Unseating Intolerant Tolerance

Randy Newman on Leveling the Playing Field:

Leveling the playing field means showing people their own intolerance. Often it forces people to see their own attempts to “proselytize.” When these professors asked my friend if he was going to try to proselytize them, they themselves were attempting to “convert” him to their way of thinking – a way that believes you should not try to proselytize! That’s a very specific form of religious faith – one that the vast majority of people throughout history have disagreed with. It’s a recent invention, and a particularly Western-American-post-enlightenment form of religion. It’s remarkably intolerant of the views of millions of people....

Until people see their own intolerance, claimed in the name of “tolerance,” it will be difficult to have a real two-way conversation. This may take some time…and a healthy dose of chutzpah. But helping people get set free from this kind of bondage (and it is certainly not anything less than that!), may be the most gracious, loving thing we can do for them.

The Drama of Baptism: the Story of Christ

Russell Moore on What Augustine’s Baptism Can Teach Our Churches:

Ambrose took the moment of baptism as itself a teaching exercise, showing how in baptism the whole of redemptive history centers on Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. He showed them the typological themes of redemption through judgment in the Flood, in the Red Sea Exodus, in the crossing of Jordan, and, of course, in the baptism of the Lord Jesus himself....

In a day when, at least in my circles, baptism has become reduced to merely the person’s individual testimony, we ought to recover the drama of baptism as placing us in the story of Christ, a story told ahead of time in countless canonical life-stories and told, in the water, in our own life-story: death, burial, and resurrection as we are joined to the life of Another.