Tolerant because Christianity itself is a hybrid tradition: a response to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ‘Toleration, Justice and Dignity’

Abstract

In Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ‘Toleration, Justice and Dignity’, he argues for tolerance between religious traditions on the basis of human dignity. In this response to his paper, I argue that a general philosophical argument from human dignity will at best lead to indifference or mere praise, but not true tolerance. In the second part of the paper, I offer a sketch of a distinctly Christian way of arguing for tolerance towards adherents of other religions, namely on the basis of the insight that Christianity itself is a hybrid tradition.

Keywords:

• Wolterstoff
• law
• gospel
• tolerance
• human dignity
• reformed tradition

In the beginning of his paper, Nicholas Wolterstorff draws attention to a distinction that is important but often overlooked: the difference between tolerance, on the one hand, and indifference and praise on the other hand. As Wolterstorff says: ‘What is required for tolerating your religious beliefs and practices is that, rather than praising them or being indifferent, I must, for some reason, dislike or disapprove of them’ (378). Be it mild or intense, tolerance implies disagreement or even dislike. I wholly agree.

For theologians who seek to broaden the scope of their expertise to religious traditions other than Christianity and seek to form a dialogical community with these traditions, this has important ramifications. In line with Wolterstorff’s concept of religious tolerance as implying disagreement or dislike, we might distinguish between de facto diversity and de jure diversity. In our society, we live in a situation of de facto religious diversity. We live among Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and many Christian denominations. But if we intend to form a dialogical community, we have to bring about the transition from de facto diversity to de jure diversity. If we are going to make religious diversity a part of our cultural DNA, this requires going beyond indifference or praise of diversity and must include disagreement and even dislike. If one never feels irritated, one is not engaging in such a dialogical community. In that case, one either ignores the radical differences in one’s environment and celebrates the moderate differences with which one is satisfied, or one has already excluded those who are more radically different than one would allow. Therefore, I also agree with Wolterstorff’s (and Grube’s) rejection of a pluralist approach to religious diversity because such an approach praises religious diversity irrespective of what that diversity is. In this view, what people believe does not really matter. What matters is that all have a share in the truth.

The question is, then, and this is basically the subject of the rest of Wolterstorff’s paper, why we should be tolerant towards members of other religions or even stimulate religious diversity and make it part of our theological DNA. Wolterstorff argues that this is because of human dignity. What makes humans human is their right to think for themselves, to make up their own mind and not be punished for that.

What must be addressed is whether this suffices as a basis for religious tolerance. As Wolterstorff has argued at the beginning of his paper, true tolerance is not the same as indifference or appraisal. It must include disagreement or dislike. The argument from human dignity, however, is of a moral kind and thus makes being tolerant a condition of being morally responsible. I wonder whether such a moral obligation satisfies Wolterstorff’s own criterion for true tolerance. When members of one religion disagree with people who hold different religious convictions, does the argument from human dignity suffice to motivate them to be actively tolerant towards them in spite of those differences? Or does it, at best, bring them to indifference or distant appraisal? Would not the most natural response to the obligation of religious tolerance on the basis of human dignity be: ‘O really, you’re right, these guys have every right to speak up for themselves and be a member of society, but I’m not at all interested in what they believe. As long as they don’t enforce their opinions on the whole of society and as long as they don’t kill people with other convictions, I don’t care.’ So, why should the argument from human dignity lead to anything more than religious indifference?

Therefore, my thesis is as follows: for adherents of one religion to become intrinsically motivated to tolerate adherents of other religions, they have to find the grounds for doing so in the core of their own religious conviction. So, rather than developing a general philosophical motivation for religious diversity and religious tolerance, as Wolterstorff has done and as Dirk-Martin Grube does in his inaugural lecture published in this same issue, I would like to urge religious traditions to develop such a motivation from within their traditions. Thus, the motivation for religious tolerance should not be developed philosophically but theologically. Motivations for religious tolerance are intrinsically contextual and relative to one’s religious tradition or denomination. They are particular and contextual rather than general.

