June 17, 2019 Show with Mostyn Roberts on “The Subversive Puritan: Roger Williams & Freedom of Conscience”

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Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Monday on the 17th day of June 2019.

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And I'm thrilled to have a first -time guest on the program today. Not only do

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I have a first -time guest, but I have a first -time topic. My guest today is Mostyn Roberts, a minister at the

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Wellouin Evangelical Church in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom. And I know that I'm going to have to get my pronunciation corrected on both of those uniquely

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UK names. But he is the author, and the book that we are going to be discussing today is

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The Subversive Puritan, Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Mostyn Roberts.

02:13

Thank you, Chris. It's good to be with you. I'm here in Wellouin. The second

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W is silent. It's just Wellouin Evangelical Church. And we're about 15 miles north of London in Hertfordshire, and I'm delighted to be with you this evening.

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It's only slightly butchered Hertfordshire. I said Hertfordshire. That's really good. It's spelled like it should say

02:37

Hertfordshire. It sounds like Hertford, Connecticut. It's pronounced like that.

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Yeah, Hertfordshire. Well, tell us about the Wellouin Evangelical Church in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom.

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Well, I've been the pastor here and there for nearly 21 years. I came in at the end of December or January, November, December 1998.

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It's a church that was started in the wake of the 18th century revivals by actually a

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Calvinist preacher, not a Wesleyan, but a Calvinist preacher. And so the church dates back its foundation to the 1790s.

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But the actual building we're using now is about 1960. So we have a continuity in the congregation going back 230 years or so.

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Before that, there were small groups of dissident believers, nonconformist believers, going back even into the 17th century.

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Yeah. So it goes back quite a while. Wellouin itself goes back hundreds of years. And I have what

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I've been assured by local archaeologists is the remains of a Roman well in my back garden. Wow.

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So there's quite a lot of history around. Well, it's better than having the remains of a Roman in your backyard.

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Yeah, it is. The church itself is living. We have not a big church.

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We have about 60 members and a good mixed congregation. We engage in local evangelism.

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We support worldwide mission. We are a Reformed church, and we are

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Baptistic in our practices, although we do actually have Pedobaptists who are members of the church, and we're a

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Baptistic church by practice. And yeah, we personally believe in the

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Reformed faith and seek to teach, preach, and practice it.

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Are you confessional in regard to the 1689 London Baptist Confession or any other confession? No, we don't officially.

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We have a fairly simple statement of faith, I think, which was adopted before I came. If we did have a confession, then that's certain.

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I have talked through that confession in my time here, and if we did adopt a confession, that would be the one we would,

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I would imagine, but we haven't actually discussed that. Great. Well, one of the things that we do on Iron Trip and Zion Radio when we have a first -time guest is we have that guest give a summary of their own salvation story, give us, if you would, an explanation of your religious upbringing, if any, and what kind of providential circumstances our

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Sovereign Lord used in your life that drew you to himself and saved you, and how you actually also came to embrace the doctrines of Reformed theology.

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Well, I was brought up in a manse. My father was a

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Calvinistic Methodist minister in Wales. The name is from North Wales. So my father was a pastor in a manse, although, strangely enough, actually, he was living in London when

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I was born. He was a minister at a Welsh -speaking church in London. But I was brought back to Wales.

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I was brought up in Wales. My father, though, was quite liberal in his theology or neo -Orthodox as well, and although I must have heard the gospel,

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I didn't actually... I wasn't converted. I didn't actually come to Christ in faith until I went to university.

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So although I was a churchgoer from earliest childhood, I went to Cambridge University to study law, and it was there that, through the instrumentality of the

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Christian unions, I was taken to evangelistic meetings, and very soon I was ready to realize

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I needed Christ, and I confessed my sins and received Christ into my life one

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Sunday evening at an evangelistic meeting at the Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge in 1975, would you believe?

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Yeah. Interestingly, before that,

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I'd been living in France for a while, and I'd read a book by a man of whom

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I knew nothing called Francis Schaeffer. I'd picked it up on a bookshelf in London called Escape from Reason, and I picked this up because I'd been very influenced by French existentialist ideas, and I thought, great,

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Escape from Reason, that's fantastic. That's going to really support my nihilistic ideas.

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Of course, I read this book, and it was completely the opposite. It was Schaeffer really sort of debunking, in a sense, in his inimitable way, the ideas of atheism and existentialism.

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And that sort of didn't convert me, but it turned me around, and so unwittingly, I think, by the time

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I went to Cambridge, I was ready to hear the gospel. So I went to Cambridge, I went to Pembroke College, and I was delighted when

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I started reading and studying Roger Williams to realize that he had been at Pembroke College as well. So I actually had the pleasure of writing about a man who had been a student at my college for 350 years before I was.

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So that was quite interesting. Where's he gone? Yeah, well, he was there in the 1620s, and I was there in the 1970s.

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So I was converted at Cambridge, and that's been, as you might expect, the dominant feature of my life since then.

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I studied law. I practiced law. I was a solicitor. Americans, you may know that we have two branches of the legal profession in England.

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A barrister and a solicitor. That's right. Barristers specialize in advocacy in the higher courts.

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Solicitors do some advocacy, but mainly are paperwork people doing stuff in the office.

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I was a solicitor, but throughout my time in the seven years as a solicitor,

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I really increasingly felt this wasn't my life. I was doing a nine -to -five job, but I wanted to get home, and I wanted to read theology, and I wanted to prepare

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Bible studies, and I wanted to be involved in church life. I just knew increasingly strongly that the

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Lord wanted me in ministry. So when I think I was about 32, I felt so definite,

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I felt I applied to go to study at Spurgeon's College, which is a

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Baptist college. I can't honestly say that it holds the theology that Spurgeon did, but I studied there for four years, and I did a master's degree at London University.

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So that was in my thirties. So I left law after seven years and trained for the ministry.

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I was a minister in the north of England for a while before coming down to Welling. Now, was there any pushback from your more liberal father, since your

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Christian experience seems to be quite different? It was quite different. My dear father was not a lot older than my mother.

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He passed away in 1994. We did have quite a lot of strong arguments.

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I came home having read Jim Packer's Knowing God and things like that.

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He had no time for the infallibility of Scripture. He had no time for doctrines like propitiation and the wrath of God and these kind of things he regarded as pathetic.

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However, he retained what I would call an emotional attachment to the idea of coming to Jesus.

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So he was genuinely absolutely delighted when he knew that I was converted. So it was very interesting that he had this kind of…

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I think a lot of men of his generation never gave up this idea of coming to Jesus and Jesus being the center of it, and yet they had cut away their intellectual biblical roots that actually gave any meaning to who this

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Jesus is and what he's done for you. So, yeah, I mean, I got on with my father and I were great friends in the latter years of his life.

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And, yeah, I mean, so that was how it was.

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Yeah, you've educated me something about the Calvinist Methodists because I had no idea that they had liberal elements in them.

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I know that they've… Well, yeah, that generation, I mean, you see, that was taught in colleges in the 1920s and 30s when it was very liberal and Barth and Brunner, also the neo -Orthodox men, were being taught.

