Regardless of the rights and wrongs of particular arguments, it is difficult to avoid the conclusi
2. Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1979).
1. See his The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967).
3. I should add that there is not a straight line from earlier dictionaries to later dictionaries. For a start, several dictionaries make rather striking distinctions between the verb "to tolerate" and the noun "tolerance" and other cognates. The distinction noted above, in other words, is grounded in a remarkable shift in current popular usage, notyet always reflected in dictionaries, which tend to lag behind. But one can find essays more than a century old that presuppose the "new" definition of tolerance: e.g., in 1891 Bernard Lazare wrote an essay titled "On the Need for Intolerance," Entretiens politiques etlitteraires 3 (1891); the English translation is available athttp://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lazare-bernard/1891/intolerance.htm (accessed 28 Dec. 2009). Assuming that "tolerance" is "the characteristic of ages without beliefs" (a view that sidles up to the "new" tolerance), Lazare was arguing for strong religious and political stances: ifyou have strong and informed views, it is a virtue to be "intolerant" - bywhich he did not mean the silencing of opponents, but the vigorous defense ofyour views such that you denounce opposing views as wrong. While Lazare calls this virtue "intolerance," provided one insists that opponents have the right to affirm their views one might argue that this is in fact the "older" tolerance!
4. I learned this well from my father, who was one of the rare evangelicals who supported the right of Jehovah's Witnesses to freedom of worship and proselytism, at a time when the Duplessis government of Quebec was oppressing them: see my Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: TheLife and Reflections of Tom Carson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008).
5. For a much fuller treatment of this point, see D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).
6. Those exact words are not found in Voltaire's literary remains but first show up in a book by Evelyn Beatrice Hall writing under the pseudonym of Stephen G. Tallentyre, TheFriends of Voltaire (London: Smith Elder & Co., 1906). Voltaire did nevertheless leave behind not a few memorable statements on tolerance, e.g., "What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature" (the first line of his essay "Tolerance," 1755).
9. Lessing, Nathan the Wise, 243.
7. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: Longman, Roberts & Green, 1869). The book has been reprinted many times.
8. The parable appears in Nathan the Wise, the last play written by Lessing. The German edition from which the English translation was first made was published in 1868 (Leipzig: Tauchnitz). The play reworks the parable of the three rings, which first appears in the fourteenth century in Boccaccio's Decameron. For background to the parable, see Alan Mittleman, "Toleration, Liberty, and Truth: A Parable," Harvard Theological Review 95 (2002): 353-72. The English translation I have used is Lessing's Nathan the Wise, trans. Patrick Maxwell, ed. George Alexander Kohut (New York: Bloch, 1939).
12. "When Jesus Met Buddha," Boston Globe (14 December 2008), http://www .boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/20o8/12/14/when_jesus_met_buddha/, last accessed 31 December 2009.
13. On postmodernism, see D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996); idem, "The SBJT Forum: What Positive Things Can Be Said about Postmodernism?" Southern BaptistJournal of Theology 5, no. 2 (2001): 94-96; idem, "The Dangers and Delights of Postmodernism," Modern Reformation 12, no. 4 (July-August 2003): 11-17; idem, "Maintaining Scientific and Christian Truths in a Postmodern World," in Can We Be Sure about Anything? Science, Faith and Postmodernism (Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 2005), 102-25.
15. "Insights on Tolerance," Cross and Crescent [publication of the Lambda Chi Alpha International Fraternity] (Summer 1996): 3.
14. When I say "much-quoted," I mean I have heard the statement on radio talkshows (e.g., Bob Harvey) and read it in books (e.g., josh McDowell and Bob Hostetler, The New Tolerance: How a Cultural Movement Threatens to Destroy You [Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 1998], 43).
16. S. D. Gaede, When TolerancelsNo Virtue: Political Correctness, Multiculturalism and the Future of Truth andJustice (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1993), 23.
17. Tim Keller has popularized this terminology. See especially his The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008).
18. Cf. Sandra L. Barnes, Subverting the Power of Prejudice: Resources forIndividual and Social Change (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 20o6).
19. James Kalb, The Tyranny ofLiberalism: Understanding and OvercomingAdministered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2oo8).
20. Bernard Goldberg, ioo People Who Are Screwing Up America (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), viii.
2. Randall Terry, as reported in the News Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Indiana, for 16 August 1993.
i. Pat Robertson, The 700 Club, accessed 2 January 2010 at http://www.imdb corn/title/tto1494o8/quotes.
3. Lance Morrow, "A Nation of Finger Pointers," Time, iz August 1991, 14. Cf. also http://www.time.com/time/printout/o,8816,973578,oo.html.
4. For this reference I am indebted to James Bowman for his wonderfully insightful book, Honor: A History (New York: Encounter, 20o6), 237.
