Paradigms of Tolerance: Cartoons, Compassion and the Cross

Chris Watkin

Amid the oceans of ink and hours of air-time devoted to the recent ‘cartoons scandal’, one phrase that regularly punctuates the debate runs ‘I disagree with what you say, but defend to the death your right to say it.’ The saying is most commonly attributed to Voltaire (though it cannot be found in his published work), yet is this a model of tolerance that Christians should embrace? The anticlerical Voltaire is held up as a yardstick, but what other paradigms of tolerance are there in the marketplace of ideas, and what might a distinctively Christian tolerance look like, if there is such a thing?
Those wishing to cast the net wider than Voltaire might stumble across Nietzsche’s ‘last man’, who tolerates everything equally, having no passion left with which either to agree or disagree with anything in particular: a tolerance from inertia. In proclaiming “We have discovered happiness”, the last man simply blinks, unmoved. In this instance as in many others, Nietzsche is a prophetic voice. How well he sums up the anything-goes-ism of some (not all) of the current advocates of free speech. If death was the mediaeval great leveller, then perhaps today tolerance is vying for the title. It is easy, too easy, to be tolerant of everything when nothing is taken seriously.
Searching for examples of tolerance in Christian history, we might point to the re-admission of the Jews to England in 1656 under the Cromwellian Protectorate, though as ever the motivations behind this historical act are far from straightforward. Perhaps we might turn to Milton’s Areopagitica, where the Puritan argues ‘Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?’ Passing over Milton’s rhetorical question, the quotation illuminates a telling difference between the ‘toleration’ of previous centuries (I think you are in the wrong but will forbear from harming you and argue the point) and today’s ‘tolerance’ (I forebear from suggesting that you may be in the wrong). The second definition implodes: if there is no disagreement then there is nothing to tolerate.
But this still leaves us dissatisfied. Forbearance from injury in allowing the expression of views with which one disagrees is something, but it is not much. What we need is both grace and truth, both love and justice, and grace and truth (John 1:17)—love and faithfulness (Exodus 34:6)—came through Jesus Christ. Turning to the bible, we see that tolerance is a provisional staying of judgment: ‘do you show contempt for the riches of his [God’s] kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?’ (Romans 2:4). In the Christian’s own experience, the point where God’s tolerance hits the buffers is at the cross, where His wrath is poured out on his only Son. At the cross we see the just God at his least tolerant of sin, and his most gracious to human beings.
Toleration can only be a provisional stance, a politics of abstention. As such, it is both important and necessary for those who serve the God who proclaims ‘it is mine to avenge, I will repay’ (Deut 32:35; Rom 12:19; Heb 10:30). But what is called for is a way of achieving both truth and reconciliation, both justice and forgiveness. It is one thing for an all-knowing God perfectly to marry grace and truth in the cross, but it is quite another to envisage how we might reflect this sweet blend of love and justice in human affairs. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (note the conjunction) under the leadership of Archbishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela indicates the power of attempting to embody such a blend. After the Encarta era, tribal warfare was avoided in the country at least in part through the efforts of the Commission. One leading journal wrote of it in the following terms:
Any successful attempt to address the past would need to both acknowledge the suffering of apartheid’s victims and lead to national reconciliation. It had to steer a delicate course between those who cried “prosecute and punish” and those who demanded “forgive and forget.” Negotiators managed to create a process that evokes the biblical paradigm of reconciliation, a process that proceeds according to this rubric: “It is necessary to both remember and judge--and forgive.” (Christian Century, Spetember 10th 1997.)
No human institution can satisfy completely both the demands of grace and of truth, but the Commission surely offers one example of the paradigm of the biblical copula being effective ‘on the ground’.
In The Cross of Christ (Leicester: IVP, 1989), John Stott gives practical application to these truths, arguing that ‘we should exhibit in our relationships that combination of love and justice which characterized the wisdom of God in the cross’. Stott stresses that conciliation will be costly whether we are the offended or offending party, and chastens his reader with the truth that:
Although the followers of Jesus never have the right to refuse forgiveness, let alone to take revenge, we are not permitted to cheapen forgiveness by offering it prematurely when there has been no repentance. ‘If your brother sins,’ Jesus said, ‘rebuke him’, and only then ‘if he repents, forgive him’ (Luke 17:3).
The example of disputes between brother Christians cannot of course necessarily be extrapolated to relations with non-believers, though the principles of peacemaking that Stott indicates (Matthew 5:9; 1 Peter 3:11) are by no means limited to intra-faith disagreements; they show how a ‘distinctively Christian’ tolerance will embody the difficult copula of love and justice. It would not be a tolerance of abstention, but a costly work of reconciliation where forgiveness is sought and freely given.
God does not tolerate human sin, he dies for it, and between those two positions there is all the difference in the world. God forebears from finally punishing human sin for a time, but that can never be the last word. His solution to wrong, both personal and collective, is not to be found in abstention from judgment but rather in Christ’s substiutionary atonement. Toleration defends to the death your right to speak, though it cannot account for the consequences of what you say (hence the fervent debates over the ‘limits of free speech’); Christ, by giving up his life, sees justice done for the ill you have spoken and will speak. Tolerance defers justice in the name of love, whereas at the cross love and justice—grace and truth—meet and are both perfectly satisfied. Perhaps then for the Christian ‘tolerance’ is too weak a term, its insipid vapours dissipated by the altogether more robust notion of grace.
Chris Watkin
Chris is a PhD student at Jesus College Cambridge. He studies contemporary French Philosophy and Literature.
(Author: Chris Watkin)

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