GLEANINGS from the Daily Office – Is Tolerance Overrated?

GLEANINGS (from the Daily Office) – Is Tolerance Overrated?  – Year Two, Advent 2, Friday, December 11, 2015, Revelation 2:18-29

Forgive my absence especially yesterday. I drove to Birmingham and back to be with my daughter Mary as she underwent another cardiac ablation. The surgery went well but did not produce anything physically, nothing more to ablate. We hope other means will bring the spiking heart rates under control. Join me in prayers for Mary.

“But I have this against you, that you tolerate the women Jezebel.”

This week has seen quite the firestorm. A presidential candidate has outraged many by suggesting a pause in immigration to the US. He has been called a bigot, betrayer of American values, and a phobe of some sort. I don’t care much for the candidate at all but the response to him seems at least as bigoted as the suggestion that produced it. In this case the candidate may be, however bombastically or inarticulately, espousing a principle basic to the office to which he aspires (protecting citizens from enemies foreign and domestic).

Has our PC world overrated tolerance? Is it a virtue? Chesterton once said. “Tolerance is the virtue of a man with no convictions.” That seems a little over the top, too harsh to be universal. But it seems a timely reminder to keep before us the limits of tolerance, even among Christians.

There were things that God expected people to oppose. Jezebel was to Thyatira what cancer is to the body. She was by her teaching and example leading people to death. But the church allowed her to prattle on, not protecting the sheep who might be led astray. And this was a church known for its work, love, faith, service, and patient endurance. But those things, however honorable, do not justify foolishness.

A balance has to be maintained. Love and discipline are two sides of the same coin. There is little love in allowing without admonishment my son to let go of my hand and run through a parking lot. There is none in leaving him with childcare that does not vet its employees. None!

Protecting others is basic to human existence and benevolence does not trump that. Subjecting anyone anywhere to a religion or sect thereof that makes any non-adherent an infidel to be eliminated is a violation of the human contract. Those who believe in liberty cannot embrace a religion that does not. Not if we want to sleep soundly at night. The inconsistency would gnaw at our conscience. Tolerance has its limits.

–Frodo: “I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”–