My argument so far is broadly in line with developments in the theology of religions in the last few decades. After a rather strong critique of pluralism,¹ the theology of religions now emphasizes that religious dialogue and the theology of religions need a grounding in religious traditions themselves.² Therefore, different religious traditions cannot develop this grounding in one and the same way. This may even be true of different denominations within a religious tradition.

In the remainder of my response, I shall give a few hints as to what a theological motivation for religious tolerance and an engagement in religious dialogue might look like when developed from a distinctly Christian perspective, more precisely a variety of the Reformed tradition. My argument is a retrieval³ of the distinction between Law and Gospel that has played a role in the Protestant Reformation and beyond but is no longer so strongly present in contemporary Reformed theology. Quite to the contrary, it is now more often associated with the Lutheran tradition. Historically, however, the use of the distinction was a common feature of the premodern Reformed and Lutheran traditions.⁴

I am well aware of various alternative ways to develop a motivation for tolerance and dialogue from the core of the Christian religion. After the aforementioned critique of pluralist theologies of religions, a whole range of proposals has been put forward for motivating dialogue from a distinctly Christian perspective. Particular attention has been paid to a Trinitarian perspective, and such a perspective has been elaborated in different ways.⁵ There is no room here to argue for or against these perspectives. What most approaches have in common is that they draw most of their inspiration from modern theology. My choice to offer a retrieval of a premodern distinction to deal with tolerance towards other religions is partly motivated by an attempt to show that a theology of the religions in favour of tolerance and dialogue can also be construed in terms of premodern theological insights.

As Wolterstorff has rightly noted in his paper, this does not mean that the argument provided below is necessarily in contradiction with others. Nor is a distinctly Christian motivation for tolerance and dialogue necessarily in contradiction with those from other religions. One of the main problems of the traditional distinction between three types of theologies of religions, exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, is that it presupposes that religious traditions are internally consistent but mutually exclusive sets of beliefs. This is not necessarily the case. Neither are religious traditions necessarily internally consistent, nor do they necessarily exclude each other.

This leads to the first argument in favour of religious tolerance, dialogue and de jure diversity from the Christian tradition: Christianity itself is a product of an intrareligious and, eventually, interreligious dialogue. The Christian tradition is a product of a complex interplay between appeals to the New Testament, which was mostly the central point of reference, and appeals to the Old Testament. On the one hand, we find ways in which the New Testament overrules or complements the Old Testament. On the other hand, we find cases in which the Christian tradition has drawn on the Old Testament, more or less against claims made in the New Testament. The Old Testament has never been rejected from the canon. Quite to the contrary, such rejection has always been condemned as a heresy.⁶ Thus, the Holy Scriptures of the Christian religion themselves embody an internal dialectics between two traditions rather than a consistent set of beliefs that excludes all other sets.

This internal dialectics provides an intrinsic motivation for religious tolerance, respect and dialogue. The complex interplay between appeals to both the Old and the New Testaments provide some sort of initial glimpse of the distinction that we are after, although it does not coincide with it. Prima facie, one might take the distinction between Law and Gospel as one between the Old and the New Testaments, but the premodern protestant tradition saw aspects of both Law and Gospel in both parts of the Bible. For them, the fundamental distinction is not between parts of the Bible but a systematic distinction between two ways in which God relates to human beings. According to this distinction, ‘Law’ refers to everything that God commands, and ‘Gospel’ refers to everything that God freely offers us by grace alone. As Gisbertus Voetius explains in one of his disputations on Law and Gospel:

The Gospel, strictly speaking, and insofar as it is distinguished from the law, in itself and directly does not prescribe anything to us, or requires anything from us that we have to do, speaking: do this, or, believe, or, have faith; […] But it refers to, announces, and signifies to us what Christ has done for us, and what God in Christ promises, what he wants to do, and what he will do.⁷

