From John Stott:

“How then are we to think of other religions? The word that immediately springs to most people’s minds is ‘tolerance’, but they do not always stop to define what they mean by it. It may help if we distinguish between three kinds.

The first may be called legal tolerance, which ensures that every minority’s religious and political rights (usually summarized as the freedom to ‘profess, practise and propagate’) are adequately protected in law. This is obviously right.

Another kind is social tolerance, which encourages respect for all persons, whatever views they may hold, and seeks to understand and appreciate their position. This too is a virtue which Christians wish to cultivate; it arises naturally from our recognition that all human beings are God’s creation and bear his image, and that we are meant to live together in amity.

But what about intellectual tolerance, which is the third kind? To cultivate a mind so broad that it can tolerate every opinion, without ever detecting anything in it to reject, is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feeble-minded. It can degenerate into an unprincipled confusion of truth with error and goodness with evil. Christians, who believe that truth and goodness have been revealed in Christ, cannot possibly come to terms with it.”

John Stott, The Authentic Jesus (London: Marshalls, 1985), p. 69.