Toleration in the history of Christianity

In this series, we cover the history of the concept of toleration in Christianity from, say, Jesus to the Enlightenment. The concept of religious tolerance came to fruition. That would herald other forms of toleration, especially freedom of conscience and political toleration.

This is a long series, because there is a lot to tell. It is therefore useful to keep an eye on the big picture, based on ideas and institutions that gradually took hold.

In the series on toleration in antiquity we talked about pragmatic toleration and about a number of philosophical insights that would form the seeds of the concept of toleration. In the first place, there was room for doubt, perhaps the primal ingredient of modernity that we will gradually end up in. What is knowledge? What is reality?What is morality? And what is justice? Nothing is certain, everything can be doubted. Through dialectics, through a dialogue between opposing perspectives, we can get closer to the truth, Sokrates taught us. We need contradiction, and the will to take each other's perspective seriously, in order to become wiser together. Perikles taught us something else, namely that shared values can bind us. The Athenians were ready to fight, not just because they were told to, to protect the group or to defend their property, but to defend shared values, especially their autonomy and their freedom. The germ of that freedom was developed in classical Athens, namely the freedom to say what you think. And that it is perfectly possible to make decisions in the common interest by giving every vote equal weight. Even if one is more right than the other, or more experienced, or with greater interests. The importance of equality and autonomy receded somewhat into the background under the Romans, but other relevant values were developed in that era. For example, that to err is human. We are often wrong, no one is perfect, we never act completely rationally, we are guided by whims and instincts. It is therefore better not to judge each other too much, to approach each other with mildness and geniality, Cicero in particular claimed. The Stoics felt the same way, but had a slightly different perspective: unpleasant events and nasty behaviour are beyond our control. The only thing we can control is our own reaction to misery that happens to us. Don't get angry, but observe, try to control yourself and let the evil slide off you.

Remarkably many of Jesus' and Paulos' teachings are related to Stoic views. That's not strange. Cicero lived a few decades before Jesus was born. Seneca and Paulos were contemporaries. Both Cicero and Seneca greatly influenced ethical thinking in the Roman Empire, including in peripheral areas such as Palestine, and not just among the Roman elite.

But Paulos and other early Church leaders didn't just have the message of Jesus in their heads. An international Christian community was also unintentionally created. And that was not only possible with charity and forgiveness. Discipline was also required, and a pragmatic approach to power. And that brought tensions. Many of the anti-tolerant tendencies of Christianity stem from this.

Other tolerance-related values and institutions that came to fruition in Christianity:

• Individualism

• Separation of church and state

• Dealing with outsiders: Jews, Muslims, pagans and atheists

• How do you deal with different beliefs within Christianity?

I have to put one aside. It is tempting to see history as an inevitable development that could only have gone one way: the current situation as the final chord. But of course it's not like that. It could have all turned out very differently. What we are not doing here is charting the inevitable course of history. What we do is map the genealogy of the current situation: how did we get here?