6. http://www.thefire.org/case/755.hun1.
5. The matter received a great deal of public notice. The BBC account can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4617849.stm (last accessed 2 January 2010).
7. The best brief suggestions as to what appropriate conscience clauses might look like are those of Wesley J. Smith, http://www.cbc-network.org/2009/o5/protectingthe-careers-of-medical-professionals-who-believe-in-the-hippocratic-oath/, posted 27 May 2009.
8. http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=7048.
9. In particular, http://chaplains.harvard.edu/about_us.php.
12. "An Unpretty Pass: What a Song without Words Says about American Life," National Review 6i, no. 20 (2 November 2009): 33.
io. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2oo2/sep/28/fiction.michelhouellebecq.
11. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date-2oo6o7o5&slug =wedletso5.
13. http://www.dartmouth.edu/news/releases/2005/o9/2oc.html.
14. http://dartreview.blogspot.com/2005_09_ol_archive.html.
15. I discussed some of the reasons for the diverse patterns in Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 186-go.
16. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/zoo6/nov/28/highereducation.students.
17. http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=84436&category =22101.
18. http://chronicle.com/article/For-Profit-College-Says-It/37892.
19. http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2oo9/o4/judge-throws-outthomas-klocek-case-against-depaulappeal-planned-.html.
20. "Pariahs, Martyrs - and Fighters Back: Conservative Professors in America," NationalReview 57, no. 19 (2005): 40-45. It should be pointed out that some of the professors Miller surveys are not all that conservative: Klocek, for instance, voted Democrat.
21. Nathan O. Hatch, "Evangelical Colleges and the Challenge of Christian Thinking," in MakingHigherEducation Christian: The History and Mission of Evangelical Colleges in America, ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Kenneth W. Shipps (Grand Rapids: Christian University Press, 1987), 163.
22. Hatch, "Evangelical Colleges and the Challenge of Christian Thinking," 16667.
23. Duane Litfin, Conceiving the Christian College (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 81-82.
24. "The Politics of Partisan Neutrality," National Review 143 (May 2004): 9.
25. Washington: Regnery, 2001.
26. Cf. L. Brent Bozell III and Brent H. Baker, ed., And That's the Way It Isn't: A Reference Guide to Media Bias (Alexandria: Media Research Center, 1990).
28. http://library.findlaw.com/2oo8/Jun/1/2472o8.html.
27. http://library.findlaw.com/2oo8/Jun/i/2472o8.html.
29. http://www.akegreen.org.
31. http://speakupmovement.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/elane-photographyplans-appeal-of-negative-ruling-by-new-mexico-court/. For some of the complexities of the issue, see http://volokh.com/tag/elane-photography-v-willock/.
30. The case has been reported in many places. See, for instance, http://www .spectrummagazine.org/node/1200.
32. http://rabbiphilosopher.blogspot.com/2oo6/lo/banned-books john-mcarthur html.
33. See the important essay by David French, "Expelling God from the University," Academic Questions 19 (2006): 75-84. The examples that follow are drawn from his essay.
34. Contrast Daniel E. Ritchie, Reconstructing Literature in an Ideological Age: A Biblical Poetics and Literary Studies from Milton to Burke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996).
35. E.g., compare Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament (New York: Basic, 2006), and Newt Gingrich, Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role ofFaith in Our Nation's History and Future (Nashville: Integrity, 20o6).
36. one thinks of the spate of remarkably inaccurate books: Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and War on America (New York: Free Press, 2007); Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: Norton, 2006); James Rudin, The Baptizing ofAmerica: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2006). Cf. discussion in Carson, Christ and CultureRevisited, 183-85.
37. Both this and the subsequent quotations are easily found on multiple websites.
38. See, most recently, the careful book by Keith Yandell and Harold Netland, Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2009).
39. http://www.nytimes.com/2o1o/oi/i1/opinion/lidouthat.html.
40. "This Is a Religious War," New York Times magazine (7 October 2001); available online at http://faculty.plts.edu/gpence/html/This%2ois%2oa%2oReligious%20 War.hun.
41. Litfin, Conceiving the Christian College, 265n.13.
1. This is one of the great merits of the work by Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Many historians have unwisely pitted tolerance and intolerance against each other as mere polar opposites: if one wins, the other loses, and it is comfortable today to hold that tolerance is winning. The historical realities, not only in Walsham's period but in every period, are far more complex, not only because tolerance and intolerance are both always present in any culture in some form or other, but also because both tolerance and intolerance can, on some moral scales, be either a virtue or a vice, as we shall see.
