I think I believe in tolerance and humility. I believe we should not do attack evangelism because I never see either Jesus or Paul doing that. I see them both insisting on and defending truth without compromise and without ever giving ground and saying, "Well, I suppose you could be right as well." If either had been willing to be tolerant in that way, their lives would have ended quite differently. Neither were victims of intolerance either. They were victimized because they insisted on a particular truth which would not allow them to accept that any competing truth If Jesus was a victim for tolerance, it was His intolerance that made Him a victim, not His tolerance.
Likewise, Jesus was humble but not by the standard in the article about faith in America. He repeatedly said He was sent to a particular people, the chosen people of God, there is nothing humble about such a statement or a belief with respect to one group of people. His claims were certainly not humble in the sense that they invited diversity of opinion and belief, He said that diversity of opinion about Him was not possible if life were to be the outcome.
How did we get here? It seems that in the absence of a belief in truth we have substituted values about which we can have some consensus of their "goodness." After we are certain of the "good" values we then project language backwards onto those values in order to affirm the value. In the process, words find new meanings. We haven't changed the vocabulary, only what we intend by it. When we interpret the Bible, we do so in community, but the community of interpreters needs to include the original writer(s), the original audience, those who have interpreted it before us, and the community of faith in which we find ourselves, and we can't exclude any of the above as we do the work of interpretation. With respect to language, it seems that we have tossed out the history of meaning.
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