Robert Louis Wilken - Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom

LIBERTY IN THE THINGS OF GOD

Copyright 2019 by Robert Louis Wilken.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To
Thomas F. Farr
and
Timothy Samuel Shah

Keep the truth which thou hast found; men do not stand

In so ill case that God hath with his hand

Signed kings blank charters to kill whom they hate,

Nor are they vicars, but hangmen to fate.

Fool and wretch, wilt thou let thy Soul be tied

To mans laws, by which she shall not be tried

At the last day?...

So perish souls, which more chuse mens unjust

Power from God claimed, than God himself to trust.

JOHN DONNE , SATIRE III

Contents

Acknowledgments

WHEN I BEGAN TO work on this book, I was fortunate to become associated with the Religious Freedom Project of Georgetown Universitys Berkley Center. The company of scholars associated with the center was an ongoing source of ideas and criticism, and I am deeply grateful to them. In particular I wish to thank Thomas Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute, and Timothy Samuel Shah, senior advisor, to whom this book is dedicated.

I am grateful to a number of friends who read the manuscript in various stages of its composition and gave invaluable criticism: Douglas Farrow, Matthew Franck, Stanley Hauerwas, Russell Hittinger, Thomas Noble, R. R. Reno, Timothy Shah, and Augustine Thompson.

Others who have offered criticism and advice are Stephen Angell, Irena Backus, Timothy David Barnes, Richard Bishop, Marcia Colish, Marc di Girolami, Harold Drake, Andrew J. Fagal, Timothy George, Bruce Gordon, Brad S. Gregory, David Bentley Hart, Paul Hartog, Alan D. Hertzke, Byron Johnson, Thomas Kidd, W. J. Torrance Kirby, Anthony N. S. Lane, Ian Christopher Levy, David Little, Paul Marshall, Peter Onuf, Ryan Patrico, Trent Pomplun, Jack Robertson, Paul Robinson, Michael Root, John Roth, Ann-Stephane Schaefer, Rebecca Shah, John Slotemaker, John Stagg, Matthias E. Storme, Roger Trigg, Carl Trueman, Adrian Weimer, Jason Whitt, David Wilhite, John Witte Jr., and Robin Darling Young. Julia Yost provided editorial help in the final stages, and Robin DuBlanc expertly copyedited the manuscript.

I am grateful to the staff of the Interlibrary Services of Alderman Library of the University of Virginia for help in locating old books as well as providing digital access to modern books and articles.

Finally, I thank Jennifer Banks, my editor at Yale University Press. She has been unfailingly supportive and has made valuable suggestions about directions the book might take. It has been a pleasure to work with her.

Introduction

R ELIGIOUS FREEDOM RESTS ON a simple truth: religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and for that reason cannot be coerced by external force. This truth was stated for the first time by Tertullian of Carthage, a Christian writer who lived in North Africa in the early third century. Tertullian said: It is only just and a privilege inherent in human nature that every person should be able to worship according to his own convictions; the religious practice of one person neither harms nor helps another. It is not part of religion to coerce religious practice, for it is by choice not coercion that we should be led to religion.

Religious freedom is often thought to be the work of the Enlightenment. In the sixteenth century, so the story goes, when the Reformation took hold in Europe, confessional differences led to the suppression and persecution of Christians by Christians. As the decades passed religious convictions hardened, and Protestant and Catholic armies faced one another on the field of battle. A half century of bloody conflict, the so-called wars of religion, was set in motion. But by the middle of the seventeenth century men with greater wisdom and less religious fervor came on the scene, and the fanaticism of religious believers gave way to the cool reason of the philosophers. Armed with notions of the superiority of reason over faith, skeptical of received truth, and distrustful of religious claims and institutions, these enlightened thinkers forged a new set of ideas about toleration and religious freedom. Through their efforts the modern idea of liberty of conscience was born.

This account portrays Christianity as inescapably intolerant and religion as prone to violence. Only with the decline of religious faith did religious freedom gain a foothold in the emerging secular states of Europe. As long as Christian beliefs were the spiritual and intellectual inspiration of society, toleration of those who believed differently made little headway. In recent years some historians have begun to modify the dominant narrative, but they move within too narrow an historical swath that does not include the broad sweep of Christian thinking reaching back to the Scriptures, the Church Fathers, and medieval teachers. We must retrieve these ancient sources, writes John Witte, a scholar of human rights and religious freedom, and reconstruct them for our day. This book is a modest effort to contribute to that enterprise.

To understand how religious freedom came to be cherished as a fundamental human right, the story must begin long before the Enlightenment and the development of modern political ideas and institutions. Its origins are not political but religious, and its history is a tale of inwardness, of spiritual freedom, and of obeisance aimed upward. To see things in historical perspective, I begin with Christian writers who lived during the years the new religion was first making its way in the Roman Empire. They did not forge a doctrine of religious freedom, and for centuries their thinking was only a quiet murmur heard by few. In dealing with dissidents and minorities in their midst, Christians seldom acted on the basis of the principles set forth by their early teachers: they acted with violence against Jews in the Rhineland at the time of the First Crusade; they executed heretics, for example, Jan Hus, the Czech reformer, in 1415; they forced the conversion of Muslims in sixteenth-century Spain. Nevertheless, writings defending the freedom and dignity of human beings were not forgotten and laid a foundation on which later generations could build. As the inheritance of the past was buffeted by the rough torrent of occasion, the Reformation of the sixteenth century, a doctrine of religious liberty began to take shape.

During the Reformation and in the seventeenth century, Christian thinkers had access to the writings of the Church Fathers newly edited by humanistic scholars. The works of Tertullian, for example, were published in Basel in 1521 by Beatus Rhenanus of Schlettstadt. Advocates of religious freedom discovered that arguments used by the Church Fathers against Roman authorities could be refashioned to address Christian persecution of Christians in their day. In his treatise