3. E.g., Graham N. Stanton and Guy G. Stroumsa, Tolerance and Intolerance in Earlyjudaism and Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), is made up of essays that usefully explore the patterns of tolerance and intolerance within various Jewish and Christian groups, but there is fairly little exploration of how such tolerance is located within a larger moral vision. The exception is that some of the contributors question whether tolerance is invariably a good thing, while others think that tolerance is rather sadly limited wherever there is a notion of revealed religion. Similarly, a contemporary reference work like that of H. Knox Thames, International Religious Freedom Advocacy: A Guide to Organizations, Law, and NGOs (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009), is a wonderful resource that equips travelers, activists, assorted agencies, and others to become familiar with what is and is not being done to safeguard religious liberty, and what resources are available within the UN, the European Union, the Organization of American States, the African Union, and so on. But of course it is not the sort of book that reflects deeply on the nature of tolerance.
2. Edward Langerak, "Theism and Toleration," in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 514.
4. J. Daryl Charles, "Truth, Tolerance, and Christian Conviction: Reflections on a Perennial Question -a Review Essay," Christian Scholar's Review 36 (2007): esp. 201- 11.
5. A. J. Conyers, The LongTruce: How Toleration Made the World SafeforPower and Profit (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009).
6. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.
7. Robert Louis Wilken, Remembering the Christian Past (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 42-43.
9. H. Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 14.
8. See, for instance, his Tractates on John 26.2.
11. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 5.
12. Summa Theologica I-II, 1.91, a.4.
1o. One of the most interesting recent books on the subject, that of Tom Holland (The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West [New York: Doubleday, 20091), argues, against much prevailing wisdom, that it was the influence of Gregory VII (c. A.D. 1015-1073) and his studied rebuffs of royal power that contributed most powerfully, in the long term, to later commitments to the separation of church and state.
15. This is one of the important themes that repeatedly surfaces in Richard Bonney and D. J. B. Trim, eds., Persecution and Pluralism: Calvinists and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1700 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006).
14. This is one of the themes of Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin, 2005).
13. Graham Ward, True Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 60.
16. Alexandra Walsharn, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance andlntolerance in England, 1500-1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). This stands over against the less nuanced and "straight line" reconstruction of scholars such as Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
17. See especially his "Indulgence and Toleration Considered" (1667), reprinted in his Works (London: Macmillan, 1850-53), 13.517-40, and other contributions in the same volume.
18. Paul Helm, "Rutherford and the Limits of Toleration," in Tolerance and Truth: The Spirit of the Age or the Spirit of God? ed. Angus Morrison, Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference Papers (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2007), 57-74.
19. For a comparison of the American and French Revolutions and their respective "takes" on religion, cf. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2oo8), esp. 186-90.
zo. John Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. J. H. Tully (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983 [orig. 1689]), 55.
21. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978 [orig. 1859]), 8.
22. Mill, On Liberty, 9.
23. Mill, On Liberty, 73.
24. Mill, On Liberty, 89.
25. Edward Langerak, "Theism and Toleration," in Quinn and Taliaferro, eds., A Companion to Philosophy ofReligion, 518-19; referring to Mill, On Liberty, 9.
26. Langerak, "Theism and Toleration," 519; referring to Mill, On Liberty, 66.
27. Langerak, "Theism and Toleration," 519.
z8. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited, esp. chap. 5.
29. I outlined these and other developments in greater detail in Christ and Culture Revisited, 173-84.
30. See Christ and Culture Revisited, 185-90. Cf. Thomas Albert Howard, "The Dialectic and the Double Helix," First Things 211 (March 2011): 21-25.
31. Cf. D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 347-48, 404.
34. Langerak, "Theism and Toleration," 520.
35. Shabbir Akhtar, Islam as Political Religion: The Future of an Imperial Faith (London: Routledge, 2011).
32. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited, 191-203.
33. In Religious Tolerance in World Religions, ed. Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 20o8), 297-313. Cf. also M. A. Muqtedar Khan, "American Muslims and the Rediscovery of America's Sacred Ground," in Taking Religious Pluralism Seriously: Spiritual Politics on America's Sacred Ground, ed. Barbara A. McGraw and Jo Renee Formicola (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005), 127-47.
36. Cf. Article i8 of the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance."
37. The failure to address such questions adequately is what weakens the argument of Stephen Schwartz, The Two Faces ofIslam: The House of Sa udfrom Tradition to Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2002). He lays virtually all the blame for Islamic terror on what he calls "the fascistic Wahhabi cult" as a late-developing perversion of Islam. What percentage of the incentives to attempt international influence by means of terror can be laid at the door of Wahhabism is a complex issue, and Schwartz may well be more right than wrong. Yet it does not follow that Islam apartfrom Wahhabism is religiously tolerant if one applies the twin tests articulated above.
