Friday, February 7, 2025

What Does Paul Mean By Divine Tolerance?

Condemning hypocrites for their disapproval of other people's sins even as they commit the very same ones, Paul asks if double-minded people show contempt for the riches of God's kindness and, in some translations, tolerance that are meant to inspire repentance in the wicked (Romans 2:4).  Some translations feature words like forbearance (restraint) instead of tolerance, which is perfectly consistent with the way the rest of the Bible describes God: not as tolerating evil, but as not immediately giving fallen people what they deserve out of mercy born from love.  In fact, if he were to do so, not only would many people immediately die, but they would either be annihilated abruptly or immediately brought to the lake of fire to potentially suffer before being killed again (Romans 6:23).

If the word tolerance is the right word for Romans 2, this is not tolerance in the sense of harboring support for or granting protection to irrationality and other evils--and all sin involves elements of irrationality when a person thinks their feelings, including conscience, make something morally good or when they do not care about the truth and verifiability of their worldview, and about the justice of their actions.  To tolerate stupidity and evil is to be stupid and evil, and the Christian deity is not an amoral God.  If this is what the uncaused cause is like (amoral), there would be no evil and thus there would be no such thing as tolerance being good, nor would there be any evil to tolerate.  Of course, if there is such a thing as moral obligation because the uncaused cause has a moral nature, then it is still true by necessity that tolerance of this kind is irrational and immoral.

No, though he is willing to wait vast amounts of time for people to turn to him (2 Peter 3:8-9) and though he is eager to show mercy, Yahweh is not a deity of tolerance in the way that the word is often used today.  The divine tolerance or kindness of Romans 2:4 would have to be an expression of mercy in the context Paul is speaking of, for tolerance in the modern sense of the word is itself sinful (if the Bible did disagree with this, it would be incorrect on this point) and Yahweh is repeatedly shown to not be tolerant at all in this manner.  He repeatedly kills his enemies across Biblical accounts, and rightfully so, and he will kill them again a second time to eternally banish them from existence (Matthew 10:28, Ezekiel 18:4, Revelation 20:11-15).

It is not true that it is logically impossible for there to not be any moral obligations even though there is an uncaused cause, but if there are moral obligations, any at all, tolerating the neglect or violation of them--with encouragement or by trivializing that which should be done--is inevitably immoral.  Even if tolerance was the correct word for Romans 2:4, it would not be this kind of toleration that marks the Biblical Yahweh, and it still does not follow from even this lack of tolerance that he would be devoid of mercy.  The intolerance of the Christian deity towards evil is not inconsistent with his merciful attitude.  He is neither tolerant nor unwilling to provide people with time in order to commit to him, no matter how grievous or numerous their moral blunders.

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