SynerJack

In vain have English Parliaments permitted English Bibles in the poorest English houses, and the simplest men or women to search the Scriptures, if yet against their soul’s persuasion from the Scripture, they should be forced… to believe as the church believes.

-Roger Williams

No one can question the courage and fortitude of Martin Luther to nail his 95 Theses on the Wittenberg door and to defend, at the risk of his life, the principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded.  That said, Luther’s move was relatively conservative.  As time progressed, many of the Roman evils against which the Lutherans and Reformed Churches rebelled became evidenced in their own respective settings.

Enter Roger Williams, who emerged in the American colonies as a prophet of reform.  His writing and powerful oratory became a potent instrument in his quest for the freedom of the individual to independently seek truth before his God.  Translation:  he took it seriously that we are a kingdom of priests (1 Peter 2:9).

The Puritan Church, by whom Williams was ordained, was in some respects no different from the Roman system it had abandoned. Puritans married the state to the church.  Puritans persecuted dissenters.  Puritans, like Catholics, practiced a theological version of respect of persons – claiming that the privileged order was the elect of God and expressing contempt of the “lesser breeds” such as the native population.

Roman Catholicism and Puritanism both tried to resurrect an Old Testament order.  For Catholics, it was a re-erection of the veil in the Temple, complete with a priesthood and a sacrificial system.  For Puritans, it was a reincarnation of the old state of Israel.

Luther said that anyone seeking to rule the world with the gospel would only lead his country into chaos; anyone who propagated the gospel with the sword would destroy the spiritual nature of the church.  Puritans disagreed.  Theoretically speaking, they said, God established ministers to declare his will and magistrates to execute it.

Williams echoed Luther in his stance that to marry the church to the state is to stain the virtue of both.  He insisted that to subject the church to the civil authorities is to subject the spotless bride of Christ to “the vain, uncertain, and unchangeable mutations of this present evil world.”

Williams was a champion of the rights and dignity of native Americans.  Indians were friends, as well as the object of his ministry.  Williams remarked that the king of England had no right to grant charters to the land the Indians owned.  That got him kicked out of Massachusetts.  But what drove him was not making a theological or political point.  It was the souls of the natives.  In his heart of hearts, he was an evangelist and missionary.

Williams is best remembered for his advocacy of the freedom of the human conscience.  What was for Luther the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers was for Williams the principle of freedom of conscience.  He maintained that it was man’s responsibility as well as privilege to seek the truth, which for him was found solely in the Scriptures.

Puritans of Williams’ day feared debate because it created civil contention and moral anarchy.  There was no room for innovation, radicals, dissenters, cranks, or men with independent minds.  Puritanism was a closed shop; you either did as the Puritans did, or you got out.

While Luther and Calvin were theologians, Williams was a social reformer.  He took their “new” theology and insisted that man’s conduct and social system change with them.  While Luther was relatively conservative with the extent to which he took his reforms, seeking to “keep what was good,” Williams spend a lifetime seeking the True Church.  Not being satisfied, he removed his affiliation with any church, convinced that no existing institutional church had any claim as being the epitomy of what Christ established.

Here’s how one author described the comparison between Luther and Williams:

The German freed us from an intolerable Catholicisim; the firebrand of Salem freed us from a Puritan theocracy almost as bad.  When he won this battle of Boston by allowing himself to be banished, he established himself as the true father of the American dream:  the dream of a really free commonwealth in which all of us are on equal footing before God and the law, all entitled to search for the truth as we see fit to search, and in finding it to find emancipation, political and social and religious, for our hearts and minds and souls.

(Note:  For more on the Reformation, check out Tim Challies‘online symposium.)

Tags: Reformation

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