38. This is, of course, an example of the fact that democracy, in the richest sense, demands more than occasional or regular democratic elections, but also such structures as equal protection under the law, an independent judiciary, freedom of the press, and limited government (itself subject to constitutional constraints, whether the constitution be written or oral).
41. Cf. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of theEuropeanMind in theNineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
39. Most recently, see the useful essay by Slavica jakelic, "Secularism: A Bibliographical Essay," HedgehogReview 12, no. 3 (2010): 49-55.
40. Charles Taylor, A SecularAge (Cambridge: Belknap, 2007). Much more briefly, see his "The Meaning of Secularism," HedgehogReview 12, no. 3 (2010): 23-34.
42. Taylor, "The Meaning of Secularism," 25.
43. See especially Meic Pearse, The Gods of War: Is Religion the Primary Cause of Violent Conflict? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2007).
44. See especially Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of modernity, 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); idem, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of man, 1670-1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); idem, A Revolution ofMind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Jonathan Israel's commitment to the thesis that only atheism generates tolerance drives him to conclude that Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), whose essay on Luke 14:23 ("Compel them to come in") helped to overturn the Augustinian consensus that wrongly uses this verse to justify coercion, had to be a skeptic or an atheist. The careful work of John D. Woodbridge, "Pierre Bayle: Protestant Contributor to Religious Toleration?" (forthcoming in First Things), demonstrates the overwhelming likelihood that Bayle remained a Protestant in the Reformed tradition when he wrote his essay on Luke 14:23.
45. This is one of the central theses of Roger Lundin, From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
46. Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Nelson, 2010), 338.
47.J. Daryl Charles, "Truth, Tolerance, and Christian Conviction: Reflections on a Perennial Question - a Review Essay," Christian Scholar's Review 36 (2007): 212.
49. Pearse, Why the Rest Hates the West, 12.
48. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004.
1. "Deconstructing the Gospel of Tolerance," Christianity Today 43, no. 1(11 January 1999): 48.
2. Priscilla Sakezles, "Socratic Skepticism," www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/o8-o625.html#feature, has convincingly shown that in every instance where Socrates says things like "I do not think that I know what I do not know" he is not claiming to know that he knows nothing, still less that human knowledge is impossible. Rather, he claims not to have knowledge where in fact he does not have it (unlike most of his opponents, who claim to know what they do not know).
3. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
4. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 26. For those interested in this probing line of inquiry, it is important to read Peter Berkowitz, "John Rawls and the Liberal Faith," Wilson Quarterly 26 (22 March 2002): 6069. Berkowitz draws attention to the "faith" assumptions in Rawls's theory, assumptions regarding such values as human dignity, equality, and concern for the disadvantaged. But in articulating such foundations of liberalism, Rawls seems to vacillate between affirming that such ideas are self-evident and affirming that they rest on faith. But if the former is true, then faith is unnecessary; if faith is necessary to establish liberalism's foundations, then what exactly is the ground for criticizing the faith of others?
5. First Things iii (January 1999): 77.
6. First Things iii (January 1999): 77.
7. Reported in First Things 165 (August/September 2006): 79.
9. Kathleen M. Sullivan, "Religion and Liberal Democracy," University ofChicago Law Review 59 (1992): 222.
8. For a useful survey of these trends, see Richard John Neuhaus, "Secularizations," First Things 190 (February 2009): 23-28. I hasten to add that this discussion of American or European exceptionalism in the religious sphere has no necessary connection with the much larger debate over "American exceptionalism": see, for instance, Ted Bromund, "The Exceptional Battleground: A Controversy," City 4, no. 1 (2011): 46-52.
12. http://www.michaelportillo.co.uk/articles/art-nipress/god.htm.
lo. Sullivan, "Religion and Liberal Democracy," 198. I am indebted to Michael Thate for drawing my attention to Sullivan's essay.
ii. Ronald S. Hendel, "Farewell to SBL: Faith and Reason in Biblical Studies," Biblical Archaeology Review 36, no. 4 (July/August 2010): 28, 74.
13. http://digital.library.sbts.edu/bitstream/handle/10392/1452/2007-02-26.pdf ?sequence=l.
14. See especially the detailed documentation in Ramesh Ponnuru, "Secularism and Its Discontents," National Review 56, no. 24 (27 December 2004): 32-35.
15. http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=an_uncertain_trumpet_12o104.
16. http://prospect.org/cs/articles?articleld=7858.
17. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/o4/opinion/04wills.html?_r=1&ex=11oo5 77901&ei=1&en=d52c693351bb5a97.
18. John Coffey, "The Myth of Secular Intolerance," Cambridge Papers 12, no. 3 (September 2003): 2.
19. For other examples in the same vein, see D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 184-85.
20. Cf. Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett, Christianity on Trial: Arguments against Anti-Religious Bigotry (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002).
