Cross. Review of Davis.The Moral Theology of Roger Williams (original) (raw)
Roger Williams, Natural Law, and Religious Liberty
Journal of Church and State , 2021
The seventeenth-century colonial Puritan Roger Williams remains a celebrated advocate for religious liberty. The copious number of texts devoted to Williams testifies to his longstanding legacy throughout history and to the idea of religious freedom. Roger Williams’s doctrine for religious liberty did not arise from the auspices of a religious zealot’s imagination. Instead, he discovered this pre-political liberty as founded in a biblical–theological paradigm and attested to through natural law. His biblical and theological justification for religious liberty has a home in a vast array of articles and books. Few, however, have asserted Williams as a natural lawyer. Williams’s use of natural law revealed the nonsubjective nature of religious liberty—that the natural law attested to the goodness, virtue, and moral imperative of religious freedom. Indeed, what made Williams’s idea for religious liberty enduring was that he understood religious liberty not as foundational but derivative—religious freedom derived from transcendent realities, which made religious liberty a pre-political liberty.
'TO HOPE, AND TO WAIT': ROGER WILLIAMS AND THE ESCHATOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TOLERATION (2022)
History of Political Thought, 2022
Despite a recent renewed focus on the historical and theological justifications for toleration, few scholars have examined the positive uses of eschatological rhetoric in fueling a commitment to religious liberty. The early modern thinker Roger Williams, however, advanced a distinctly eschatological conception of church-state relations to defend the practice of religious toleration in Rhode Island. Drawing on works by Thomas Helwys and John Murton, Williams articulates a millenarian ethos of toleration characterized by patience and hope. This important, though neglected, dimension of Williams's political theology sheds light on the relationship between apocalypticism, eschatology, and religious toleration.
A Brief Biography of Roger Williams: Father of Religious Liberty in America
A Brief Biography of Roger Williams: Father of Religious Liberty in America, 2022
is one of the most important persons in American history. It did not appear that way during his 80 years (1603-1683), because he was despised by his peers in New England. However, because of his stance on religious liberty, he is now one of the most written about persons in American history. Roger Williams can be identified with one of the two experiments of what the fathers of America thought would be the ideal society to create in the new world. On one side, you have the Puritans, led by John Winthrop, with a vision of a pure theocracy. On the other hand, is Roger Williams, also a Puritan with a vision of a society where the state is separate from the church. The story of Roger Williams is the story of the conflict between these two ideals. Rhode Island versus New England; John Winthrop and John Cotton versus Roger Williams. History declares Roger Williams and the Rhode Island experiment the winners. Though despised by his contemporaries, Roger William's ideas became the foundation upon which republicanism of America is built. John Winthrop thought that Puritan theocracy would be the experiment for the glorious future that he imagined. However, it would be this "gentle radical" called Roger Williams, who would become the hero of American democracy. It is the Rhode Island experiment that would be immortalized. This is Roger William's story in brief. In this brief biography, I will cover his early years, his life and conflicts in colonial America, his relationship with the Indians, and his religious liberty legacy.
The Lively Experiment: Roger Williams, Rhode Island, and Religious Liberty
2021
for reading my thesis and participating in my defense. I have learned so much from my time at Sam Houston, the thesis process, and my committee members that I will cherish and take with me as I move forward. I would also like to thank Dr. Richard Edwards for graciously assisting in my research by allowing me access to Baylor University's extensive theological collection on Roger Williams. Additionally, I am very appreciative of the librarians who are a part of Sam Houston's Newton Gresham Library. They were tremendously helpful to me during my research. I am also sincerely grateful for the encouragement and guidance of Professor Jeremy Lehman, whose evident passion for teaching and the field of history inspired me to pursue this path. Lastly, to my family and friends, I am so thankful for the constant encouragement and support that I received from all of you. On the days where I did not feel like I quite measured up to the task, you pushed me to see this project through to the end. I will always look back on this portion of my educational journey with the greatest sense of gratitude and joy due to the many extraordinary people who chose to invest their time, talents, and energy into me. v PREFACE Roger Williams had an extraordinary way with words. He was very passionate about Rhode Island and the liberation of the religiously persecuted. This fervent passion was very evident in his writings, especially in his treatise The Bloudy Tenent. In order to get his passionate point across, however, his works often contained bold statements, capitalized declarations, punctuation for emphasis, and non-traditional usage of words. His liberal writing style, in conjunction with the antiquated spelling of the 1600's, makes some his works difficult to follow. However, I have largely chosen to leave the original spelling and grammar intact. I really wanted to accurately portray the original source material and allow readers to experience the passion that I feel comes through in his writing. I have combatted some of the possible confusion by breaking up his statements, explicating them, and placing them in the correct context. Williams was truly a master at argumentative writing, and the extra flourishes he added (while not grammatically sound), were a deliberate choice and an important aspect of his unique style. To fully update his words would be to strip his writing of its distinct character and historical significance. vi
Is Divine Providence Risky? A Dialogue Between John Calvin and John Sanders
Coceptus, 2022
This study presents John Calvin and John Sanders as an example of the ongoing debate on the nature of divine control and human freedom. Given the time gap between Calvin and Sanders, the study uses a dialogical hermeneutics methodology. The former upheld a "no risk" while the latter propagates a "risky" conception of providence. However, the concept of providence as "risk" or "no risk" is not distinctively biblical. It has not been conceived in such a manner. Despite this, providence can be both risky and risk-free. Seemingly, the notion of divine providence constitutes a paradox, namely: as an omniscient creator, God controls everything, yet humans are free. For humans to be free, their future contingent actions must not be foreknown, because whatsoever God foreknows happens necessarily. Since both Scripture and human history show that humans are free, it follows, therefore, that God does not know all future contingent actions. In that case, divine providence is risky. This explains why God changes and repents of his earlier decisions. However, this study argues that this paradox may be softened if divine ignorance is understood from a contextual point of view. Further, libertarianism, as advocated by Sanders, is overemphasized. Lastly, divine mutability and relenting denied by Calvin are part of divine sovereignty, without which there can be no forgiveness of sin.
An Interval of Grace: The Time of Ethics
Spazio Filosofico, 2016
In the introduction to this paper we first point to Schopenhauer’s ethics and philosophy of religion and to his peculiar understanding of the notion of freedom as a grace. From this constellation we then start with three Meadian analyzes. We first introduce the topics of space and touch into the discussion of Mead’s philosophy of intersubjectivity and the related problem of an ethical temporality. We try to demonstrate the importance of the so called ‘interval’ in ethics, both in temporal as well as in spatial sense. For this purpose we offer three Meadian meditations by reading Ludwig Feuerbach’s, Jean-Louis Chrétien’s and Watsuji Tetsurō’s texts (both in philosophical and religious sense) and by relating them to Mead’s original inception of the philosophy of intersubjectivity. Finally, by reading B. Libet’s Mind Time in an ethical key, we argue for a ‘theological’ extension of Mead’s philosophy also by indicating the nature of the ethical ‘interval’ and the related phenomenon of ethical temporality as a grace
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2020
The mid-seventeenth century turn to moralism in English Protestant theology – exemplified here by ‘Ignorance’ in Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress – involved a clear rejection of the Calvinistic doctrine of the ‘internal testimony’ of Scripture. The upshot was the emergence of a religious impulse that emphasised the salience of a ‘rational account’ of Scripture's credibility. The shift is conventionally traced through Richard Hooker, William Chillingworth and the Cambridge Platonists. Hooker was, however, more Calvinist and Chillingworth more Laudian than has been recognised. The Cambridge Platonists and their ‘latitudinarian’ successors emerged from and were shaped by puritan culture.