom 16:17-18).

Respected expositor James Strong writes that the term mark them as used in Romans 16:17 means “to take aim at.” Now, could the apostle of grace and mercy, Paul, possibly intend to teach believers to “take aim at” leaders within the Christian church? Such a notion might seem offensive when viewed through today’s politically correct, “tolerant” viewpoint. Paul, however, demonstrated that Christian intolerance can be a virtue in 2 Timothy 2:17 when he openly rebuked Hymenaeus and Philetus whose teaching “will spread like gangrene.”

Can you imagine the reaction a preacher today might receive if he said that another Christian leader’s doctrine “will spread like gangrene?” It’s easy to believe that Paul’s intolerance was probably always directed at some fringe teacher. Kindly consider, however, another example of Paul openly rebuking the most prominent church leader of early Christianity:

But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews? (Gal 2:14).

Here, Paul withstood Peter openly because when prominent leaders are teaching what they ought not others are led astray. Open intolerance of doctrinal error is surely not politically correct, but it is scriptural. “So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitans,” warned Jesus, “which thing I hate” (Rev 2:15). Because of this virtuous act of intolerance the church at Pergamum needed no guesswork to determine whose teaching to avoid.

In stark opposition to the practices of modern Christianity where tolerance at the expense of doctrinal purity is considered a virtue. In scripture though, Jesus expects His church to exercise the virtue of intolerance toward errant teachers and their dangerous dogmas. By merely being tolerant of an errant teacher within the church at Thyatira the Christians there earned an open rebuke in the eternal record:

But I have this against you, that you tolerate the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads My bond-servants astray, so that they commit acts of immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols (Rev 2:20).

Just as the wayward doctrines of Jezebel (and even Peter) led the early Christians astray, teachers within the Christian church today go unchallenged though they too teach doctrines which cause the people of God to stumble. Contrary to the milquetoast tolerance dogmas so popular today the lost virtue of Christian intolerance is needed like never before because popular leaders with worldwide platforms stumble the servants of Christ and go unchallenged.