22. First Things 140 (February 2004): 30-34.
25. Miller, "Alone in the Academy," 31-32.
21. E.g., Candace de Russy, The Chronicle Review: The Chronicle ofHigherEducation 48, no. 24 (22 February 2002), sect. 2, B11-B13.
23. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Warner, 1979); Christopher Shannon, Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
24. Miller, "Alone in the Academy," 31.
26. Miller, "Alone in the Academy," 34.
27. E.g., SFGate, as reported in http://articles.sfgate.com/2oo6-o3-25/news/ 17286242-1-culture-war-battle-cry-popular-culture.
z8. http://articles.sfgate.com/2oo6-03-28/opinion/17286464_1_supervisorschristian-battle-cry.
1. Robert Bellah, The Good Society (New York: Knopf, 1991), 43-44; quote also in Steven Garber, The Fabric ofFaithfulness (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2007), 222. I am grateful to Tom Frakes for drawing my attention to this quotation.
z. J. Budziszewski, True Tolerance: Liberalism and the Necessity ofJudgment (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2000).
3. The original essay, "Religion without Truth," was published as an op-ed piece in the New York Times for 31 March 2007 (now available at http://www.nytimes.com/ 2007/o3/3i/opinion/31fishs.html). A follow-up piece appeared on 15 April 2007 (see http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/religion-without-truth-part-two/).
4. Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004).
6. Miles, "Of Truth, Tolerance and Tyranny," 8.
5. Phil Miles, "Of Truth, Tolerance and Tyranny," kategoria 22 (2ooi): 7-27.
9. Miles, "Of Truth, Tolerance and Tyranny," 11-12.
7. Miles, "Of Truth, Tolerance and Tyranny," 11.
8. Miles, "Of Truth, Tolerance and Tyranny," ii.
10. Some of the preceding paragraphs first appeared in D. A. Carson, "Editorial: Contrarian Reflections on Individualism," Themelios 35 (2010): 378-83, http:// www.thegospelcoalition.org/publications/35-3/editorial-contrarian-reflections-onindividualism.
ii. Colin Gunton, "Revelation: Do Christians Know Something No One Else Knows?" in Tolerance and Truth: The Spirit of the Age or the Spirit of Christ? ed. Angus Morrison, Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference Papers (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2007), 19. At a more popular level, see John MacArthur, The Jesus You Can't Ignore: What You MustLearnfrom the Bold Confrontations of Christ (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010).
12. Abraham Lincoln, "Speech at New Haven, Connecticut [1860]," in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865 (New York: Library of America, 1989), 140-41.
13. Time 163, no. 25 (21 June 2004).
14. The matter has been widely reported: e.g., http://www.layman.org/ News.aspx?article=14149; Richard John Neuhaus in First Things 142 (April 2004): 6o.
15. "A Season of Sacrifice," the New York Times, 4 April 1999 (can be accessed now at http://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/04/opinion/a-season-of-sacrifice.html).
16. See, for instance, Shabbir Akhtar, Islam as Political Religion: The Future of an Imperial Faith (London: Routledge, 2011), 75.
17. Amusing ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985), 121.
19. Shane Rosenthal, "Reflecting upon Scripture: `You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Text Is about You,"' Modern Reformation 19, no. 5 (2010): 24, citingTNIVAudio Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005).
18. New York: Free Press, 2009.
20. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
21. These can most conveniently be read in English in Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1991-92). To this one should add James A. Robinson, ed., The NagHammadi Library in English, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Harper, 1990).
22. New York: Random House, 1979.
23. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We NeverKnew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
24. Ehrman,Lost Christianities, 255.
25. The Status of Women and Gnosticism in Irenaeus and Tertullian, Studies in Women and Religion 36 (Lewiston: Mellen, 1995).
26. Simon J. Gathercole, "Epluribus unum? Apostolic Unity and Early Christian Literature," in "But My Words Will NeverPassAway": The EnduringAuthority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming).
27. Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
28. Cf. Andreas J. Kostenberger and Michael J. Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture's Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010).
29. His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama, "`Religious Harmony' and The Bodhgaya Interviews," in Christianity through Non-Christian Eyes, ed. Paul J. Griffiths (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990), 169. I am indebted for the reference to Keith Yandell and Harold Netland, Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2009), 109.
30. On Buddhist views of other religions, see K. N. Jayatilleke, The BuddhistAtti- tude to Other Religions (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1975); Kristin Beise Kiblinger, Buddhist Inclusivism:Attitudes towards Religious Others (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005).
33. A Muslim scholar like Shabbir Akhtar (cited in note 16 above) does not concede these points; rather, he insists on them.
