Tolerating Intolerance

Socialists, both the political types and the scientific types, have problems deciding how to balance their toleration of intolerant people. The problems come from every direction; if you are intolerant, it usually means that at some point you become intolerable. If I don’t tolerate you being intolerant, who wins that argument?

If I, in hopes of being right and nice, start the process to freedom from intolerance by tolerating everything, I won’t exist long, because the intolerant will fight to decide which ones of them will get my stuff from me since I don’t stop their controlling and their not tolerating differing groups.

In 1945, at the time of the end of WWII, Karl Popper wrote in his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, about what he called “The Paradox of Tolerance:”

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

It becomes a dog chasing its tail. I suggest that the difference a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, (filled with the Holy Spirit of its King) can add is the power to tolerate people whether we tolerate their behavior or false religions or evil plans or hateful prejudice or not. We have the power to press past stupid behavior with the plan to bring freedom from it to the one enslaved by it.

“If your brother sins against you, go and rebuke him in private. If he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he won’t listen, take one or two more with you, so that by the testimony of two or three witnesses every fact may be established. If he pays no attention to them, tell the church. But if he doesn’t pay attention even to the church, let him be like an unbeliever and a tax collector to you. I assure you: Whatever you bind on earth is already bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is already loosed in heaven. Again, I assure you: If two of you on earth agree about any matter that you pray for, it will be done for you by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there among them.”
(Matthew 18:15-20 Holman Christian Standard Bible®©)

In this instruction from Jesus, even if we reach the point of treating the offending people like unbelievers and traitors, they are by that shift returned to our list of people to love and evangelize.

Remember, too, that the group of people Jesus said were to pronounce a judgment in the matter of the brother’s sin and refusal to repent of it would be gathered as an ekklesia. He certainly didn’t mean the church Constantine and James 1 built. Ekklesia, for perhaps 500 years before Jesus spoke what Matthew recorded here, meant a group of people, gathered from a larger group, with authority and responsibility to judge, decide, vote, govern, or accomplish some project.

Much more clarity regarding ekklesia and James of England’s attempt to usurp it by the instruction he gave his hired interpreters to mistranslate it, can be found in this short book: The Kingdom of Our God.