Friedrich Julius Stahl, “On Christian Tolerance,” in The Christian State (Aalten: WordBridge Publishing, 2025), pp. 99–103.

In the age of intellectual culture which calls itself the age of enlightenment and philosophy and which still extends its powerful influence into the present, religious tolerance is considered the cardinal virtue above all others. Every person should be allowed to live according to his faith – Christian, Jew, Muslim, philosopher – but he should show the same respect for the faith of others. Likewise, the state should recognize all religions as equal. Indeed, even the enlightened church, which Protestantism has the honor of representing, demands this tolerance – that it grant every opinion, whether believing or unbelieving, the same right to the professorship and the pulpit. Before God and man, it is not religious belief that matters, but upright conduct alone. The utmost condemnation therefore falls on exclusivity, i.e., the claim of a religious conviction to exclusive truth and justification.

The revelation of the Old and New Testaments stands in stark contrast to this tolerance of the Enlightenment. The God of Holy Scripture is not tolerant; He is a jealous God. The highest of the commandments is: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” The most emphatic injunction to the people of the Old Covenant was to eradicate all other religions in the land. The most distinguished prophet slaughtered the priests of Baal. And in the New Covenant, too, the Savior himself pronounces damnation on all who do not believe in Him; and the Apostle Paul proclaims: “Whoever teaches a different gospel is damned.” Even the martyrs of the Christian church, a son of the Enlightenment might say, suffered death not only for their faith but even more for their intolerance, because they condemned all other religions, because they condemned all the customs and pleasures of the world, games and theater. And it was precisely the philosophical thinkers – a Pliny, a Marcus Aurelius – who were their most zealous persecutors. Yes, Christianity entered world history as a religion of intolerance, contrary to the tolerance of the Roman religion, contrary to the tolerance of Greek philosophy, and even contrary to Judaism, which left the pagans to their errors. Its core is exclusivity, its mode of action is aggression against all other religions, propaganda among all peoples. And how could it be otherwise? Certain of its own divine truth, how could it be tolerant of error that deprives God of honor and man of salvation?

After all, the innermost motive for such tolerance is none other than doubt in divine revelation and thus in all certain and binding religious truth! It is the famous story of the three rings in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise [Nathan the Wise]. It is impossible to know which of the three rings – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – is the genuine ring left by the father, and which two are the counterfeits. Indeed, it is suspected that all three are counterfeits and that the genuine ring, the philosophical religion, has been lost. Therefore, let everyone consider his ring to be the genuine one and live in peace with the others. The decision on tolerance therefore ultimately depends only on this: are Nathan the Wise and Pilate right when they ask, “What is truth?” or is Christ right when He says, “I am the truth”?   

The cardinal virtue of Christianity is therefore something different and contrary to tolerance. It is faithfulness in the preservation and confession of divine truth; it is zeal for God’s honor and for the spread of His kingdom for the salvation of all generations.

Nevertheless, Christianity also embodies a tolerance of a depth that no one before or since has ever conceived. It is a tolerance of a different and more genuine kind than the tolerance of the Enlightenment or philosophy. This, Christianity’s tolerance, is the subject of my lecture.

First of all, Christianity surpasses every other way of thinking in that which is the general basis of all tolerance: in love, which bears and tolerates everything; in humility, which, conscious of its own sin, does not judge its neighbor; in the high regard for the image of God in man, which grants him free, inner resolution. This extends not only to religious conviction, but equally to moral transgression. But we are asking about tolerance in the specific sense, about religious tolerance. Does Christianity grant tolerance toward unbelief and false doctrine that it does not grant toward sin and vice? Can it, for example, be tolerant of rationalism and pantheism in a different way than it is tolerant of pride, selfishness, and dishonesty? That is our problem.

Christianity knows no distinction between religious and moral error. Unbelief and false doctrine are subject to the same divine judgment as sin and vice. Christianity alone distinguishes between what is merely the knowledge of the mind and what is the longing of the heart, the pull of the will, the hidden life in God. It further distinguishes between the fear of God that man can have by nature and the fear of God that comes to him only through the special grace of God. Therefore, if unbelief and false doctrine do not manifestly spring from the root of wickedness, profaneness, sacrilege, or carnality, they demand a tolerance of a completely different and specific kind than moral transgression; because man is not the judge of whether they have their seat in his neighbor only in a deficiency of intellectual concepts or in the direction of the will, and whether they arise from his rejection of the grace offered by God or from God Himself still holding the veil before his eyes. Christianity does not recognize two kinds of sin, sin against faith and sin against virtue, but it does recognize two kinds of imputation, imputation according to nature and imputation according to grace. Selfishness and pride are imputed according to nature; rationalism and pantheism are imputed according to grace. Blasphemy and perjury are attributed to nature, which is why the authorities punish them; apostasy from Christianity and heresy are attributed to grace, which is why the authorities may not punish them. Before God, all these things are equal; before men, they are not.

This is the reason for a specific religious tolerance even in Christianity, and herein also lies the difference between the tolerance of Christianity and the tolerance of philosophy. The tolerance of philosophy is based on uncertainty about religion itself, while the tolerance of Christianity is based solely on uncertainty about the religious condition of one’s neighbor. The former declares all religious views to be excluded from judgment, the latter exercises judgment only over itself while testifying to an eternal judgment. Philosophy says: I am not sure which religion is the true one, and every opinion about religion is permissible; therefore, I must grant the religion of others the same right as my own. Christianity says: I know that my faith is the eternal truth, that its denial is the gravest sin; but I cannot see into the inner condition of my neighbor, how God reveals Himself to him and will reveal Himself to him, and therefore I must not judge him. The former is doubt about God’s truth, the latter is humility before God’s ways.

The tolerance of Christianity therefore has divine truth as its foundation. It stands on its exclusivity. It never grants the false convictions of its neighbor the same justification in the ethical world and thus in public order; it only grants him the freedom of inner life. Christian tolerance also has divine truth as its limit; it does not depart from faithfulness and zeal for it. No tolerance could prevent the prophets of the Old Covenant from condemning as idolatry the cult that was then the sacred thing of the nations. No tolerance may prevent us from calling the wisdom and knowledge which are currently the cult of the nations, the innermost root of which is the denial of God’s revelation and the overthrow of His order, what they are. No tolerance must move the church to permit her pure doctrine to be falsified in the pulpit or at the altar or move the state to abandon its Christian institutions. It is enough that everyone in his person may live out his own faith, without prejudice to his human rights and human honor.

Yes, Christian tolerance has divine truth itself as its goal. It does not end, like philosophical tolerance, with mere autonomous permissiveness, but is a positive cultivation and support with a view to the ultimate victory of faith, in one’s neighbor, in the community, and over the whole earth. The tolerance of God, which is the archetype of all genuine human tolerance, always aims at the conversion of man. His long-suffering will lead to repentance. So also Christian tolerance. Although sinful man cannot himself practice long-suffering, he can nevertheless praise the long-suffering of God and, where he is called to do so, willingly serve as an instrument of it, both in sparing the erring and in desiring, and trusting in, his ultimate correction.

Thus, the essence of Christian tolerance is to protect, maintain, and care for the religious condition of one’s neighbor, in faithfulness to divine truth.