31. Allah: A Christian Response (New York: HarperOne, zoii).
32. Volf, Allah: A Christian Response, 120.
34. See the important book by Mark Durie and Bat Ye'or, The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom (Melbourne: Deror Books, 2010).
35. Cf. ShabbirAkhtar, Islam as Political Religion, 37-38: "A permanent stalemate persists between a prophetic monotheism which must arrest the divine engagement at the level of prophetic instruction and an incarnational theology which sees gracious possibilities beyond messengers bringing laws and divine punishment."
36. C. S. Lewis, The Problem ofPain (New York: HarperOne, zoos), 32-33.
37. Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner, The Faith Club:A Muslim, a Christian, ajew (New York: Free Press, 2007).
38. The Faith Club is of course not the only example of contentless agreement. Also in 2007, Rev. Ann Homes Redding, an Episcopal Church priest in Seattle, declared herself both a Christian and a Muslim. Responding to questions about her beliefs, she replied, "I believe that Jesus is divine in the same way in which all humans are related to God as children of God. Jesus is different in degree, not kind; that means that he shows me most fully what it means to be in total submission to and identification with God. The significance of his crucifixion is that it is the ultimate surrender, and the resurrection - both his and as it is revealed in the lives of his disciples - shows us that God makes life out of death. That is the good news to me and it is salvation. I don't think God said, `Let me send this special person so that I can kill him for the benefit of the rest of humanity.' That's not the kind of sacrifice I think that God desires." In other words, she denies central teachings of confessional Christianity. Yet she also affirms that Jesus died and rose again, which denies what the Qur'an teaches. Her bishop, the Right Reverend Vincent Warner, declares that Rev. Redding's claim that she is both a Christian and a Muslim is exciting in terms of interfaith understanding. In fact, it is incoherent. Or, as R. Albert Mohler puts it, "Is there any hope for a church whose bishop considers heresy to be exciting?" Cf. www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=964.
39. B. B. Warfield, "Reviews of Recent Theological Literature," Presbyterian Review 9, no. 33 (1888): 160. I am grateful to Fred Zaspel for drawing my attention to this passage.
2. Time, 31 July 1978; now available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/o,2171,946921-3,oo.html. Much of the same passage is also cited in Don Cormack, Killing Fields, Living Fields (London: Monarch, 1997), 176.
3. James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
i. See the report in modern Reformation 13, no. 6 (2004).
5. Cf. Harry Blamires, The Post-Christian Mind: Exposing Its Destructive Agenda (Ann Arbor: Servant, 1999).
6. Mark Ellingsen, Blessed Are the Cynical: How Original Sin Can Make America a Better Place (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2002).
4. E.g., Alan Wolfe, "Desperately Wicked: Reckoning with Evil," Books & Culture 9, no. 2 (March/April 2003): 26-27.
7. Reported in The Briefing 328 (January 2006).
9. John Piper, Think: The Life of theMind and theLove ofGod (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), chaps. 7-8 (pp. 89-112).
8. This example is helpfully discussed in the acerbically unfashionable book by David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
lo. This problem surfaces in many disciplines, yet among those most committed to unqualified open-endedness, the seriousness of the problem is rarely confronted. One thinks, for instance, of the book by Susan E. Gillingham, One Bible, Many Voices (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). She argues at length that both the diversity of content in the Bible and the diversity of approaches to its interpretation drive us to the conclusion that the Bible has "manyvoices," not one. In short, we must insist on a pluralistic approach to the Bible. But then in her conclusion (pp. 245-47), she recalls the warning of Anthony Thiselton (New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory andPractice of Transforming Bible Study [New York: HarperCollins, 1992], 612), who carefully warns against the authoritarian pluralism that disguises itself as liberal pluralism. As soon as we insist that the only responsible way to read the Bible is in a thoroughly pluralistic fashion, we have narrowed our theory down to one dogmatic option - which is of course what Gillingham has done. She acknowledges the problem: "An appeal to read the Bible in a pluralistic way is thus in need of some sort of self-critique" (p. 245). Yet the most she can winkle out of this observation is that while we defend pluralism "we should be as critical of pluralism per se as we should be critical of any exclusivist approach" (p. 247). But if we are that critical of pluralistic approaches, might we not be driven to wondering if there are not some certainties grounded in Scripture?
13. 14 June 2007, available now at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/o6/13/AR2007o61302012.htm 1.
ii. Stanton L. Jones and Marl, A. Yarhouse, Homosexuality: The Use of Scientific Research in the Church's Moral Debate (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000). Cf. also Peter Sprigg and Timothy Dailey, eds., Getting'It Straight: What the Research Shows about Homosexuality (Washington: Family Research Council, 2004).
12. 19 June 2007. The article can now be read at http://www.boston.com/news/ globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2007/o6/19/intolerance_makes_bad medicine/.
