Beeson podcast, Episode 454 Robert Wilkes July 23, 2019 https://beesondivinity.com/podcast/2019/Liberty-in-the-Things-of-God Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George. Timothy George: Welcome to today's Beeson podcast. Our guest today on the Beeson podcast is Dr. Robert Louis Wilken. He is the William R. Kenan professor emeritus of the history of Christianity at the University of Virginia. He's also a good friend and collaborator with me and the work of Evangelicals and Catholics together. He was brought up a Lutheran. He is now a Catholic. A major scholar of Christian history. Written many books: Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, The First Thousand Years, many others. A former president of the American Academy of Religion. And his work is just renowned all over the world and edifies the scholarly guild, new insights, but also the people of God. He's a churchly theologian. Robert, welcome to this podcast. Robert Wilken: It's a pleasure. Timothy George: Now let's begin. I've mentioned your work in church history, I think you were a student of Jaroslav Pelikan, isn't that right? Robert Wilken: I was indeed. He was at the University of Chicago and I went there in the fall of 1960 to study Early Church, the Church Fathers with him. So for two years I was able to study with him and actually he was the first to give me an idea that would eventually become my dissertation. He left though after two years and went to Yale, but over the years we kept in very close touch. Especially in his last year and month, I was close to him. I went up to visit him a few weeks before his death, so he's been a mentor, he's been a model of what a Christian scholar can be. And a churchman. He was the son of a Slovak Lutheran pastor and eventually because of his Slovak background, since he's Eastern European, he was received into the Orthodox Church. Timothy George: One thing in common I see between you and Jaroslav Pelikan, great historians, but he also wrote extremely well. He was a great writer and so are you. Not every historian can write well, but that's a gift that you have. And it shows up in all of your writing. So he became Orthodox, like you said, towards the end of his life. You became a Roman Catholic. You taught for a while at Notre Dame, didn't you? Robert Wilken: I did. I was there for thirteen years in the 70s and then the 80s. That was, for me, a very formative period, because I really began to see Catholicism at close hand and to respect what it represented. And one of the things that I still remember is some of my students were religious women, that is sisters in various religious communities, and I think they, more than anybody else, made an impression on me and made me realize there was something about Catholicism that Lutheranism, that Protestantism, did not have. That is, a religious, monastic communities. An enrichment to the life of the laity. Timothy George: It's one of the things that we lopped off at the Reformation. I think to our detriment in many ways. Robert Wilken: Oh no question about that. I think that was most unfortunate and it's interesting. In the book, as you'll recall, one of my most important sources of information was a community of Franciscan sisters in the city of Nuremberg. Basically their community was shut down by the new Lutheran magistrate. The abbess of the community, a woman named Caritas Pirckheimer, wrote a diary and detailed almost week by week what they were actually doing. And in that she then says that they will not allow us to confess our faith freely and forced us to go against our conscience and we're not going to do that. So it's a good bit of evidence to show that conscience is not something that people think, that arose during the Reformation and it is not about the right of private judgment, it's about obedience to God. Timothy George: Excellent. We're talking about your book, your new book, called Liberty and the Things of God: the Christian Origins of Religious Freedom. It just came out this year, 2019, from Yale University Press. Why did you write this book? Robert Wilken: Well as is often the case, a book develops gradually and incrementally. About seven or eight, nine, ten years ago, because religious freedom was so much in the air, and I began to get more interested. And I noticed in my reading of the Church Fathers that several writers, men by the name of Tertullian living in Carthage, which is present day Algeria. [inaudible 00:05:36] And another man Lactantius, who was in the 4th century, wrote some documents and some paragraphs that say religion can not be coerced. And no one else had really put it that way, there had been accommodations to religious dissonance, but no one had really set down a principle. Robert Wilken: Well, I got interested in that but then to my delight I discovered that these writings from the Early Church resurfaced in the 16th century during the Reformation. And they are used then by defenders of liberty of conscience and religious freedom to defend themselves against Christians who were persecuting Christians. And so they have a second life. Probably the earliest and in some ways, very significant, the author Sebastian Castellio, middle of the 16th century. Here's another side of Joan Cawas, we didn't talk about Calvin. Robert Wilken: But Calvin actually was complicitous in the execution of a man by the name of Servetus, who was a heretic. He didn't believe in the Holy Trinity and other classical Christian doctrines. And Castellio wrote a treatise defending Servetus, criticizing Calvin and other leaders. And in that treatise, titled Whether Heretics Should Be Punished or Persecuted