Roger Williams, Religious Liberty, and the Parables (part 3): The Debate with John Cotton

John Cotton

Williams’s theological and scriptural arguments for liberty of conscience are most evident in his ongoing debate with John Cotton, the eminent Puritan minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When one of Cotton’s letters to Williams was published without authorization while Williams was in London, Williams published a line-by-line refutation of that letter: Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered. When Cotton angrily wrote in reply, Williams then more fully responded in The Bloudy [Bloody] Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. Cotton responded with his The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and made white in the Bloud of the Lambe (1647), to which Williams responded with his The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy (1652).

The parable of the Wheat and Tares plays a major role in their debates, because Williams believes this parable is central to Jesus’ advocacy of religious liberty. He also argues that it had been tragically misinterpreted over the centuries to justify the persecution of those believed to be heretics (Byrd 2002: 88), a misapplication which resulted in the “spilling of the blood of thousands” (Williams 2001: 55). 

Cotton argues that the field in the parable symbolizes the church. The wheat designates faithful Christians, the servants represent God’s ministers, and the tares, since they look so much like wheat, symbolize hypocrites within the church. Therefore, those tares should not be “rooted out”; Jesus commands toleration, since just as tares look similar to wheat so do these people look similar to faithful Christians. On the other hand, sinners and heretics are stubborn, prideful people who, even though they know better, rebel on purpose. They are easily discerned from Christians; Cotton compares them to “briars and thorns.” If these sinners are warned, given opportunities to repent, and still refuse to change their ways, they should be punished, either by the church by censure or excommunication or, if they corrupt others, then by the “Civil Sword” of the state (Byrd 2002: 106). Otherwise, these sinners would expose others in society to “a dangerous and damnable infection” (Williams 2001: xxxi). 

Williams responds that any such persecution is a perversion of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus clearly says that the field represents the world (Matt. 13:38), not the church, and the tares symbolize all sorts of dissenters, separatists, heretics, and even non-believers in society, not Cotton’s hypocritical sinners within the church. The wheat plants are “children of the kingdom” who must co-exist in society with the followers of Satan until the end of the world. The servants denote messengers or ministers of the church, and the crucial point is that Jesus’s parable commands Christians to advocate religious liberty and oppose any coercive policies of the state concerning religion, even when it concerns “heretics and pagans” (Byrd 2002: 117). Jesus warns against civil persecution of those deemed as heretics, because it is impossible in this fallen world always to distinguish between God’s people and those opposed to God. The “weeds” will be collected when Jesus returns, and then they will receive the punishment they deserve at the hands of God, not by human beings. Like Jesus commands, it is better to allow the wheat and tares to coexist in the world until he returns than to risk the damage that uprooting the sinful ones would do.

The analysis of this dialogue/debate will be continued in the next post.

Writing Retreat at The Chicago Cenacle

The Courtyard at The Chicago Cenacle

I just returned from a brief writing retreat at The Chicago Cenacle Retreat & Conference Center. My private retreat was a chance to work in almost complete solitude to begin to finalize the book manuscript. 

I am grateful to Sister Judith for facilitating my stay; it was fantastic. I accomplished all my editing goals while there: Focusing on the Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2. Chapters 1 and 2 are now both under 20,000 words, which qualifies as a minor miracle, I suppose--facilitated by the helpful suggestions of my editor, Bryan Dyer.

I was able to work in solitude from morning to night in the Cenacle Center (it was even warm enough to do some work in the courtyard, pictured above), as well is in nearby coffee shops (I highly recommend the coffee shop of the Bourgeois Pig Cafe), on a bench overlooking Lake Michigan, and on a bench in the Palm House of the Lincoln Park Conservatory (all within ten-minute walks of the Center). The change in settings helped keep me focused on the manuscript.

I highly recommend the Center to anyone looking for a place to do a retreat; it was a place of solitude and peace in the midst of a large, busy city. Plus it is in a fantastic location.

The downside is that I could not spare the time (or money) to go to Wrigley Field to catch one of the Cardinals/Cubs playoff games. Plus my team lost; so now I'll be rooting for the Cubs.

Back to Roger Williams and the parables tomorrow. 

P.S. I forgot to add a word of thanks to my sister, Rev. Nancy Gowler Johnson, and to my brother-in-law, Father Jerry Stookey, for recommending The Chicago Cenacle to me.

Roger Williams, Religious Liberty, and the Parables (part 2)

Roger Williams

Just kidding. I meant this one:

The "real" Roger Williams

Emory University's fall break starts later today. We only have Monday and Tuesday off next week, but that will give me time to finish some things on the weekend and focus completely Monday and Tuesday on the final (I hope) edits of the book. I am grateful to Bryan Dyer, my new editor at Baker Academic, for his helpful feedback. 

Since I will be focusing exclusively on the book early next week, I probably won't continue this series on Roger Williams until Wednesday or so.