15. The matter has been very widely discussed. One of the most comprehensive reports is "Fired, in a Crowded Theater," First Thing's 2006 (October 2010): 24-29.
14. Many more examples of this sort could be adduced. For example, in 2003, when William H. Pryor Jr., then Attorney General of Arkansas, was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of NewYork, objected on the ground that Pryor's beliefs were so well known and so deeply held that it was hard to believe they would not influence his decisions. In other words, we may not bar a person from high office on the ground of race or creed, provided the creed is so loosely held that it exercises no influence on his conduct. In a word, the necessary positive criterion is the adoption of a tacit secularism.
16. For example, in several Western countries street preachers have been arrested (and occasionally convicted) for saying that homosexuality is wrong, citing the Bible. In the UK, a couple has been banned from fostering children because they taught their foster children that homosexual practice is wrong. In several countries, it is no longer impossible to imagine how clergy maybe prosecuted for refusing to offer civil union ceremonies, or even marriage ceremonies, under church aegis. More broadly, the media insist on referring to the horrible abuse of boys by priests as "pedophilia," even though it is not: pedophilia is the sexual molestation of very young children, while the abuse in question involved older boys, often teenagers. But where do the media speak of gay priests molesting teenage boys? See the discussion in Bernard Goldberg, Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite (New York: Warner Books, 2003), especially 165-84.
17. From her column in Salon, accessible at http://www.salon.com/col/pagl/ 1998/o6/nc_a3pagl.html(2000).
18. Cf. R. Albert Mohler, Desire and Deceit: The Real Cost of the New Sexual Tolerance (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2008).
1. Robert P. George, "God and Gettysburg," First Things 205 (August/September 2010): 15-17, esp. 16.
2. Joseph Bottum, "A Demand for Freedom," First Things 198 (December 2009): 63.
3. Scott H. Moore, The Limits ofLiberalDemocracy: Politics and Religion at the End of Modernity (Downers Grove:InterVarsity, 2009), 135-
4. Helpful discussions are found in Stephen L. Carter, The Dissent of the Governed: AMeditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and David Novak, In Defense of Religious Liberty (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2009); Barbara A. McGraw and Jo Renee Formicola, eds., Taking Religious Pluralism Seriously: Spiritual Politics on America's Sacred Ground (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005).
5. It should be clear that the freedom to speak one's mind openly in the public square does not itself mitigate the responsibility the church always has to be a countercultural community. One does not have to adopt the Amish way to be a counter-cultural community.
6. David Novak, "Law: Religious or Secular?" first published in Virginia Law Review (2000), and now conveniently found in Martin Kavka, ed., Tradition in the Public Square: A David Novak Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 186.
7. See especially David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death ofJim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), well reviewed by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Hopeful Pessimism," Books & Culture io, no. 4 (July/August 2004): 8-9; Stephen L. Carter, "Liberalism's Religion Problem," First Things 121 (March 2002): 21-32 (an account sometimes truly moving). Cf. also jean Bethke Elshtain, "The Know-It-All State," Books & Culture 6, no. i (January/February 2000): 2223.
9. Schall, "A Reflection on the Classical Tractate on Tyranny," Sect. XI.
10. Some secularists have come to see the need for something like a unified religious vision in the nation if we are to avoid the dangers of an increasingly controlling state, but then try to stipulate the kind of religion it must be. Perhaps the most interesting example is Richard Rorty. At one time he called himself a militant secularist, but from about 1999 on, which marked the publication of his book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), he has advocated what he variously calls "romantic polytheism" or "religion of democracy."The "communion of saints" is displaced by a democratic community, and instead of being energized by truth or God, pragmatists-as-religious-polytheists are energized by social action. We are all polytheists now, Rorty argues, because we are all attracted to various "goods" instead of one ultimate good. He thinks this vision can link together John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James. These "pragmatic theists" must do without a personal God, divine supernatural interventions, personal immortality, the risen Christ, the authority of the Qur'an, and so forth. His vague theism can be tested: ifa religious community supports gay marriage and denounces capitalism, then it qualifies as an acceptable religion. And meanwhile teachers at colleges around the country have the religious duty to pressure students who enter as bigoted, homophobic fundamentalists to graduate with the enlightened views of Richard Rorty: college lecturers should do their best to discredit the views of the students' parents, dismissing them as silly. So here is a man who has come to see the importance of a transcendent vision in order to hold state power in check, but wants that vision to be his own, which makes him utterly blind to the fundamental role of religious freedom. He rightly sees the danger of unchecked state power, and knows there must be an extra-state god, buthas none to offer but his own views: his own views must be god. The unqualified hubris is mind-boggling, and testifies that he has grasped little of the role of genuine religious freedom in a democracy.