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So these were the intellectual influences on my father. It didn't seem to affect Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones who came out of there.

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That's right. But he, of course, didn't go through any of the colleges. He just went straight back to the tap roots of Calvinistic Methodism in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

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Yeah, he was educated in the medical school, not in the seminary. That's right. That's right. He was a doctor and, well, he would have been a very fine doctor had he stayed in that, but the

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Lord called him to ministry. Amen. And so, yeah, but no, his… In fact, because of my father's age, he and Dr.

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Lloyd -Jones were almost contemporaries and lived within about a mile of each other in Ealing in London in the 1950s and early 60s.

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They never met, and my father's theological strain, you know, track was very different from Lloyd -Jones.

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However, I'd have to say that on my own personal life, the theology of Lloyd -Jones has been far more influential than that of my father, you know.

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Right. I've come in through reading. In fact, you asked me how

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I came into Reformed theology. I mean, I was converted to Cambridge, which was a very kind of sort of Arminian evangelicalism, but it was interesting.

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It was again through Schaeffer. Nothing to do with reading Escape from Reason, which

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I'd read six years earlier, but in 1981, I went to Libri. I thought I'd read The God Who Is There, and I went to Libri, and it was

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Schaeffer's approach to theology, his ability to explain, you know, the

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Westminster Confession, theology, Calvinism, in a contemporary way, really resonated with me, and it was that that drew me into Calvinism and Reformed theology.

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I immediately, and I remember coming home from Libri, and I think, you know, I bought Calvin's Institutes, and I read

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Calvin's Institutes at 50 pages a week for eight months and got through a lot of, I read

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Puritan paperbacks from the Banner of Truth, and I started buying banner commentary, and that was really what was, for me, almost like a, well,

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I mean, if you understand, it was a second blessing, you understand, I'm not talking about two -stage, but it was like a kind of almost a rebirth of the rebirth, you know?

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Yeah, in fact, a lot of people who have spent any reasonable amount of time, as are many in Christians, when they become

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Reformed, they have very often described it as a being born again again.

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Yeah, it was like that. It was like that in the early 1980s, and my intellectual love of the faith really took off from there, and I think even from there on,

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I really realized that I love theology, I love doing theology, I love teaching the Bible, and this is what

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I wanted to do with the rest of my life, really. Praise God. Well, you brought up something significant in this conversation that would lend me to asking the question about your bite -sized biography that you've written for Evangelical Press about Francis Schaeffer, since he had such a strong impact upon your life and your theology.

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Tell us about this bite -sized biography, and even about the series itself that Evangelical Press publishes.

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Okay, yeah. This is going back, I guess, about 10 years now. I think before I was really involved with Evangelical Press, I haven't been chairman of the

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EP, and I'm still a board member, but EP, I think, began this series,

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Bite -sized Biography, with the idea to try to make well -known people, or some not -so -well -known, accessible to Christians who didn't know them, and to do that with short books, because they seemed to sell well these days.

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And they made a list, a little long list of names, and they came to me and asked me, would

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I like to write one? They gave me two or three names, and I said, I thought I'd consider these. I thought, actually, I went back and said, would you mind?

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How about if I were to write about Francis Schaeffer? And they came back and they agreed to that.

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So it was really a labor of love, because I was quite familiar with Schaeffer's works, although I went through them again.

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I read Edith Schaeffer's The Tapestry and various biographies of Schaeffer, and I just wrote this 34 ,000 -word book, which was published in 2012.

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I think it's been selling reasonably well in America and in this country, and it's just really an introduction to Schaeffer's life, ministry, thought, and to Le Brie, the work of Le Brie.

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So I enjoyed writing it, and I hope it's been helpful to people.

17:28

Great. Well, if anybody wants more information about Evangelical Press, who have published not only the bite -sized biography by Mostyn Roberts on Francis Schaeffer, but have also published

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The Subversive Puritan, Roger Williams, and Freedom of Conscious, you can go to... There are about 21 volumes in the bite -sized series, so there's a lot of those books around.

17:55

Sorry, I interrupted you. Yes, I was just going to give the website for E .P. Books, which is the abbreviation for Evangelical Press Books.

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It's E .P. Books .org. Also, you can get any

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E .P. book from my sponsors here in the United States, CVBBS .com,

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which stands for Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com. They carry quite a number of books published in the

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U .K. here in the United States, so a lot of this would depend upon where you live as to where you would order

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Mostyn Roberts' books or any other Evangelical Press book.

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But we thank the fine folks at Evangelical Press for donating 100 copies of The Subversive Puritan, Roger Williams, and Conscience of Freedom, which were recently given away at the

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Iron Trip and Zion Radio Pastors Luncheon, the most recent one that we had on May 23rd.

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Dr. Tony Costa, professor of Islam and Apologetics at Toronto Baptist Seminary, was my keynote speaker speaking on how the

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Dead Sea Scrolls vindicate the reliability of the Bible. We were honored to give away copies of this book by my guest

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Mostyn Roberts today at the luncheon and also quite a number of other major Christian publishers and also not -so -well -known publishers that are absolutely extraordinary when it comes to their quality of what they publish.

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So many of the publishers every year donate to the Pastors Luncheon and we're so glad that we this year included

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The Subversive Puritan, Roger Williams, and Freedom of Conscience among them. If you have any questions for my guest

19:52

Mostyn Roberts on Roger Williams, my email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. And as always, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

20:10

USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Let's say you disagree with the theology of our guest today or the theology of Roger Williams and you don't want to identify yourself when expressing your opinions.

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Perhaps you disagree with the theology of your own church or your own pastor. Well, we would require that you remain anonymous in that case.

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Or perhaps you're a pastor and you disagree with the theology of your own denomination, which happens from time to time.

20:42

We understand your desire to remain anonymous and we will grant that request. But if it's not a personal and private matter, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence.

20:53

Well, this is quite the provocative title typically when, especially we who are conservatives and may even be more typical of conservative

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Christians, the word subversive does not exactly pop into mind as a compliment when you're describing someone.

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I think that is a provocative title in and of itself, the subversive

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Puritan. But also, even the description of Roger Williams as a

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Puritan may raise some eyebrows of people who only have a very tiny bit of information about Roger Williams.

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They may only think of Roger Williams as a Baptist. And I think that our guest today will reveal that that was only a portion of his life of being a

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Baptist. And also, I guess the true part of what our guests may have heard is that Roger Williams, although a

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Puritan, strongly opposed the persecution by Puritans against those who disagreed with them theologically.

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But tell us, first of all, why you had this burden on your heart to write a current book on the life of this great hero of the faith.

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And what was it that captured your imagination about him and drew you towards wanting to learn more about him and write much about him?

22:33

Well, in 2012, I think it was, I think I must have finished the Schaeffer book, and I just picked up a book that had been on my shelf for some years called

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Liberty of Conscience by your American theologian Edwin Gostat. And it's about Roger Williams.

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And I read it, and it just began to intrigue me, this man.

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And so over the years, the next three or four years, I read other biographies.

