Roger Williams

About the year 1630 there arrived here one Mr. Roger Williams;

who being a preacher that had less light than fire in him,

hath by his own sad example preached unto us the danger

of that evil which the apostle mentions in

Rom 10:2 ‘They have a zeal, but not according to knowledge.’”

~Cotton Mather in Magnalia Christi Americana, Vol. II, pg. 495

Roger Williams is oft celebrated as a man who was a pioneer of “religious freedom” and tolerance, a victim of the extremely intolerant, paranoid, Puritanical folk who banished him into the cruel New England winter merely because of their virulent dislike of Baptists.

According to an A Beka history book, “A Puritan named Roger Williams, whom you have already met as a missionary to the Indians, saw religious freedom—or the whole idea about religious freedom—Roger Williams and preachers like Obadiah Holmes have gone down as champions in the cause of liberty for all. Roger Williams’ teaching upset some of the leaders of Massachusetts. The leaders told Williams that he must either change his ways or leave Massachusetts. Williams’ ideas about the Indians also upset some people. He traded with them fairly and never tried to cheat them. After they were finished trading he would tell them about God,” implying that the Pilgrims cheated the Indians and did not tell them about God.

John Quincy Adams called him, “Conscientiously contentious.”

Henry Martin Dexter recounts, “When [Williams] lived in Massachusetts he was evidently a hotheaded youth, of determined perseverance, of vast energy, considerable information, intense conviction, a decided taste for novelty, a hearty love of controversy, a habit of hasty speech with absolute carelessness of consequences and a religious horror of all expediency.”

Roger Williams claimed there were “No True Churches!”

In the year 1631, Roger Williams arrived in Massachusetts to pastor a church in Boston. He refused to take the position because they would not renounce the Church of England as apostate. He fanatically declared, “I durst not officiate an un-separated people,” He had a hearty love of controversy.

He then went to Plymouth and found that the parishioners visited congregations of the Church of England. Roger Williams demanded that the church of Plymouth rebuke these people and if they did not repent, excommunicate them. They didn’t go along with his ideas and he thereupon declared that they “were no true church,” because they put up with this “Intolerable evil.”

Roger Williams then went to Salem and assumed the office of Assistant Pastor. Some time later he denounced the king for referring to Christian Europe as Christendom, calling it blasphemy, and for issuing charters giving the Indians’ land to his subjects, calling the king a “Public liar.” John Cotton went to Roger Williams and pleaded with him to stop saying these outlandish things. For awhile Williams was quiet, and then six months later he published a document saying that the charter was invalid, demanding that the Bay Colony uproot and return to England, and tell the king to his face that he was a public liar, and that he ought to amend his charter to omit the clause of the donation of land.

Upon another summons to the General Court, Williams declared that all the churches in Massachusetts were “no true churches of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

He said the New Testament “nullifies” the Old Testament

Roger Williams was the first to seek to put a biblical face on Humanism. He was an Antinomian, believing that the New Testament annulled the Old Testament, getting rid of the sanctions of the Old Testament law. He believed in a “neutral state.” Jesus came to fulfill (i.e. put into force) the law. He said “If you love me, keep my commandments.”

Three years after his banishment for the space of three months he became Baptist. W. Clark Gilpin comments in The Millenarian Piety of Roger Williams on pg. 56: “Having once become a Baptist, Williams did not long remain one. Instead, he concluded that the Roman apostasy had so disrupted the church that no authentic congregations could exist until Christ initiated the millennium by sending new apostles to recreate the church,” thereby aligning himself with the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, and the father of Dispensationalism, John Nelson Darby who both believed that there is no true church. “Hence, only a few months after being re-baptized by Holliman, Williams departed from the Baptist congregation at Providence, never again to count himself a member of any church.”

The cause of his banishment was his ecclesiastical intolerance coupled with his anarchical views on civil government. In Williams’ view The New Testament completely nullified the Old, leading him to view God’s revealed will in His law, as rubbish.

It was certainly Williams’ intention in founding Rhode Island to discredit the political views of the Puritans. “Williams’ insistence on the secular nature of the state led him to conclude that a ruler could still be a good ruler even though he had never heard of Christ. There was no reason to assume that a person would perform better in his particular calling simply because he was a Christian...Williams declared ‘that Civil places of Trust and Credit need not be monopolized into the hands of Church-members (who sometimes are not fitted for them)” T.H Breen, The Character of the Good Ruler, p 45

The Puritans viewed these positions, in the language of John Quincy Adams, as “altogether revolutionary.”

“Sir, we [in Williams’ colony of Rhode Island] have not known what an excise means; we have almost forgotten what tithes are, yea, or taxes either, to church or commonwealth.” quoted by Craig S. Bulkeley, “Christianity and Religious Freedom,” Christianity and Civilization, No. 1, Spring 1982, pg. 264.

The settlers of Rhode Island proved to be more consistent in following Williams’ teaching than he did himself. It was more “prosperity” than he could stand.

Providence became a haven for every crackpot, rebel, misfit, and anarchist in the country. A Mr. Verrin refused to obey any order from the government on the grounds that it violated his “liberty of conscience.”

A seductive heretic named Samuel Gorton soon found his way to Providence as well (he had already been booted out of the Bay Colony, Plymouth, and the settlement of Aquidneck, an island in Narragansett Bay.) He began to preach, provoking Williams to write to John Winthrop, “Master Gorton, having foully abused high and low at Aquidneck, is now bewitching and bemadding poor Providence, both with his unclean and foul censures of all the ministers of this country (for which I myself in Christ’s name withstood him) and also denying all visible and external ordinances.” (quoted in Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory, pg. 197)

All this caused Williams to write, “Rhode Island had long drunk of the cup of as great liberties as any people that we hear of under the whole heaven…But, the sweet cup hath rendered many of us wanton and too active.” Quoted by Bulkeley, ibid pg. 265.

Implications

To quote America the first 350 years:

Williams was astounded at what happened in Rhode Island. He shouldn’t have been. If, as he believed, every man should be free to follow the dictates of his own conscience, nothing can be wrong or unlawful. No one can be condemned. All laws and government are wrong (since they force the consciences of men.)

In Winthrop’s words “Having…refused communion to all, save his own wife, now he would preach to and pray with all comers.”

But now we are able to understand why Roger Williams is lionized by the modern historians and viewed as an unblemished hero by most modern Americans. He opposed the sovereign rule of God and sought to establish the autonomy of man. He sought to justify the “neutral state” and thereby nullify the importance of a distinctly Christian State. He was in a real sense the first to put a biblical face on Humanism.