8. "A Reflection on the Classical Tractate on Tyranny: The Problem of Democratic Tyranny," American Journal ofJurisprudence 41 (1996): 1-19.
ii. D. A. Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), esp. chaps. 4-5.
12. The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 6 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856-56), 1:446-47.
14. Gilbert Meilaender, "Talking Democracy," First Things 142 (April 2004): 2530; George Weigel, "Europe's Problem - and Ours," First Things 140 (February 2004): 18-25. For a helpful treatment of some aspects of the debate, see Scott H. Moore, The Limits of Liberal Democracy: Politics and Religion at the End of Modernity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2009).
13. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, zoos); Gertrude Himmelfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures (New York: Knopf, 1999).
15. Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (London: Sheed & Ward, 1949 [orig. 19441), 14.
19. See especially Marci A. Hamilton, God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
20. See the insightful examples and discussion by Steven D. Smith, "Conciliating Hatred," First Things 144 (June/July 2004): 17-22.
21. Carl E. Esbeck, "The Establishment Clause as a Structural Restraint on Governmental Power," Iowa Law Review 84 (1998): 1-113; idem, "`Play with the joints between the Religion Clauses' and Other Supreme Court Catachresis," Hofstra Law Review 34 (20o6): 1331-36. The latter title makes reference to justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinion that the Court must explore where "there is room for play in the joints between the Clauses" to determine if there is "space for legislative action neither compelled by the Free Exercise Clause nor prohibited by the Establishment Clause." Cf. also James Hitchcock, "The Enemies of Religious Liberty," First Things 140 (February 2011): 26-29.
16. John O'Sullivan, "Debating Democracy: Can Everyone Go Athenian?" National Review 55, no. 24 (22 December 2003): 36.
17. O'Sullivan, "Debating Democracy," 37.
18. See the two important books edited by Terry Eastland: Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases That Define the Debate over Church and State (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); Benchmarks: Great Constitutional Controversies in the Supreme Court (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). More broadly, see the trenchant critique by Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (New York: Basic Books, 2009), esp. chap. 6.
22. For a summary and discussion of the biblical texts that most directly bear on this tension, see Carson, Christ and Culture Revisited, 145-203.
23. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
24. One of the more penetrating recent treatments I have seen on the slide from truth to feeling, from principle to therapy, from honor to self-esteem, is the recent book by James Bowman, Honor: A History (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), esp. chap. io, "The Aristocracy of Feeling" (pp. 263-91). Bowman begins the chapter by quoting the well-known words of W. H. Auden: "Justice will be replaced by Pity as the Cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish.... The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums, and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother ... will be the heroes and heroines of the NewAge, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire" (from the Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being [London: Faber & Faber, 1945], 115-16).
26. Kraynak, Christianity and Modern Democracy, xii (emphasis added).
25. Robert Kraynak, Christianity and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), xiii (emphasis his).
2. Mark Steyn, "Sharia in New Haven," National Review 6i, no. 16 (7 September 2009): 52.
i. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
3. Dissonant Voices: Religious Pluralism and the Question of Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991). More recently, Angus Morrison, "Christian Freedom, Tolerance, and the Claims of Truth," Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 17 (1999): 166-69, has expanded the three to four, adding the ecclesiastical.
4. Christ the Controversialist (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1970), 22.
6. Stott, Christ the Controversialist, 8.
5. Stott, Christ the Controversialist, 19.
7. Another writer, Stephen McQuoid, makes similar points with different terminology: what I call the old tolerance he calls the true tolerance; see his The Quest for True Tolerance: Searching-for a Tolerance That Does Not Make Society Sick (Leominster: Dayone, 2008).
8. The Autobiography, vol. 16 of The Collected Works ofG. K. Chesterton (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998), 212.
9. The dogmatism, even the "fundamentalism," of those who are so certain that there can be no certainty about such matters, is treated in an interesting fashion by Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
io. Washington: Cato Institute, 1999.
ii. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965 (orig. 1931).
12. Amazing Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).
13. First Things 210 (February 2011): 58.
14. Paul Helm, "Rutherford and the Limits of Toleration," in Tolerance and Truth: The Spirit of the Age or the Spirit of God? ed. Angus Morrison, Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference Papers (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 2007), 71.
15. Cf. Os Guinness, Unspeakable: Facing Up to the Challenge of Evil (New York: HarperOne, 2006).
16. See the delightful book by C. J. Mahaney, Humility: True Greatness (Sisters: Multnomah, 2005).
17. Not least the important book by Timothy C. Tennent, Christianity at the Religious Roundtable: Evangelicalism in Conversation with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002).
18. One need not agree with every judgment in the book to recognize that the appeal of Richard J. Mouw, Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010), is both moving and penetrating.