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Ola Winslow has written about him, Perry Miller. John Barry wrote an excellent large biography in 2012,

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These American Historians. And I read other books related to the political philosophy of the time, and I refreshed my reading on the

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Puritans and so forth. And in 2016, the church gave me a sabbatical, so I thought, well, actually, what

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I'd really like to do is devote more time to this subject. And I read through the seven volumes of his complete writings, which

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I was able to obtain from the evangelical library in London. And I thought, well,

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I really would like to write something and get all this out of my system, you know. I think a number of things appeal to me.

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I've always been deeply committed personally to the idea of freedom of conscience.

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I think it goes back to childhood, and I don't know quite why.

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I always emotionally hated any kind of people being oppressed.

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If I saw films about slavery, they'd make my skin prickle. Would you believe it?

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Even seeing choir boys in uniforms, I used to hate. I thought, this is dreadful.

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I don't know, whether it was being Welsh or being nonconformist, or being, I don't know, where I was brought up.

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And so Williams drew out something quite emotional and deep in me about the idea of religious freedom for a man who fought for freedom of conscience.

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And also I began to see there were things I thought, really we need to remember these things today. We need to, you know,

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Christians are not going through a good time in the West these days. But here was a man who really went through incredibly difficult times as a

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Christian. We may not, we almost certainly wouldn't agree with a number of aspects of his theology.

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And yet he held what I'm convinced was a Calvinistic faith right through.

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It was ecclesiology and eschatology where he sort of would not be where we are in any sense.

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Well, I'd like that, I'm sorry, if you could finish your thought there, I'm sorry. Yeah, no, that's right, yeah, go on.

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I was going to say I'd like you to now start with the life of Roger Williams in the same way

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I started the program with you. If you could give from what you know about Roger Williams, something about his religious upbringing in London, I believe is where he was born, if any religious upbringing, and how he came to be called by Christ, what kind of providential circumstances that you are aware of rose up in his life that drew

25:58

Roger Williams to God and saved him? And tell us a bit, obviously, about his theological journeys.

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Yeah, Williams was born and brought up in East London, probably born in 1603, we can't be 100 % sure, but that's generally accepted as a date.

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We know that he appears to have worshipped at the local parish church in London.

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He may have worshipped at the same church as Threadwood Cook, who was a very famous lawyer at the time, and who later on took on Williams as a kind of an annuensis and clerk in his court work, and this almost certainly had an influence on Williams as well.

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This would have been an Anglican church? This would have been an Anglican church, yes, in the early 1600s in London.

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And we don't have anything much about his spiritual journey, except in later writings, and he said this about his conversion, when he wrote in one of his latter books, this is when he was about 70, he wrote, the truth is from my childhood, now above three score years, so he's talking about when he was about 10, the father of lights and mercies touched my soul with a love to himself, to his only begotten, the true

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Lord Jesus, to his holy scriptures, etc. So that is the closest you have to a coming to faith pre -teenage years, possibly about 10.

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He did write later on in life about being persecuted, even in and out of my father's house these 20 years.

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Now, it's a little bit ambiguous, what did he mean by that? Did he mean that his home life was unhappy, that his father persecuted him for being a believer?

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We just, it's difficult to know. Could he have been using the term my father's house as an allegory for the church?

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It might be, yes. It's in and out of my, yeah, it could well be that.

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But it's not, yeah, it's not entirely clear. What it does suggest is that he was conscious from an early age of persecution.

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Which I guess lends itself to the adjective you used in your title, the subversive

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Puritan. There was obviously something that he was saying or believing or doing that put him on the black list for the church at some point.

29:05

There was something, yeah, I mean, we don't know. Certainly, maybe in his childhood there were things.

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We know that in that area of London there were various Dutch refugees who were themselves subject to persecution as immigrants in that area.

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This possibly sensitized Williams to little plight of persecuted minorities.

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And later on we do know that he knew the Dutch language, so he may well have had something to do with the

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Dutch communities there. And we're going to pick up right where you left off, because we have to go to our first station break right now.

29:52

Okay. If anybody would like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

29:57

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And as always, please give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

30:09

USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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.nyc. Have a great day. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. And if you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with a little less than 90 minutes to go, is

39:33

Mostyn Roberts, Minister of the Welland Evangelical Church in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, and the author of a biography on Francis Schaeffer, an

39:43

Evangelical Press' bite -sized biography series. And today we are addressing his latest book,

39:49

The Subversive Puritan, Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience. If you'd like to join us, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

39:57

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. And as always, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

40:05

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter. And, Mostyn, if you could pick up where you left off, you were talking about some ambiguous reference by Roger Williams, written about his childhood, where he found disfavor in his father's house, and we don't really know what that means, but if you could give us...

40:26

Well, not quite. It could be a biblical reference there. And to his father's house, but I think what it shows is that, at an early stage,

40:39

Williams was somehow conscious of suffering for his faith at an early stage. We've no evidence that his father maltreated him, or he never said anything else about that in his life, but it was something that he wrote about.

40:52

But certainly the more positive aspect of his conversion came out in what he wrote, his last book, his penultimate book, to be accurate, about his debates with the

41:04

Quakers in 1673. But there is, in conventional language, he describes the

41:11

Lord calling him to himself. It's interesting. You asked about his doctrine.

41:16

I do try to summarize how we categorize Williams. Where does one place him theologically?

41:24

And I say in terms of his basic system, his doctrines of God, of man, of Christ, of salvation, he was clearly

41:32

Calvinistic. And certainly the five points,

41:37

Calvinism is much more than the famous five points, of course, but they were his firm beliefs.

41:44

I go to say on, I knew that, I suspected that using the word

41:51

Puritan might be a bit controversial. But I say in his desire for purity in personal life and the church, in taking the

42:00

Bible as God's word with utmost seriousness, and trying to bring every area of life under its direction, and his dissatisfaction with the established church, he was in disposition, as well as doctrine, a

42:15

Puritan. Though unlike the more mainstream Puritans, he rejected an established church completely.

42:22

In other words, he most certainly was a separatist, and you might go on to say he was actually a sectarian, because he...

42:30

I feel that in his basic attitude towards Scripture and seeking to live a pure Christian life, it is not incorrect to call him a

42:44

Puritan. But he went, like many separatists, he went further. Then the mainstream

42:52

Puritans were happy with, and this was a big debate, the big issues of the relationship of the church to the state, and the issues of to what extent do you allow freedom of conscience.

43:06

Those were the issues of which he differed with the Massachusetts Bay establishment, and for which in 1636 they exiled him, and then were about to repatriate him on a ship back to England.

43:18

John Winthrop, who remained a personal friend to Williams, gave him a tip -off, and Williams high -footed it into the snow, and 14 weeks later landed up in what became

43:32

Providence, Rhode Island. Now, how did he, and why did he, arrive on the shores of America to begin with from London?

43:43

What happened was, as he grew up, he had education, he became a clerk to this famous English lawyer,

43:50

Threadwood Cook. He then went to a famous school, which Cook helped him finance him through Charterhouse School in London.

43:57

He then went to Pembroke College, or Pembroke Hall, it was called as it is, Cambridge. He got his first degree at Cambridge.

44:04

Within 18 months he was studying for his master's degree, but suddenly left, probably because he saw what was happening.

