It is difficult for American Christians today, long accustomed to the political benefits of liberal democracy, to imagine what it was like to live in a time when religious freedom was not taken for granted. The concept of the separation of Church and state was a radical idea in the seventeenth century, and it is still a debatable one today. As Baptists have become more numerous and more successful in American society (just a few years ago, the top five constitutional officers in the United States were all Southern Baptists), they have tended to lose touch with the historical role their forebearers played in the struggle for religious liberty.
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1 [ Back ] Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646) part I, epistle dedicatory, sig. Blr.; part i, pp. 18-36.
2 [ Back ] Edwards, part i, 203. C. N. Brailsford, The Levelers and the English Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 40.
3 [ Back ] Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World, trans. W. Montgomery (1912; reprint ed., Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 124-26.
4 [ Back ] George H. Williams, "The 'Congregationalist' Luther and the Free Churches," Lutheran Quarterly 18 (1967), pp. 283-94.
5 [ Back ] Weimarer Ausgabe Luther's Werke (Hereafter, "WA") 11, 268.
6 [ Back ] WA 19, 263.
7 [ Back ] WA 15, 616.
8 [ Back ] Roland Bainton, "The Struggle for Religious Liberty," Church History 10 (1941).
Dr. Timothy George is the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, and a senior editor of Christianity Today.
Issue: "Why Two Kingdoms?: Dual Citizenship On the Eve of the Election" Sept./Oct. 2000 Vol. 9 No. 5 Page number(s): 29-31, 51
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