THE INTOLERANCE OF TOLERANCE by D A Carson Book Review

The Intolerance of Tolerance
D. A. Carson, author
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids MI
ISBN 978-0-8028-3170-5
Retail price: $24.00

Reviewed by Mary Katherine May of QualityMusicandBooks.com.

Recommended Book

Perhaps you, the reader, are like many of my contemporaries and myself, that after going along with the status quo, moving through the years of middle age while attempting to keep up with the super speed of change, one day in confusion and perhaps a naive dumfoundedness, you were startled into wondering what happened.  Attitudes and morality had changed beyond what anyone who skirted over the flower power era, who never had thought about going to San Francisco, and now were flip flopped upside down.  In all honesty, I remember the time when here in Minnesota what we call flip flops were called thongs and we wore them on our feet.

The Intolerance of Tolerance by D. A. Carson, research professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, speaks clearly about how the morality of a society, so focused upon being open, equal, and tolerant, is anything but open, equal, and tolerant outside of a particular narrow scope that has been designed by a group of perhaps not so very large numbers yet persuasive and powerfully driven to control public thought.

Mr. Carson explains the difference between the definition of tolerance that is a social response, and the current definition for tolerance as the supreme virtue of a politically correct society used today, in correlation with the defining of the term, tolerance, by a society that has a shared moral vision and conscience verses a definition driven by individual freedom. 

See how the omission of one word changes the whole definition:

• Tolerance: To accept the existence of different views.
• Tolerance: To accept different views.

The Intolerance of Tolerance offers clear reasoning and explanation of how this change of morality in our 21st century society has come about, presents many examples of how the new tolerance is unfortunately played out in everyday life, and why tolerance as defined today is intolerant and destructive.  I found the text well written but maybe verging on a bit hard to take in with comprehension for some, though I think there is plenty of meat and potatoes for anyone willing and able to read the book.  If I should have one criticism, it is that the number of examples borders on too many, and perhaps makes Carson's thought process a little hard to follow.

Mr. Carson backs up his text with Scripture when necessary.  He demonstrates why attempts to dialogue on this subject will often not work, and that is because there is no common ground between definitions.  I think that he has made a good effort to present the facts without extreme bias, while in the last chapter offers practial tips on how Christians can conduct themselves today in this post-postmodern, intolerant-tolerant 21st-century place in which we find ourselves.

All of this being said, The Intolerance of Tolerance is written for Christians and for those who define themselves by a belief that tolerance means to accept the existence of different views, respects that different views in a free society are going to exist and be expressed, while at the same time knows that there will not always be agreement about the rightness of every view.

I recommend this book.