44:12

A man called Archbishop Lord, who had been appointed the Bishop of London and would soon be

44:19

Archbishop of Canterbury, and under Charles I, the Church of England was becoming slowly more leaning towards Catholicism.

44:28

And I think Williams, at some point, at the age of about 25, 26, in the late 1620s, was definitely influenced by separatist writings.

44:41

We don't know exactly what or exactly when, but he left

44:48

Cambridge because he presumably felt he couldn't see his future in the Anglican Church. But he then went to be a chaplain in a

44:57

Puritan household in Essex, the

45:03

Masham household, and he worked as a chaplain there for a year or 18 months.

45:12

So this would have been like a house church? This would have been, he would have been a chaplain, he would have been the pastor in inverted commas, to a noble family, a family of lower nobility, put it that way, not the high aristocracy in England, but the lower nobility, who were in those days very strongly, numerically,

45:39

Puritan, and certainly in East Anglia, Essex and Suffolk areas, where John Winthrop himself came from Suffolk, and Williams found a home, and he would have had to minister to the lady of the house and the man of the house.

45:56

So this is like a religious butler we're talking about. You're talking about a kind of religious butler, yes.

46:02

You're talking about, well you have prison chaplains. Right. Right, well this would be a chaplain, but in a well -to -do house.

46:13

And when you're talking about a well -to -do house, you're talking about a house which would have had 60 rooms and lots of servants, it would have been like a small village.

46:24

Wow. You're not talking about living in a family, 4 .2

46:30

children or 2 .4 children, and 4 bedrooms. I mean, this is a big community.

46:36

But the Masham men were very much radically involved with Parliament, and so Williams was, at this point, very centrally involved in the discontent the

46:49

Puritans were feeling with Charles I. Charles dissolved Parliament in 1629, and for 11 years, he ruled on his own, more or less, without Parliament.

47:03

And it was this period that John Winthrop, in 1630, on the ship

47:08

Arbella, with leading a fleet of ships and about 1 ,000 people, came to Massachusetts Bay, the

47:15

Massachusetts Bay Company. And this was 10 years after the

47:21

Plymouth Puritans had arrived in the Mayflower. But in 1630, the big settlement arrived in Massachusetts, and that was in 1630.

47:33

And it was the following February, in 1631, that Williams came, obviously feeling like the

47:40

Puritans. He wanted somewhere where he could worship God freely, and they saw that that was not going to be possible under Charles I and Lord.

47:50

And then over the next 10 years, something like 15 ,000 to 20 ,000 English Puritans followed them from England.

48:01

And what were the specific things, in summary form, that the nonconformists, the

48:07

Puritans, had or held in opposition to the

48:12

Church of England? Was it a lot of liturgical things, things that they believed were an intrusion on perhaps the regulative principle?

48:20

I don't know if they called it the regulative principle back then, but something similar to that?

48:26

Well, the Puritans, the Puritans going back to the 1560s, 1770s, had obviously men amongst them who had been deeply influenced by Calvins, Geneva, and Bisa in Geneva.

48:38

They came back to England under Queen Elizabeth, and they were very discontented with Queen Elizabeth's kind of, what they saw as a compromised settlement.

48:46

They wanted a purer church. They wanted to get away. They wanted the last vestiges of Romanism taken away from the

48:52

Church of England. They saw that while James I, King James, held a kind of balance, although he was no friend of the

49:00

Puritans, Charles I was clearly taking the church in the other direction. He made matters far worse for the

49:07

Puritans. And so the interesting thing is, though, and this is where Roger Williams and the separatists had a problem, the mainline

49:16

Massachusetts Bay men, like Winthrop and like the great preacher, John Cotton, who became a kind of sort of antagonist, really, of Williams, but people like Winthrop and his colleagues always pledged they wanted to be loyal to the

49:34

Church of England. But when they came to Massachusetts, they actually established

49:41

Congregationalism, and the problem was that they didn't just establish

49:48

Congregational churches. They established what became a kind of, effectively, a national church called with a

49:58

Congregational basis. So the problem was, and Williams pointed out, he said, look, you know, you can't have it both ways.

50:11

You either got to be Anglican and be a national church or else you're going to break away completely.

50:20

And he would, I mean, John Cotton, for example, said, well,

50:27

I'm walking between two extremes. Cotton and Williams pointed back and said, no, you're not. You're halting between two opinions.

50:35

It depends on how you look at these things, you know. But Williams began to poke holes and he went to, when he went across, they were very glad to get

50:47

Williams. They said a godly minister. They were very pleased. John Winter was delighted to have him. They offered him a teaching post at the church in Salem, and Williams said no, because they weren't sufficiently separate from the

51:03

Church of England. And then he began throwing other things into the mix. He then had to go to Plymouth, so he spent a year or two with William Bradford and folk at Plymouth down the coast.

51:15

And then he began making friends with the Native Americans, the Indians, and that's another story. But Williams began to say, well, hold on.

51:24

By what patent do you hold the land? What right has James I got to give this land to the

51:30

Massachusetts Bay Company? It's the Indians' land. And he then says, well, you know, and the government, he says, the courts, the state, the civil state, not the church, has no right to enforce the first four commandments.

51:47

Well, when you start saying that to people who've been brought up in a system where the church and state are very closely tied up, you're beginning to lob bombs, and they didn't like what they heard from Williams.

52:03

He wrote a long letter, apparently, which has been lost, outlining his beliefs as to why the government should not impose the first four commandments.

52:17

And this was really the beginning. He was obviously, at this early stage, in the early 1630s, he was working through these things as to what would become a full -blown cry for the complete separation of church and state and for complete liberty of conscience.

52:33

And the next 40 years of his life would be devoted to establishing at Rhode Island, where he ended up when he was exiled, a state where anybody who, as he called it, was distressed for conscience could go, that whatever your religious beliefs, atheist,

52:55

Turkish, or we'd say Muslim, Anglican, non -Anglican, whatever you, you could go there, and the state would not molest you for your religious beliefs.

53:07

In other words, a place where there was liberty of conscience for all, including atheists and Roman Catholics. Sounds a lot like the

53:12

Quaker William Penn's view of the United States, the way that America should be governed.

53:19

That's right. It became the Quaker way, but the interesting thing was,

53:24

Williams had, towards the end of his life, in the early, about 1670, he would have been late 60s, had a terrific debate with Quakers in Newport and Providence.

53:41

And eventually it was published in a book called George Fox Digged Out of His Burrows. So Williams was playing on the pun of Fox and another

53:49

Quake leader called Burrows. And for four days he'd gone hammer and tongs at the

53:54

Quakers. And the interesting thing was, he said, look,

54:00

I am never ever denying your right to live in Rhode Island. As long as you don't breach the peace, you can live in Rhode Island.

54:09

But I disagree fundamentally with your beliefs. Much like what your average theologically committed

54:18

Calvinist in the 21st century, most of us, even theonomists, don't typically want a denomination to rule

54:30

America. They don't want to violate the United States Constitution that prohibits the establishment of a religion.