or Executed, he quotes a long passage from this 4th century Christian writer like Hanchus in support of his argument. And that's the first incident that I know of, but then other writers, some of the English Baptists, Roger Williams for example, quotes Tertullian. Robert Wilken: And so these documents then become a source of ideas and inspiration to 16th and 17th century writers that allow them to formulate their own arguments in terms of their own time to defend religious dissenters. Timothy George: Yeah you picked up on the Calvin story and of course you mentioned Servetus which is a dark stain, let us say, against Calvin. I tell people, Calvin should have known better, because elsewhere, he says things about religious freedom that point in a different direction. And you talk about this, you have a chapter on Calvin and Servetus-- Robert Wilken: That's exactly right. He should've known better but the other thing that moderns cannot understand is that everyone assumed that you could not have a peaceful and stable society if there were not one religion that everybody practiced. Timothy George: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Robert Wilken: So Calvin, even though he says that there are these two realms, he had to deal with the realities of 16th century social and communal life and everybody else did. They simply could not conceive that there could be religious associations, we would call them churches, who practice a different form of Christianity than that which is established and official in the city. And so we have to give them a lot of space and not be too harsh on them. But Calvin knew that, he knew he was inconsistent. And he admits that at one point in his institutes. Robert Wilken: And then others had the same issue. It was the big issue in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As I observed, their John Cotton, who was really the spiritual head of the community, and he got into a controversy with Roger Williams. And Cotton basically takes one aspect of John Calvin, namely there should be one public religion, and Roger Williams takes the other, that there must be a distinction between the civil and the religious arms of society. Timothy George: There was another distinction that Williams made relating to the Ten Commandments. The first and second...[crosstalk 00:10:08] Robert Wilken: The chapter on Calvin is called Custodians of Both Tables and what they distinguish was that the first two to three, depending on how you enumerate them, which have to do with the worship of God and then the others, which have to do with behavior, moral behavior, adultery, stealing, this kind of thing. And so the argument was, and what Williams said, is that the second table which dealt with behavior and moral questions, that was the responsibility of civil government and the worship of God was the responsibility of the religious community. But it was very hard to maintain that in 16th and 17th century Europe. Very hard to maintain. Timothy George: I think one of the great contributions you've made in this book is to challenge maybe what's the reigning paradigm of thinking about religious freedom as a product of enlightenment, conscienceless, modern thinking, individual rights. And you show that it's grounded in the Scriptures in the Early Church, not consistently, not everywhere of course, but this is something that was retrieved in a way, in a time of the Reformation and afterward. Robert Wilken: Yes well that's of course the main point of the book. As recently as six weeks ago, a very prominent political commentator and his story named Robert Kagan had an op-ed column in the Washington Post in which he said that it was not until the Enlightenment that liberty of conscience was recognized. Timothy George: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Robert Wilken: And I was astounded, that's what everybody's been saying for decades. But that he simply had no clue as to another way of viewing things. And so the book is an attempt to show and also what also goes along with that is that Christianity is inescapably intolerant and prone to violence. And as long as Christianity was the inspiration for societies of the West and the new national communities after the Reformation, there can be no hope of liberty of conscience or freedom of religion. So that's really what the book is about. Robert Wilken: And what I try to show is that even a thinker such as Locke, who is a major Enlightenment thinker and the person to whom people turn when they want to speak about religious freedom, Locke is basically working with Christian idea that he received through the writings that he had been reading and through his contemporaries. One in particular I think was very significant, John Owens, who was a dissonant separatist in the 17th century England. And Locke then was read by Madison and by Jefferson and what he says is what basically Christians have been saying for the past hundred years, hundred and fifty years. Timothy George: I'm a Baptist, in fact I'm a Southern Baptist, which may be worse in some people's minds, but you give a good credence to the Baptist contribution to religious freedom in this book. Robert Wilken: I do indeed. Everyone knows about Roger Williams, but I think one of the unique contributions of this book is to give a prominent place to Thomas Helwys. And Helwys was a contemporary, a little younger than Roger Williams, who had gone over to the Netherlands and there was a lot of ferment about religion and liberty of conscience. And he came back to England because he wanted to support his fellow Baptists. He was founder of one of the first Baptist churches