All Posts Tagged With: "Dogmatism"

At one point in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, someone remarks that the people of San Francisco are so nice that, just in the course of saying hello, they’ll invent a new religion for you. What Adams fails to say is that in an age when no final authority is accepted, such a religion will perforce be considered by many to be just as valid as any other religion.

Why, then, did Harvard University attempt to assume the authority to remove the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship from its campus? The group’s alleged crime was having a constitution that required it to have a Christian as president, which is to say that it refused to recognize the new god known as Diversity. Fortunately for IVCF, a Harvard Law School graduate successfully pointed out in court that Harvard was asking a Christian group to cease to be Christian.

On quite another level, but dealing with the same essential question, not long ago a rabbi called a Presbyterian minister friend and told him he had to have lunch with him the next day because, he said, “I have a Christian problem.”

He refused to name his problem on the phone, but the next day at lunch he explained that some people from his synagogue had formed an interfaith group with some members of a nearby Presbyterian church. As they were entering the synagogue, one of the Presbyterian ladies turned to the rabbi and said, “Don’t worry, Rabbi. We won’t talk about Jesus.”

The rabbi told her, “It is your duty to talk about Jesus!”

Turning to his minister friend, he remarked, “Someone in this community has to stand up for Jesus.”

The point would seem to be that this “all religions lead to salvation” ideology has become a new religion in its own right, and a highly dogmatic and intolerant one at that. A New Age landlady of mine in Santa Barbara once gave me a tongue-lashing about how “exclusive” my Christian faith was, and not long after that I received another tongue-lashing from a Wiccan on the beach for the same reason. The irony of their own hard-headed intolerance was lost on both of them. One of the core beliefs of Christianity is that there is one God, that he is infinite in all his attributes, and that he has provided a Savior known as Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation. Therefore, to remove John 14:6 (”I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”) is to gut the Christian faith. Christians—the real ones—are perfectly willing to allow others to believe in other ways to salvation, but in the nature of the case are unwilling to surrender the essence of their beliefs.

The tolerance of diversity in religion used to mean Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and those of other faiths were content to live together in peace and friendship, working with each other and enjoying socializing with each other, perhaps even arguing with them in a loving manner. But genuine Christians do not verbally attack Muslims, for example, for their core beliefs and demand that they abandon them in the name of pluralism and diversity.

Neither should the practitioners of the new Theology of Diversity demand that we Christians abandon our faith in favor of membership in their Church of the Lowest Common Denominator. That rabbi was right.