Westminster Institute talks Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom
Robert Louis Wilken is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, past president of the American Academy of Religion, the North American Patristics Society, and the Academy of Catholic Theology. He is chairman of the board of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the publisher of First Things. His new book is Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom. (It will be available at his lecture for purchase and signing.) Dr. Wilken states: “Religious freedom rests on a simple truth: religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and for that reason cannot be coerced by external force.” Chronicling the history of the struggle for religious freedom from the early Christian movement through the seventeenth century, he shows that the origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious, not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminds us of how “the meditations of the past were fitted to affairs of a later day.”; For instance, Dr. Wilken quotes Tertullian (ca. 155-240): “the religious practice of one person neither harms nor helps another. It is not part of religion to coerce religious practice, for it is by choice not coercion that we should be led to religion.” Carlos Eire, author of Reformations, says, “Wilken argues convincingly that the concept of religious freedom originated with Christian thinkers, challenging one of the most revered paradigms in Western intellectual history. In the process, he also injects a corrective twist into current debates about secularist hegemony.” Dr. Wilken received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has taught at Fordham University, the University of Notre Dame, the Institutum Patristicum (Augustinianum) in Rome, the Gregorian University in Rome, Providence College, and Lutheran Theological Seminary. He is the author of more than 10 books, including The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale, 2013), The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale, 2003), Remembering the Christian Past (Eerdmans, 1995), and The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (Yale, 1984).