Tolerance and Toleration

One of those weird facts that science turns up is that redheads generally do not tolerate pain as well as people born with other hair colors. It's especially true of redheaded females and especially in regards to the pain of cold or heat. They also need more anesthesia. Oddly enough, they can usually handle spicier foods. Oh, and if they are on certain painkillers, they exhibit a higher pain tolerance than other people. They're still working out the science behind this.

Having a lower pain tolerance could have advantages. You'd be more likely to take care of an injury right away and less likely to make an injury worse as do some athletes (or just regular guys) by playing or working through the pain. On the other hand, there are people who do not feel pain at all. That might seem like a superpower but those people really have to watch themselves because they may not realize they've just burned themselves on a heated pot or that they've cut themselves rather badly. Pain is an alarm system. If it's too sensitive, it's like your neighbor's car alarm that goes off if a cat walks by. If it's not sensitive enough, it loses its protective power.

Our sermon suggestion asks, "How can a book be interpreted to support both tolerance and intolerance?" I'm assuming the book in question is the Bible. And I'm presuming that the person's question has arisen in response to hearing a lot of conflicting rhetoric over various issues, like religious freedom or tolerance of different groups of people. And both sides were probably quoting the Bible to justify their opposing opinions.

This is a very complicated issue and so I'm cutting the Gordian knot on the political questions. The first amendment of the Constitution prohibits the government from either establishing a state religion or impeding the free exercise of religion. It also guarantees our rights to free speech and to assemble peaceably. This amendment was included to stop people from being persecuted or prosecuted for their beliefs. In certain states Baptists preachers could be jailed for preaching. (Seeing a Baptist preaching to people in the street through the bars of his jail cell window was a formative experience for James Madison who wrote the amendment.) In other states, Roman Catholics or Jews could not hold elected office. The Supreme Court says the government needs to demonstrate a compelling interest to refuse to let people exercise religious practices. So I will not deal with legal issues about religion here.

I am focusing narrowly on what the sermon suggestion question asks. How can different people use the same Bible to say we should tolerate certain religions or people and to also say we shouldn't? Basically by emphasizing different passages and ignoring different contexts.

When the Israelites entered the land of Canaan, they found themselves up against a culture that had different gods and different values than they did. Wikipedia offers a partial list of Canaanite gods that numbers more than 2 dozen! The primary god was Baal Hadad, the god of storms and rain and thus fertility. At festivals, the people held public orgies to encourage Baal to send rain and fertilize the earth. Another major god was Moloch, to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children, as did the Phoenicians (Philistines in the Bible) who inhabited the coast. In Carthage, where they also worshiped Moloch, the bones of numerous infants have been found at many sites. Ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that when it looked as if Carthage was about to fall to the Romans, the city sacrificed from 300 to 500 children to appease their god, first procuring them from others before the nobility gave up their own. Leviticus explicitly forbids doing this, just as the story of Abraham and Isaac implicitly says that Yahweh is a God who does not require this of his people.

If the Israelites were to occupy the land, they could not let this continue. They could not tolerate child sacrifice. We are social creatures and so we tend to conform to the prevailing culture. The Israelites were to stone anyone sacrificing their children to Moloch. They were supposed to eliminate such practices in the land--there's no sugarcoating this--by eliminating the peoples of the land. In Deuteronomy 7 Moses says, "When the Lord your God shall bring you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and shall clear away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorities and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you, and when the Lord your God shall deliver them before you, and you shall defeat them and you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them." They are forbidden to intermarry nor are they to take loot. They are to destroy their idols, even if they are made of gold or silver.

In the end, the Israelites do not do a very thorough job of this. They don't wipe out all the natives. They do intermarry. And we see hundreds of years later that these practices continue. The Books of Kings and the prophet Jeremiah mention these child sacrifices and Israelites doing them. In fact, the valley of Hinnom on the south side of Jerusalem is notorious as the place where people offer their children to the fires of Moloch. It later becomes the city dump, where trash is burned continually, and which Jesus uses as the symbol of Hell.

On the other hand there are numerous passages in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy that command compassion and tolerance towards outsiders. In Exodus 22:21 the Israelites are told, "You must not wrong a foreigner nor oppress him, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt." But the other passages are where people get their justification for holy wars and genocide, even though they are not tiny bronze age Israel trying to establish themselves against bigger nations. And people use the various lists of crimes and their punishments listed in Leviticus and other places to justify intolerance of witches and homosexuals. (Also included in these lists are bestiality, incest, polygamy, and adultery.) Today in the West we tolerate some of these things but not others. Our level of tolerance is different from the ancient Israelites and different from other cultures around the globe today. In parts of Africa children are still sacrificed. Both the ancient Israelites and the modern world unite in not tolerating this. However, in Jesus' time a girl could be married by the time she first menstruated. His mother Mary may very well have been a teenager. In Asia, Africa and the Middle East they still have child brides. We set limits on how young a person can marry (though those under 16 can marry with a court order and parental consent.) Simultaneously we have in recent years become much more aware of the problem of pedophilia. Other societies would differ with us on whether and how much damage is being done.

I'm not trying to confuse the issue but point out its complexity. No society does or can afford to tolerate everything humans wish to do, even if it is religiously motivated. Each society tolerates things that other cultures don't. And though lines must be drawn, exactly where to draw them can be tricky.