54:36

And so you have people that are firmly committed to the doctrines of sovereign grace or any other

54:43

Christological view or theological view. But at the same time, even though they might call their neighbor a heretic or an apostate, they would say that we want this country to provide freedom for people such as the heretics and the apostates to freely believe and have the liberty to worship as they see fit.

55:08

Well, this is what, Williams, you said, yeah, I think it's right. Williams' views at the time were far too far ahead.

55:14

I mean, John Locke, the great philosopher, who followed with an incentive, the kind of intellectual successor to Williams, in a way, in terms of liberty of conscience.

55:28

But even he would not allow liberty of conscience to Roman Catholics because he said they couldn't be trusted because they owed allegiance to another state.

55:35

Neither did John Milton. But Williams was prepared to allow freedom of conscience to Catholics and atheists, which was unheard of and not very popular.

55:45

But then, you see, 150 years later, with the First Amendment to your Constitution, he wins the day, really.

55:52

History was on his side. In fact, we have to return to that thought because not only do you have to hang up and call us back from the

55:59

UK to save yourself money, but we also have to take our elongated station break right now.

56:04

Okay. And this is our longer -than -normal break because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

56:10

FM, in Lake City, Florida, requires of us this longer break so they can air their own commercials and public service announcements to localize

56:17

Iron Trip and Zion Radio to Lake City, Florida. So use this time wisely. Write down questions from Austin Roberts on Roger and Williams and send them to me via email.

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And also write down all of the information provided by our advertisers so you can more successfully and more frequently patronize them.

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Even if a church is advertising with us and they live thousands of miles away from you, you never know when you're going to have a friend, family, or loved one ask you for a church recommendation in a particular area or you may be vacationing or visiting a particular area outside of where you live and need a church to visit.

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So write down all of the information provided by all of our advertisers and this way, if you patronize them enough, they may continue to advertise with us and, of course, that means that we will more than likely remain on the air because we require their advertising dollars to exist.

57:13

So we look forward to hearing from you and your questions from Austin Roberts at ChrisArnson at gmail .com

57:19

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com And as always, please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

57:26

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Don't go away. We'll be back after this station break with more of Austin Roberts and our discussion on Roger Williams.

57:44

Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, announcing a new website with an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a

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James White of Alpha Omega Ministries here. If you've watched my dividing line webcast often enough, you know

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Dan handles serious injury and medical malpractice cases in all 50 states. He represents many

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That's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Have you been blessed by Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio?

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We remain on the air because of our faithful sponsors and because of listeners like you. There are four ways you can help.

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I'm Dr. Gary Gambrail, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Laurel, Mississippi. God tells us in James 127 that pure and undefiled religion is a visit to fatherless and widows in their affliction.

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In the providence of God, three years ago, I discovered a poor small church outside Lusaka, Zambia, in a township called

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Again, the address is Bethlehem Baptist Church, 838 Reed Road, Laurel, Mississippi, 39443, or bbclaurel .com.

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Thank you. As host of Iron Trumpet Zion Radio, I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations.

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This is a beautiful little hardback by Evangelical Press, and you'll get it absolutely free for the purchase of any amount.

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The other offer that they have, in addition to that one, is the book is quite larger and quite more expensive, so you'll have to purchase at least $50 worth of merchandise, and that is my favorite of all biographies, a pastor in New York, The Life and Times of Spencer Cohn, by my dear friend

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01:14:10

He was a school teacher. He became a lawyer. He became a theater actor, or stage actor, in the 19th century.

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He was a war hero in the War of 1812, and then pastor, amongst other places, he was pastor in New York City at the

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01:15:42

Before I return to our guest today, Mostyn Roberts, who is discussing The Life and Legacy of Roger Williams, before we return to that discussion,

01:15:52

I just have a few announcements to make regarding special events that I hope you attend. The first of which is going to start this coming

01:16:00

Sunday, June 23rd, and will continue through the following Wednesday, June 26th.

01:16:09

That is the 2019 John Bunyan Conference of Tennessee, sponsored by Providence Theological Institute of New Covenant Theology.

01:16:20

There's a very good likelihood I will be there. I heard about this late notice, so I have to rearrange some things and so on, so I'm not 100 % sure, but I am going to try to get there, because this year, the

01:16:34

John Bunyan Conference is going to be held in tribute and in memory of my friend

01:16:40

John Riesinger. Some people know him as John Risinger, but it is

01:16:45

John Riesinger and he had great influence upon my life and my theological thought.

01:16:54

I was a regular attendee at the John Bunyan Conferences here in Pennsylvania before they relocated to Tennessee, and although I had some differences theologically with John Riesinger, I still learned a great deal from this friend of mine and had him on this program, and I can't even explain adequately the impact he had on my life and the impact his conferences had on my life that I attended with the late

01:17:23

Don Blind, who was my late wife's pastor. Don was a very dear friend and I would accompany him for a number of years to the

01:17:31

John Bunyan Conference. So this will be done in memory, as I said, to John Riesinger, who is actually the brother of Ernie Riesinger, who founded the church where I am a member now,

01:17:42

Grace Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. John and Ernie had some sharp disagreements over theology, especially in regard to the

01:17:51

Decalogue and other matters, but they both proclaimed, unwaveringly, the doctrines of Sovereign Grace, and as my church still does, many years after Ernie Riesinger planted the church in the 1950s.

01:18:07

But the John Bunyan Conference includes a very impressive lineup of speakers. Some of these men are close friends of mine, some of them

01:18:14

I have interviewed, and some of them will be first -time speakers in my life.

01:18:21

But Pastor Gary L. Scott, a very good friend of mine for many years, who some of you may remember being a guest on Iron Trump and Zion Radio.

01:18:29

Peter Gentry, who I have not yet interviewed, looking forward to getting him on the show at some point. Pastor Greg Van Cort, Dr.

01:18:38

Joe Kelly, Dr. Stephen Wellum, many of you may have heard Dr. Wellum on Iron Trump and Zion Radio, looking forward to meeting him in person for the first time,

01:18:48

God willing. Pastor Blake White. Pastor Gary George from Worcester, Massachusetts area, what a phenomenal brother in Christ he is, a longtime friend going back to the early 1990s, who

01:19:03

I've had on this program. Reverend Kirk Wellum. And Dr.

01:19:08

Tony Costa, my dear friend who has been involved in a number of events that I've orchestrated here in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and debates and conferences, and he was my last keynote speaker at my

01:19:20

Iron Trump and Zion Radio Pastor's Luncheon. So that's going to be June 23rd through the 26th, that's this coming

01:19:26

Sunday through Wednesday, the 2019 John Bunyan Conference of Tennessee in Franklin, Tennessee, to be more specific.

01:19:33

Adams Road will be performing, that is a musical group of Christians that are all former Mormons. That's Adams Road, and I am so looking forward to it if I can attend, and God willing

01:19:44

I will be there in attendance. If you would like more information on this conference, go to the website of the aforementioned

01:19:53

Providence Theological Institute of New Covenant Theology, and that email me as well if you want more information, chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:20:11

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Then coming up in December the 19th and 20th, which is a Thursday and Friday, I will be heading back to my old stomping grounds in New York City to attend the

01:20:21

Foundations Conference, a conference of sermonaudio .com, and I am so thrilled to be attending this event once again.

