Acceptance, Tolerance, and Spiritual Wrestling Matches

What a pickle I've gotten myself into!

One of my major concerns as a researcher and as a Christian involves the issue of inclusivity, otherwise known as the problem of exclusions. As a left/liberal/progressive person, my default mode is "inclusivity-good/exclusivity-bad." Liberal-left folk tend to pride themselves on how welcoming and tolerant they are, and I try to be so in my work and life.

Yet my scholarship indicates to me some problems with the purely pro-inclusion stance. For instance, the sentence above smashes together welcome and tolerance as if the two were synonymous. Of course this is not so. As critics like Michael Waltzer and Wendy Brown write, tolerance is a tricky term. It's managed to install itself as a liberal-left buzzword, one of the integral features of any proactive social justice initiative.

Yet tolerance by definition disrupts the warm-'n-fuzzy affect of inclusivity. You tolerate only those things, those people, or those behaviors that you basically disapprove of. If you approved of the person/thing/act in question, you wouldn't have to tolerate it; you'd simply accept it. Welcoming operates on a semantic frequency close to that of full acceptance. Tolerance, Brown reminds us, begins as the stopgap measure in which bitter foes agree not to slaughter each other. "Uneasy co-existence," not "hands joined in unity,"--this is the tolerant state.

When it comes to the Body of Christ, the church, my initial question was how tolerant we as Christians need to be of others whose views seem, well, anathema to ours. I have difficulty, I confess, seeing how my faith can possibly match that of, say, someone who honestly believes that the poor deserve not to have access to health care. Other Christians, by contrast, would flatly deny the suggestion that I as an openly gay man could be a Christian. To what extent, I wonder, ought we to accept or tolerate our ideological/theological others?

I want to say that God's standard is always to be surprisingly, shockingly accepting. I am led to this partly by conviction from (as far as I can discern) from the Holy Spirit, partly from the witness of other saints in the faith (including my sister and my parents) who model for me a radically inclusive faith, and partly from examples in scripture.

As I've written, I do not view the Bible as inerrant and infallible (a position which defines another fundamental disagreement between me and other Christians), but I do value it as an inspired witness (perhaps even as the witness par excellence). And as such, the gospel narratives contain multiple instances of Christ shocking those around him with his radical inclusivity. He did not merely tolerate people; he accepted them, welcomed them, ate with them, touched them, let them wash his feet with their hair--I just don't see him setting up any kind of boundary. Yes, several gospel writers tell of Jesus castigating the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders (a narrative inclusion that bespeaks the antagonism between the early Christian church and some in the first-century Jewish community). But Jesus also spends time in deep, loving conversation with those same people (e.g., Nicodemus in John 3).

But, as I mentioned yesterday, other instances--not as many, I would say, but still some--feature Jesus as relating a more exclusivist picture of the Kingdom of God. The parable of the King's Son's Wedding Banquet (in the first part of Matthew 22) is one of the harshest in this regard. There the King ends up inviting all comers to his son's wedding, only to then weed out those guests not dressed appropriately: "Many are called," Christ says, "but few are chosen." This isn't acceptance, and it isn't even tolerance (the guest in question is bound hand and foot before being thrown into the outer darkness). It is Christ saying--apparently--that the Kingdom is closed to some.

Thus my pickle. I have at my disposal some easy-out ways to interpret this passage--mainly the "it's an interpolation from the human writer, not the actual words of Christ" bolt-hole. It's tempting... The parable of the Wedding Feast itself gets parallel treatment in Luke 14 and even in the Gospel of Thomas 64 (thank you, Wikipedia). Both of these, however, lack the bummer ending that Matthew includes, with the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" that is Matthew's trademark. Since it's that ending that bugs me particularly, I could explain it away as an anomalous addition (along with the particular violence that Matthew's version contains, e.g., the slaughter of the original guests in retribution for their violence toward the original messengers of the King). Matthew, as I recall my Bible training, typically features harsher-than-usual attitudes toward Jews, so the violent fate of those originally invited (the Jews, in some popular interpretations) has some explanation.

But I don't think I do my faith any favors by simply editing out this particular difficult part and side-stepping a spiritual wrestling match. (I have fewer qualms about reading beyond certain other Biblical mandates, mind you--slavery, gender relations, homosexuality, etc.). Truth be told, Matthew isn't alone in preaching exclusivity, nor is the Wedding Feast the sole instance in the Bible of God establishing and enforcing some harsh distinctions. I might as well deal with this example of non-acceptance/intolerance in the Kingdom of God.

More tomorrow,

JF