But what of Christians? We do not live in a theocracy. We live in a democracy where laws can declare certain things crimes, but not sins. Our society tolerates stuff that wouldn't fly in days of David or even Jesus. We are not bound by the laws that governed ancient Israel, are we?

Not the ceremonial or civil laws, but certainly the ethical laws. But, again, which of them? When the church in Jerusalem met in council to decide how much of the Jewish law Gentile converts must observe, it was determined that they should, in the words of Acts 15:29, "abstain from meat that has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what has been strangled and from sexual immorality." These they considered the essentials.

Jesus stated things more succinctly: We are to love God with all we are and have and to love our neighbor as ourselves. He said that all the other commandments hang on these two and no other commandment is greater than they are. They are also, as is Jesus' restatement of the Golden Rule, positive commandments. This makes them, if you think about it, even more restrictive than negative commandments. Ask any kid. Would he rather be told to turn off the TV, which still allows him to do other fun stuff, or to be told to do his homework, which requires him to do what he doesn't consider fun at all? In the same way, being told "not to do to others things you wouldn't want done to yourself" doesn't put you under the obligations that being told to "love someone as you love yourself" does. If I don't kick or hurt the starving beggar at my gate, I have fulfilled the negative command. But to fulfill the positive command, to love, requires me to feed and take care of the beggar.

How does this relate to toleration? Toleration, in the words of Perez Zagorin, "is the practice of deliberately allowing or permitting a thing of which one disapproves." I realize this is a little different from tolerance, which usually means the amount one is able to endure. I am, like 60% of the population, lactose intolerant, which means I cannot digest milk products where the lactose has not been broken down. It's not a question of whether I like things like milk shakes or not. I cannot digest them and they cause me pain and so I avoid them. But, having no hatred of them, I don't care if others indulge.

Toleration, on the other hand, is what I exercise around smokers. As a nurse, I've seen the damage that emphysema, heart disease and cancers of the lungs, tongue and throat can do. But I don't attack, physically or verbally, those who smoke. I have friends, including nurses (!), who smoke. I will enthusiastically help them should they wish to stop. I will, if they are continually coughing their lungs out, suggest they might want to cut back or consider quitting. If they say "No" I won't press it. They know how I feel and why I feel that way but they also know I feel that way because I care about them and the harm they are doing to themselves.

But do we see this kind of thing in Jesus? Yes. When the woman caught in adultery is brought before him, her accusers rightly point out that the law of Moses stated she should be stoned to death. We know from his teachings that Jesus has a very high view of marriage and is opposed to adultery. So he doesn't approve of what the woman did. But instead of answering, he scribbles in the dirt. When pressed, he says only a sinless person had the right to throw the first stone. Then Jesus goes back to writing in the dirt.

Normally an elder in the community would cast the first stone. None of them dared assert that they were without moral failings. (Why? One wonders what Jesus was writing in the dirt.) And so they melted away as did the younger men, no doubt trying to figure out just how the matter of this woman's adultery was now about them. After a while Jesus stands up and sees no one but the woman. "Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?" She says, "No one, Lord." Jesus replies, "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more." Jesus showed mercy toward the woman and toleration of her sin. And he did believe she had sinned because he tells her not to sin any more.

Then there is the time that Peter asks Jesus how often he must forgive his brother. Seven times? asks Peter. Seventy-times seven, says Jesus. Most of us would conclude long before reaching that number that the brother was insincere in his regrets. Jesus essentially says, err on the side of grace and forgiveness.

Finally there is the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Jesus tells of a farmer whose enemy sows weeds in his fields. Wheat and weeds grow up together. The farmer's slaves wish to pull up the weeds but the farmer says that some wheat may be uprooted as well. Instead, he will wait till harvest time and only when everything is harvested will they sort the good from the bad. It is pretty obvious that Jesus is saying judgment must wait till the Day of Judgment. Otherwise in being zealous to root out and destroy evil people we will uproot and damage the good. And, unlike in the parable, in real life bad people can become good ones. Indeed, all good people come from bad ones, redeemed by Jesus. Only God knows when to end this grace period. And then Jesus will be the final judge.

And his judgment is going to surprise people, including some who thought they were good guys. In Matthew 7, Jesus says, "On that day, many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, didn't we prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons, and do many powerful deeds?' Then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you. Go away from me, you lawbreakers!'" Based on what Jesus says in his parable of the last judgment in Matthew 25, I think we can conclude it must be the law of love that they break.

A thousand years ago, Bishop Wazo of Liege, in what is now Belgium, was faced with what to do about heretics. A man of education, his approach was uncommonly nuanced for the 11th century. He wrote to a fellow bishop that, based on the parable of the wheat and the weeds, "the church should let dissent grow with orthodoxy until the Lord comes to separate and judge them." In other words, err on the side of forgiveness and grace.

At the jail, there was an officer who was a Wiccan. She told me a previous chaplain (whom I never met) used to verbally ridicule other faiths and put post-it notes on her computer telling her she was going to hell. In contrast I see myself as everyone's chaplain, both staff and inmates, and try to get Muslims, Jews, Hindus and others the proper literature and diets their religions require. So when this Wiccan bought a rosary to give to a sick Christian friend, she brought it to me to bless, which I did in Jesus' name. The Wiccan officer was very grateful. So tell me: should that officer be interested in learning more about Jesus, to whom is she likely to go? The person who disparaged her belief and told her she was going to hell? Or the person who did not condemn her but showed her respect and acted out of Christian love?