God, War, and Providence by James A. Warren

Author:James A. Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

THE BLOUDY TENENT

Before returning to America, Roger Williams had one more contribution to make to the transatlantic debates swirling around the great questions of religious freedom and the nature of good government—and it was hefty. In late spring he finished the manuscript for The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for cause of Conscience, discussed, in a conference between Truth and Peace. The prose is often turgid and the syntax difficult to follow, for The Bloudy Tenent was a hurriedly written book by an author with a penchant for run-on sentences. “These meditations,” wrote Williams, “were fitted for public view in change of rooms and corners, yea, sometimes in variety of strange houses, sometimes in the fields, in the midst of travel where [the author] hath been forced to gather and scatter his loose thoughts and papers.”35

But The Bloudy Tenent is also profound, universally recognized today as a classic Christian defense of religious liberty and democratic government. Williams’s argument for freedom of conscience and strict separation of church and state is rooted in Scripture, but well supported by arguments drawing on history and general experience.

The Bloudy Tenent’s core premise is that “it is the will and command of God, that since the coming of His Son the Lord Jesus, a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships, be granted in all nations and countries.”36 Christ in his time on earth “never appointed the civil sword for either antidote or remedy” of error concerning those who refused to accept Him as the son of God.37 The only weapons employed by the Prince of Peace in matters of belief were gentle persuasion and love.

The orthodox Puritan belief that civil leaders possessed divine authority to make judgments about men’s souls was a dangerous misconception, Williams argued. Only Christ’s church had divine authority, and that authority extended to spiritual matters only. Magistrates must restrict their activities to protecting the bodies and goods of all members of the community and leave their souls to the church, and God.

All too often, the defense of religious orthodoxy by civil powers had a worldly, political end in view. While it was true, as the authorities of Massachusetts preached, that God had granted the leaders of ancient Israel civil and religious powers, wrote Williams, the Massachusetts authorities failed to recognize that, with the birth of Christ, God had dissolved His covenant with Israel and had never established a new covenant with another nation. That included England, no matter how deeply its Puritans believed otherwise.

Since the incarnation—the arrival of Christ on earth as both man and God—only individual men gathered together in discrete churches could be said to be in covenant with God, and the ministers of those churches, explains Edmund Morgan in his brilliant book on Williams’s thought, “were forbidden by their founder to propagate or defend His religion by force. Israel could send forth its armies to smite the heathen. But no body of men who now employed force in defense of religion could claim the name Christian.

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