Premodern Lutheran and Reformed traditions claimed that all that pertains to the Law is given to us in creation and by nature, so that God’s giving the Law to Israel and the Church is more like a reminder of something that we already know rather than imposing anything new. In this, they followed the medieval natural law tradition. This should not be interpreted as if all human beings would agree on a specific set of moral prescriptions but in the sense that God’s revealed rules for moral behaviour resonate with a natural longing for the good and make an appeal to moral ideals that correspond to the way in which we have been created. One might think of the command to love one another or the insight that human beings have an intrinsic value and, therefore, should not be killed.

It is from the interplay between the Old Testament’s and New Testament’s callings towards the good and their witness to what God did, does and will do in Christ that I would like to develop an intrinsically Christian motivation for religious tolerance. From this perspective, Christianity itself is a dynamic interplay between insights that resonate with universally human concerns and wisdom, on the one hand, and special revelation of God’s work in Christ on the other hand. From this perspective, Christians are not primarily people who believe everything that is said in the Bible, taken together into a consistent and exclusive set of beliefs, but Christians are people who believe in Jesus Christ. This belief in Christ is not without its connection to things to be done; quite to the contrary, it shares a concern about the good life with other religions or secular views of life, and it brings these concerns into an interaction with the centre of its faith in Jesus Christ. A Buddhist view of the good life, for example, might be brought into dialogue with a Christian view of the good life as we find it in the New Testament, but also, as Buddhists and Christians have done, the life of Jesus might be viewed in several ways as reflecting a Buddhist ideal of the good life. At the same time, Christ is not only an ideal of a good life but also the life giving God who enables us to live a good life, and this good news remains different from a Buddhist view of life, however much we may appreciate it from a Christian point of view.

The dynamics internal to the Christian faith is why Christians can be intrinsically motivated to tolerate other religious traditions, respect those traditions and be in an ongoing dialogue with them about the good life. This is because, in their fundamental concern about the good life, Christians are on common ground with these traditions. This does not mean that the purpose of interreligious dialogue is to find out what one has in common, as Wolterstorff rightly criticized. Common ground means an invitation to discover what God has given in other religions through creation and revelation, somewhat similar to the way in which Christianity obliges one to listen to everything written in the Old Testament.

From this perspective, Christianity forbids one to enforce one’s faith in Jesus Christ on anyone anywhere, because that would destroy the most fundamental nature of that faith in Jesus Christ as a response to an essentially free offer of grace and salvation in Jesus Christ and would, instead, turn it into an obligation. Christians are invited to tell others about Christ and about what Christians find in him, but they have to proclaim the Gospel as good news, as a free offer, and, thus, they are obliged to tolerate and respect anyone who does not yet accept that offer or who never will.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Marcel Sarot for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maarten Wisse

The author is an associate professor of Dogmatics and Ecumenics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Privatdozent in Systematic Theology at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany.

Notes

1. D’Costa, Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered.

2. Moyaert, Fragile Identities.

3. Cf. Webster, “Theologies of Retrieval”; Crisp, Retrieving Doctrine, preface.

4. Schwöbel, “Gesetz und Evangelium.”

5. For example, Heim, The Depth of the Riches; D’Costa, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity; Kärkkäinen, Trinity and Religious Pluralism.

6. See the recent discussion at Slenczka, “Texte zum Alten Testament.”

7. Voetius, Selectae disputationes theologicae, deel IV, 26, ‘Iam vero Evangelium stricte dictum, ut à lege distinguitur, directe & per se non praescribit nobis officium nostrum, aut quid nos facere debeamus, dicendo, hoc fac, aut crede, aut confide; […] Sed refert, nuntiat, significat nobis, quid Christus pro nobis fecerit, quidque Deus in Christo promittat, quid facere velit, & facturus sit.’