in London. He was put in prison and then he died in prison. Robert Wilken: But he wrote a book called The Mystery of Inequity, and in that book he sets forth a basic argument that others have been presenting, including Roger Williams, namely that the civil authority had no authority over a person's conscience and that the idea that religion has to do with where you were born. If you were born in German principality, you're Lutheran. If you're born in Italy, you're Catholic. If you're born in England, you're Church of England. And Helwys was one of the first to cut through that, but what made it even more remarkable was that he realized that he didn't like the Catholics. He considered them idolists but he said, "Look. If you're going to give liberty of conscience to dissonant Protestants, you've got to give it to the Catholics as well. Because the king has no authority over their consciences and you have to give it to the Jews and to the Muslims." Timothy George: Yeah, remarkable isn't it? Robert Wilken: It is remarkable. And five years ago, I'd never heard of Thomas Helwys. I'm very pleased that I'm able to give him some prominence. In fact, in my conclusion, he's the first person I mention. Timothy George: Yes. It's a wonderful treatment of the Baptists. Baptists don't know as much as we should about some of those figures like Thomas Helwys and John Murton and others. Robert Wilken: And Busher. Timothy George: Yes, stood with him. Robert Wilken: I don't know whether you ever had a chance to look at this book by this Dutch scholar called Twisk. I discuss him. Twisk was the one who put together the most extensive dossier of citations from earlier Christian writers on liberty of conscience and freedom of religion. He had an impact on John Murton who put together a dossier within Roger Williams' (youth/views) He's a very obscure figure but a very significant figure. And he's hard to get at because his book is not available, but I found it in the Library of Congress, for example. It's only available in two libraries in this country and it's in Dutch. And I thought because I can read German well that I can read Dutch, but I can't read Dutch. Timothy George: Not exactly the same. I discovered that myself. Well we've used these two terms, religious freedom and liberty of conscience. Are they the same or is there distinction? Robert Wilken: Well they are not exactly the same, they are the ones that occur. I'd say in general, liberty of conscience is the more familiar term, the one that's used the most, the one that comes in earliest. You get it already in the 16th century. Freedom of religion then is a more general term that begins to be used later on in the 17th century. And they have a different accent because the one puts the stress on conscience and the other on the phenom and the religion. Robert Wilken: What I discovered writing this is that a good part of the debate on religious freedom has to do not with individuals' liberty of conscience, but it has to do with the rights of religious communities. To actually practice their faith, which doesn't mean simply that they can worship in a way that's different from the official worship of the country or the territory, but that they can proselytize, they can organize, they can care for their sick and their needy. So it's very significant. In fact one of the ways that it comes in is the use of the term exercise of religion, as one Dutch writer says. It's not enough just to embrace liberty of conscience. You've got to recognize the right to practice your religion, to exercise your religion. And that then becomes part of the normal verbiage that's used for any writers of religious freedom. Timothy George: And that's important today, isn't it? Because religious freedom is under threat, under attack actually around the world in many different ways, and it isn't simply a matter of individual right but of the right of a group of faithful people. Robert Wilken: Exactly. The difficulty, as I have thought about this and as I've given talks about this book and have questions, is that I do not think there's any place between within our purest prudence for such an idea. And I think that's a question that's going to have to be faced in the coming decade. Whether religious freedom, liberty of conscience actually has a carpet dimension to it, because that's exactly what you're just saying. That's the form in which these things come to today. Nobody cares about a solitary nonbeliever. That doesn't bother anybody. Timothy George: Well it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today, Dr. Robert Louis Wilken. He is the William R. Kenan professor emeritus of the history of Christianity at the University of Virginia. A wonderful scholar, a wonderful writer and thinker. It's a pleasure for me to know him and the context of our work together with the Evangelicals and Catholics together. You are the president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life which sponsors that dialogue. So thank you for your many contributions and especially for this new book from Yale University Press, Liberty and the Things of God: the Christian Origins of Religious Freedom. It's a significant contribution to this important discussion today. Thank you for being with us. Robert Wilken: Thank you very much Timothy. Announcer: You've been listening to the Beeson podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to the Beeson podcast at our website beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational, Evangelical divinity school, training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your worth. 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