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| Roger Williams |
Because of the
current political debates within the United States (e.g., those who apparently
want to have an unconstitutional “religious test” for being president of the
United States), I thought it would be good at this point to include some
information about Roger Williams (ca. 1603-1683). Williams is one of the key people who helped formulate
(in North America) the ideas of religious liberty and separation of church and
state that are part of the foundation for the U.S. constitution.
In his arguments for religious liberty, Williams dialogued
extensively with the parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. Illuminating
comparisons could be made to the different ways other interpreters respond to
the Wheat and the Weeds parable in their own historical contexts. Two have been
mentioned on this blog before:
First is Wazo of Liège,
who lived in the mid-eleventh century in (modern) Belgium during a time in
which a number of Christian heresies arose. Wazo uses the Wheat and Weeds
parable to argue that the church should not execute such “heretics” or turn
them over to the state to be executed. Circumstances changed, however, as the
church began to respond more vigorously to these heresies. Pope Gregory IX started
a Papal Inquisition in 1231 to suppress such groups as the Cathars, Christian
heretics that flourished in southern France and northern Italy in the twelfth
through the fourteenth centuries (Fichtenau 1998: 27). By the thirteenth
century, heresy was a capital offense in most of Europe, a context in which
Thomas Aquinas—the second example—interprets the Wheat and the Weeds parable in
a much different fashion than did Wazo. He believed that the state was
responsible for executing the heretics that the church deemed worthy of death.
The historical context is entirely different for Roger
Williams’s interpretation of the Wheat and the Weeds parable four centuries
later, in a post-Reformation context in the New World. Williams famously
advocated for religious liberty and that neither the church nor state should
use any coercive force against perceived heretics.
The next few posts will discuss Williams’s interpretation of
the parable in detail.
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