Back to Roger Williams:

Williams was born in England around 1603. After serving as an apprentice to the famous jurist Sir Edward Coke, Williams earned a scholarship to Cambridge University, studied to become a minister, and then served as chaplain on the estate of William Masham from 1628-1630. Pressures to conform to the Church of England increased after Charles I ascended to the throne in 1625, and Williams almost left with the Massachusetts Bay colonists to immigrate to North America in spring 1930 (Chupak 1969: 39). Williams and his wife did leave for the colony on December 10 of that same year on a ship that brought supplies and reinforcements (Davis 2004: 6).

The governor of the Bay Colony, John Winthrop, welcomed Williams’s arrival, calling him “a godly minister,” but things soon changed. When Williams was offered the prestigious position of teacher in the Boston church, he refused, because the church had not separated from the Church of England (by that time Williams advocated separation from the Church of England, not merely the reforms for which non-separatist Puritans advocated, including the Pilgrims in North America; see Gaustad 2005: 3-4). A number of other controversies followed and, in 1635, Williams was ordered to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Williams made his way south, bought some land from Narragansett Indians, and founded a settlement that he named Providence, which a few years later, along with other nearby settlements, was chartered as Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. Notably, the charter issued by Charles II in 1663 decreed that the colony would have “full liberty in religious concernments” (Gaustad 2005:70). Rhode Island thus became a refuge for all types of dissenters—believers and non-believers.

Many Puritans in New England envisioned themselves as a “New Israel” and interpreted some Hebrew Bible texts about ancient Israel as applying typologically to them (Gordis 2003: 125), including the idea that God would bless or punish the “New Israel” for obedience or disobedience to God’s will. Church and state were thus interdependent, and the state was responsible, for example, for compelling, by force if necessary, conformance to religious obligations.

Williams disagreed strongly with identifying anything but the church with a “New Israel” and argued that the church should utilize only spiritual weapons (e.g., Scripture, prayer, and persuasion) not physical ones (e.g., a sword). Ancient Israel and its “National Religion” was a unique phenomenon in history, Williams declared, with Jesus proclaiming a different way: Jesus refused to use violence and the new covenant he inaugurated means that neither the state nor the church could use violence or religious coercion (Williams 2008: 29).

Roger Williams (ca. 1603-1683), Religious Liberty, and the Parables

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.

Invisible Gorillas, Parables, and Reception History

Can you see the gorilla?

I spent a few pages in the Introduction of my James Through the Centuries reception history commentary explaining the theoretical/philosophical foundations for my approach to reception history of the Bible. I am not repeating that more detailed argumentation in this student-oriented textbook on the reception history of the parables. I am including a section, however, that explains in a slightly humorous (maybe) way one reason why reception history is helpful: It helps us see gorillas that might otherwise be invisible.

Here is the first draft of that short section:

The Invisible Gorilla, Parables, and Reception History

Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction (Bakhtin 1984: 110).

This quote, perhaps better than any other, helps to illustrate the philosophical foundation of my approach to reception history—and why I do reception history in the first place. No one person or interpreter holds a monopoly on truth, and an essential element of reception history—and the search for meaning in these texts—is listening to and interacting with a wide range of voices, including those whose voices are usually not heard.

One basic truth concerning the interpretation of any narrative is that any interpreters tend to find what they expect to find in a narrative. What interpreters expect to see influences what they see. This selective attention places blinders on interpreters, blinders that can only be removed when interpreters join in dialogues with other interpreters who have different perspectives, presuppositions, and modes of analysis.

The famous “invisible gorilla” experiment by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons illustrates how our perceptions of what we things is “reality” are skewed by our preconceptions. Participants in the experiment were asked to watch a brief video in which three people in white shirts pass a basketball back and forth to each other and three people in black shirts also pass a basketball back and forth to each other. Viewers of the video were instructed to count the number of passes the people in the white shirts made to each other. In the middle of the brief video, a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks from slowly from the right side of the screen into the middle of the six people passing basketballs, stops, faces the camera, and beats his chest before slowly walking off to the viewers’ left. The person in the gorilla suit spends a total of nine seconds on the screen (see www.theinvisiblegorilla.com).

Surprisingly, almost half of the viewers of the video did not see the gorilla; because they were focused on counting the number of passes made between the players in white shirts, the gorilla became invisible to them. I have shown students in some of my classes over the past few years, and a similar percentage does not see the gorilla. What we look for influences what we see, and interpreters can miss a significant number of elements in a narrative simply because of their own contexts and presuppositions. Interpreters may believe that they interpret the text “as it is” as objectively and completely as possible but actually overlook a number of significant elements, metaphorical gorillas stroll through the narrative sight unseen. Reception history helps to overcome these shortcomings and remove exegetical blinders from interpreters, especially when diverse voices from various perspectives are included in the conversations.