01:20:29

The speakers are always phenomenal, and they include Dr. Stephen J. Lawson, whose voice you've been hearing every day promote the

01:20:36

New Covenant Church NYC in Manhattan, a church that sponsors this program.

01:20:41

He is the founder of One Passion Ministries, and he is a profound and extraordinary preacher. Paul Washer, another profound and extraordinary preacher is on the roster.

01:20:51

Jeff Thomas, another profound and extraordinary preacher. We were talking about whales earlier with my guest

01:20:57

Mostyn Roberts. Jeff Thomas was, for over half a century, the pastor of Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales.

01:21:07

He is now retired from pastoral ministry and is an itinerant evangelist and author, and you've got to hear him preach if you never have before.

01:21:15

Rev. Armin Tomasian, a man that I believe is going to be a household name over the next decade, amongst

01:21:21

Reformed Christians anyway. He is a powerful preacher, a young man who has gifts and abilities far beyond his age, and I look forward to hearing him again preach.

01:21:30

Richard Caldwell Jr. and Andrew Quigley are two men that I have not yet heard preach, but if Sermon Audio selected them for this conference,

01:21:38

I am sure they are extraordinary. So if you want to attend this conference and meet me there,

01:21:43

I would love to see you there, go to thefoundationsconference .com. That's December 19th and 20th in Manhattan.

01:21:51

What better time of year to visit New York City than in the Christmas season, and I'm sure it will be memorable for you.

01:21:58

Then in January, I am heading back to Atlanta, Georgia, more specifically

01:22:04

College Park, Georgia for the G3 Conference. That's G3 stands for Gospel, Grace, and Glory, and the conference is being held

01:22:16

Thursday, January 16th through Saturday, January 18th. The theme this January is theology,

01:22:24

I'm sorry, worship matters. Worship matters is the theme this January.

01:22:29

The speakers are always extraordinary, and this January is no exception. Kosti Hinn, nephew of the notorious charlatan faith healer,

01:22:39

Benny Hinn, that's some introduction, huh? Well, Kosti is no longer a word -of -faith

01:22:44

Christian. He was raised in that heresy and has renounced it, and he has renounced his own uncle as being a heretic, and he does whatever he can to travel the world exposing the word -of -faith heresy for the deadly and damning and dangerous deception that it is, and he is going to be speaking on worship matters at this conference.

01:23:07

He is now a Reformed Baptist pastor in California and a cessationist on top of that. David Miller, another extraordinary preacher, is on the lineup.

01:23:16

A man who is certainly very familiar to most of the Iron Sharpens Iron radio audience, Derek Thomas, who

01:23:23

I believe is also originally from Wales. My friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries that I've known and called my friend since the early 1990s.

01:23:33

Joel Beakey, who has also been my friend since the 1990s, president of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.

01:23:39

Josh Bice, the founder of the G3 conference. Once again, we have Stephen Lawson and Paul Washer on the roster at this conference.

01:23:47

My friend Dr. Tom Askell, who is the executive director of Founders Ministries, the

01:23:52

Calvinistic ministry within the Southern Baptist Convention, and Vodie Baucom, one of the most powerful voices for Christian truth alive today.

01:24:01

If you want to register for the G3 conference, go to G3conference .com. G3conference .com.

01:24:06

I strongly urge you, if you have a business or parachurch ministry or something that you want to promote amongst a very large crowd of Christians, then register also for an exhibitor's booth at the

01:24:17

G3 conference while they still have room. They have typically over 5 ,000 people every year who attend this.

01:24:23

I will be manning an exhibitor's booth and I hope to see you there. I hope your exhibitor's booth is near mine. That's G3conference .com.

01:24:30

G3conference .com. Make sure you tell them that you heard about the G3 conference from Chris Arnzen on Iron Sharpens Iron radio.

01:24:36

Last but not least, if you love Iron Sharpens Iron radio, you don't want the show to disappear, please go to IronSharpensIronRadio .com,

01:24:43

click support, then click, click to donate now. You could donate instantly via debit or credit card.

01:24:49

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July is very scary financially. We don't even know how we're getting our rent paid and our electric bill paid for July.

01:25:01

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01:25:13

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01:26:11

I mentioned, then please, if you have a benevolent fund or extra money to use for benevolent purposes, please, please, if you love the show, donate to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio today.

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And please donate as heavily as you can. That's IronSharpensIronRadio .com, click support, then click, click to donate now.

01:26:29

If you are not a member of a local Bible -believing church, and you're not prayerfully looking for one, you're living in rebellion against God, if you need help in joining a

01:26:38

Bible -believing church near you, I have lists of biblically faithful churches all over the world. I've helped a number of people in my audience find churches near them, and even churches where they're going on vacation.

01:26:49

So please, send me an email to ChrisAronson at gmail .com, and put something like, I need a church home in the subject line.

01:26:57

Also, if you can advertise with us, we would love to help you launch an ad campaign on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, because we are in urgent need of your advertising dollars, as long as whatever it is that you want to promote is compatible with what

01:27:07

I believe. You don't have to believe identically with me, but you do need to be promoting something that is compatible with what

01:27:13

I believe. And please send in your email to ChrisAronson at gmail .com, and put advertising in the subject line.

01:27:20

And that's also the email address where you can send in a question to Mostyn Roberts on Roger Williams.

01:27:26

Our subject today, the specific title of his book is The Subversive Puritan, Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience, a publication of Evangelical Press.

01:27:35

That's The Subversive Puritan, Roger Williams and the Freedom of Conscience. Our email address is

01:27:40

ChrisAronson at gmail .com, ChrisAronson at gmail .com. Before our elongated station break in the middle of the show,

01:27:48

Pastor Mostyn, we were talking about how before we had

01:27:53

Thomas Jefferson promise Baptists here in America that there would be no establishment of a national religion, that they were to have freedom of conscience and their ability to worship and believe as they pleased.

01:28:13

This has become known as the separation of church and state, which ironically leftists in our day and age have flipped that on its head and made it the opposite of what it was intended to mean.

01:28:23

They believe that it means that the government can impose restrictions upon people of religious faith, which is the exact opposite of what it meant originally.

01:28:36

But you were saying how Roger Williams, in fact, I believe Roger Williams is the first one in recorded history that we know of who coined a phrase, the wall of separation, and he was speaking of the separation between church and state.

01:28:51

I don't know if I'm correct on that, but if you could continue from there. Yeah, you are. Thank you. Yeah, we were just,

01:28:56

I just finished off what I was saying about Williams and the debate with the Quakers. It's very interesting that because this is so,

01:29:03

I think it shows something quite clear about Williams. A recent academic,

01:29:14

Teresa Bijan, who wrote about Williams and compared him with John Locke and Thomas Hobbes about two or three years ago, says that his determination to tolerate the

01:29:25

Quakers in Rhode Island, despite his personal contempt for them, should be seen as a powerful illustration of what true toleration really looks like.

01:29:36

The willingness to coexist with those people and views one finds most contemptible.

01:29:43

Now, I'm not sure if contemptible is quite the right word for Williams' attitude to the Quakers. He certainly found some of their behavior, and certainly what he disliked most was their pride in claiming an inner light and downgrading the authority and the sufficiency of scripture, which

01:30:04

Williams never ever questioned. That was always his bedrock. But it's interesting,

01:30:10

I think that this question of true toleration, the willingness to coexist with those people and views one finds most contemptible,

01:30:17

I think that's one of the things we're finding is under threat in our society today is that this toleration is slipping away.

01:30:30

Toleration now and political correctness becomes the refusal to allow certain views you don't want to be heard in public.

01:30:40

It's becoming a kind of censorship. It's becoming a kind of opposite of true toleration, rather than a willingness to tolerate views that are very different from yours.

01:30:51

D. A. Carson wrote a book with a phenomenal title, The Intolerance of Tolerance.

01:30:56

That's right. I think that's right. But I think that Williams is somebody who actually lived and was prepared to live with people with whom he profoundly disagreed, but said, we are all

01:31:06

God's creatures. We've all got a right to the air of the world and the earth of the world.

01:31:13

We've got to somehow find a way of living together. This is one of the messages

01:31:19

I felt that we could recover from Williams, the kind of a basis of true toleration.

01:31:29

But going back to your question about the wall, he was certainly the first one that we know of,

01:31:37

I think, to use that phrase, wall of separation. And he uses it in a reply to John Cotton.

01:31:44

And I think he uses it in various places in different ways. But what he talks about, it was commonplace amongst

01:31:50

Puritans to talk about the church as a garden and the kind of song of songs, kind of imagery.

01:32:01

And Williams was talking about we need to protect the garden. And so he talked about a wall of separation between the church and the world.

01:32:10

And that's a slight difference, but an important difference. The church and the world is what Williams talked about.

01:32:15

The church was what it became 100 years later. But Williams was more concerned,

01:32:20

I think, of the spiritual malign influences of the world on the church.

01:32:28

He wanted to protect what he saw as the church of Christ. 100 years later, it became, in Jefferson's mind,

01:32:36

I think it'd be fair to say Jefferson was much more concerned about protecting the state from the church. Whereas Williams, he certainly wanted separation of church and state.

01:32:48

But it was more the state of the kind of instrument of worldly influences on the church, which he most feared.

01:32:59

And so he used that imagery to talk about the importance of separation. But it was no evidence.

01:33:07

As far as I've read, no one's ever found direct evidence that Jefferson was quoting Williams. But Isaac Bacchus, in the late 18th century, a

01:33:18

Baptist historian, was using some of Williams' writings, but he brought Williams back into respectable academic circles again, theologically.

01:33:28

And it's quite likely that Jefferson had come across that phrase, which had become current again in the latter decades of the 18th century, the time of the

01:33:39

Revolutionary War. But we haven't got proof that he was actually quoting Williams. We have a listener,

01:33:45

Mary in Cork, Ireland, who wants to know, was Roger Williams the planter of the first Baptist church in America?

01:33:55

And how long was he actually a Baptist? That's a lovely question.

01:34:01

Yes, Mary. He, with 20 others in 1636,

01:34:11

I believe, maybe just a bit later than that, he was the founder member of the

01:34:21

Baptist church, first Baptist church in America. And this was in Providence.

01:34:31

But he was a member of it, as far as we know, only for three months or so.

01:34:39

And he left. And after that point, and this is where one has to say one does not get one's ecclesiology from Williams, whatever else one feels about that.

01:34:51

He never was a member of a church again. He and now this is where it really gets quite complex.

01:35:02

I try to describe this way while we look, he developed sometime in the 1630s, early 40s, he developed some rather strange views from the book of Revelation that he seems to have got from some sectarians or some

01:35:19

Arminian Baptists, the general Baptist, about the fact that a true church had to be founded by apostles.

01:35:32

There were no apostles. Now the church was going through a period in the wilderness where there were no authorized apostles to find churches.

01:35:44

And so you couldn't have a real church. And so all you had was what he called prophets in sackcloth.

01:35:51

And he quotes from Revelation 10 and 11. Prophets in sackcloth, amongst whom he numbered himself and other preachers, and they would meet voluntarily.

01:36:05

But he would say that you could not find a true church, a truly founded biblical church, because only an apostle could find that church.

01:36:20

So we have a precursor to Harold Camping here. I don't know if you know him.

01:36:26

I don't know him. Harold Camping was a worldwide, globally known, reformed president of a radio network called

01:36:38

Family Radio. And he maintained an excellent radio network for years that was thoroughly reformed, although there were some non -reformed programs on there.

01:36:51

It was predominantly Calvinistic. He was from a Christian reformed church background.

01:36:58

But he began to spiral into bizarre teaching and ultimately into heresy.

01:37:06

And he came to a point where he declared that the church was the enemy of Jesus Christ and vice versa, and that if you were a member of any church, you were an enemy of Christ.

01:37:16

You had to just sit at home and listen to him on the radio, basically, in order to be right with God.

01:37:24

Yeah, it was interesting. Even people like Cotton Mather, who wrote the great works of Christ in America, and people like John Winthrop, there's no evidence anyone ever accused

01:37:35

Williams of heresy. They accused him of having strange ideas. And one mustn't forget that at this time in the 1630s and 40s, there were an awful lot of very bizarre and extremely excitable ideas, as we would say it now, derived by many

01:37:54

Puritans, even mainstream Puritans, about the Millennium and about the return of Christ.

01:37:59

A lot of them expected the kind of reign of the saints to culminate in the return of Christ in the late 17th century, and some of them even dated it.

01:38:09

So while he seems to us to be bizarre, I think in the context of his time, he was probably certainly at an extreme end of the spectrum.

01:38:20

But it was a spectrum. It wasn't completely off the radar. But he certainly had these views.

01:38:28

He did meet with believers for worship, but he would have said, these are voluntary groups of believers.

01:38:34

They're not a true church. He preached. He was known, he was commended for preaching with great acceptance in an arrogant country in Rhode Island.

01:38:42

And in fact, he sent us a collection of sermons to Boston to be published in his latter years.

01:38:50

But we have the titles of his sermons, but we don't have the sermons anymore. I don't think they were ever published. So yeah, he was one of these men who managed to keep, despite these strange ideas, within the bounds of orthodoxy.

01:39:04

And yet, certainly on his whole idea of church, and derived from a very distorted view of how to interpret the book of Revelation.

01:39:17

He wasn't alone in his strange interpretations of Revelation in the 17th century, certainly.

01:39:23

One thing I just wanted to quickly say before the folks at Family Radio get mad at me, they have publicly repented over their support of Harold Camping's heretical views.

01:39:33

Harold Camping had died a number of years ago. They continued his heresies for a bit, but they have renounced them now.

01:39:41

They have purged their airwaves of all remnants of Harold Camping.

01:39:47

And they are committed to biblical and confessional orthodoxy today. So I just wanted to make that clear.

01:39:53

I didn't leave the story hanging with Harold Camping's heresy. Did Roger Williams, even though he had that Looney Tunes idea of the church that you mentioned, did he remain, after becoming baptistic, did he remain a believer in what we call not credo -baptism,

01:40:19

I mean not pedo -baptism, but credo -baptism, a baptism that is only for repentant believers?

01:40:27

Yes, he did. And there's very interesting evidence of that just actually being published recently.

01:40:35

In 1680 -ish, the latter years of his life,

01:40:44

John Eliot, the great evangelist of the Indians, published a book in support of pedo -baptism.

01:40:55

And it was a book in response to an earlier book supporting credo -baptism.

01:41:00

So Williams wrote a little book, a brief reply to a short book by Mr.

01:41:10

Eliot. And so Williams, but in this little book,

01:41:17

Williams sets out all the classical arguments for credo -baptism, believer's baptism.

01:41:23

He wasn't a member of a Baptist church, he hadn't been for 40 years, but he wrote this book in support of credo -baptism and against pedo -baptism, even at that stage.

01:41:33

The funny thing is though, Chris, is this, that he wrote the book in shorthand on another of his books.

01:41:42

And it was lodged in a library in Rhode Island, the John Carter, I think, library.

01:41:48

And it was only in the last decade that the shorthand has been translated.

01:41:55

And it was discovered what this book actually was. And so they managed to decode the shorthand.

01:42:04

And it's been published in a book, which came out in 2014, called Decoding Roger Williams.

01:42:10

So in 2014, these scholars from Brown University have produced the latest work by Roger Williams, which is a very helpful introduction by the scholars who translated it.

01:42:24

But it's basically a book in defense of credo -baptism, with some also some interesting comments on the preaching and conversion of the

01:42:35

Native Americans, as Williams saw it. So it's interesting that he denied the existence of a church, but perpetuated a church ordinance, namely baptism.

01:42:49

He did. He came to some rather strange beliefs in what we would call apostolic succession.

01:42:56

It was not the Catholic version of it. But he just believed that the church was in, between Revelation 6, the white horsemen disappear.

01:43:10

They don't come back to Revelation 19. We are still in that period. We are prophets in sackcloth.

01:43:17

The death of the two witnesses, prophets in sackcloth, happens in Revelation 11.

01:43:22

We're not there yet. But then they will rise, and then new apostles come. For us, it sounds bizarre.

01:43:29

We are thankful to, you know, progressive parallelism and other ways of interpreting

01:43:35

Revelation. But for them, it was a kind of chronological historicist view, and they varied on where they saw themselves in the kind of history of the church.

01:43:46

Well, thank God for Sola Scriptura and not Sola Roger Williams.

01:43:52

Absolutely, yeah, yeah. We have to go to our final break right now. It's much briefer than the last one. If you intend to send in a question, and we do have a couple of people waiting, if you intend to send in a question, do it immediately to chrisarmson at gmail .com,

01:44:05

chrisarmson at gmail .com, and please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

01:44:12

USA. Don't go away. We will be right back after these messages from our sponsors. One sure way all

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01:53:30

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen and this is our last segment of today's show with our guest

01:53:36

Mostyn Roberts. We are discussing the subversive Puritan Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience and our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

01:53:45

We do have Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania who asks, do you think that the life of Roger Williams is an example to us all to not totally write off those that have profoundly impacted the church by preserving the gospel but at the same time have developed a bizarre concept of a certain portion of theology or on the other end of the spectrum those that elevate heroes to become idols where they imitate everything that person believed and taught?

01:54:23

Right, I think what I would say is I think where Roger Williams does help us,

01:54:29

I mean I think we've already spoken about the question of tolerating people with whose opinions you profoundly differ and that we won't even find offensive, but I think

01:54:40

Williams was an absolutely great believer in the

01:54:46

Word and the Spirit. He believed in the separation of church and state and he was subversive in that sense and this is why

01:54:52

I used that in the title because he was subversive of what even what about the Medieval and even the

01:54:58

Puritan view of Christendom had been. The church and state were basically inseparable and distinct but different parts of one great kind of you know body and soul of one great organism.

01:55:13

Williams wanted to separate that and he wanted to do it because for the sake of the church that there should be the

01:55:20

Word and the Spirit. He keeps in his best -known book,

01:55:26

The Bloody Tenet of Persecution, he keeps repeating this that the Word and the Spirit are the only weapons

01:55:32

God has given us and we must use these and yes he says you know there are wolves out there but even a wolf can become a sheep and of course he uses

01:55:42

Saul of Tarsus as an example of that. So I think yeah people who are profoundly wrong, even enemies, we're not going to convert them by force of law or by but we you know use the weapons that God has given the church and to rely on the state and to rely on the arm of legislature and judiciary is to suggest that the weapons

01:56:12

God has given to the church are not in some sense sufficient. So yeah there is hope for people who are different from us.

01:56:21

I was just going to say quickly that people who believe in reform theology above all should never have fallen into the trap of persecuting those who disagree with them because we know that men can never force men to become regenerate.

01:56:38

Absolutely no and this is the point that his argument on conscience is that God alone is lord of the conscience.

01:56:44

You can't force religion on people. But I think in England, one of the things

01:56:51

I feel that Williams does say to us in Britain and I mean in America the religious situation is very different.

01:56:59

You can do Christianity publicly whereas we in Britain can't. I'm sure you're aware of that.

01:57:06

We are much further down the road towards secularism. I don't know about much. I don't know about much.

01:57:13

One of the things that Williams does say to us is that you need to learn to be a

01:57:20

Christian without Christendom. You need to learn to be Christian without a Christian culture. And I think over the recent years

01:57:26

I've heard quite a lot of analyses of why it's got like this and there's a certain amount of lamenting where we are.

01:57:41

But what I think with Williams, you have a kind of a basic theological approach which doesn't need

01:57:51

Christendom, doesn't want Christendom, he saw that it wasn't just the

01:57:56

Native Americans who needed converted. He knew that a lot of the so -called Christians coming into New England needed conversion as well.

01:58:04

And so a lot of his work was actually saying we need to convert Christendom. And what

01:58:10

I would like to see is Christians developing an approach to the times in which we are, which is seeing the collapse of Christian culture, which is not just seeking to rebuild that culture or in a sense even seeking to spending all our energies in protecting it, but actually saying, well, you know, there is something else.

01:58:36

We're here to build the kingdom of God, not a Christian culture. They're not necessarily the same thing.

01:58:43

Right. And we are out of time. And I definitely want to have you back, Mostyn. And I just want to repeat the website of the church where you pastor, the

01:58:52

Welland Evangelical Church. That is Welland, W -E -L -W -Y -N -Evangelical .org

01:59:02

.uk. That's W -E -L -W -Y -N -Evangelical .org

01:59:09

.uk. And remember, you can get the book that we've been discussing, The Subversive Puritan, Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience, and any other evangelical press book at C -V -B -B -S -dot -com,

01:59:21

C -V -B -B -S -dot -com. That's Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service. If you could hang on, Mostyn, I would love to speak with you off the air before we say goodbye.

01:59:29

And I would want to thank again all of you who listened. I am sorry that we couldn't get all of the questions that were waiting read on the air.

01:59:36

But when we have Mostyn back, resubmit those questions. And I want you all to always remember for the