Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 01:2 (Fall 2019)
Article: "Liberty In The Things Of God"
Author: David Closson

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Eikon 1:2 (Fall 2019) p. 125

Liberty In The Things Of God

Reviewed by

David Closson

David Closson serves as the Director of Christian Ethics and Biblical Worldview at the Family Research Council in Washington D.C. He is also a Ph.D. student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

A widely-held paradigm in Western intellectual history is that religious freedom originated with enlightened intellectuals during the seventeenth century. By this telling, philosophers fatigued by Europe’s never-ending wars of religion introduced new concepts about toleration and religious freedom which helped usher in the modern age. It was only as institutional religion weakened and religious beliefs diversified that the state saw liberty of conscience as a right worth protecting. Christian theology is usually seen as an unhelpful impediment to the emergence of today’s liberal consensus on religious freedom, if it is considered at all.

Robert Louis Wilken’s latest book, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom, challenges this dominant narrative. Wilken argues that the concept of religious freedom originated with Christian thinkers in the first centuries of the church. Rather than impede the development of religious freedom, Christianity served as its impetus.

To support his thesis, Wilken briefly surveys centuries of Christian reflection on religious freedom, beginning with Tertullian, the first person to use the phrase “freedom of religion.” In chapter one, Wilken identifies two important themes in Tertullian’s thinking. First, Tertullian believed that religion arises from inner conviction and thus consists of more than outward gestures and rituals. Whereas the Romans saw practice and outward conformity as the most important aspect of religion, Tertullian argued that belief — what Christians held in their heart — was what mattered.

Eikon 1:2 (Fall 2019) p. 126

Moreover, because religious belief is inherently spiritual, it cannot be coerced. Second, Tertullian argued that religious freedom applied to the beliefs of communities, not just individuals. Wilken notes that Tertullian offered theological arguments for religious freedom rooted in a biblical understanding of the human person and the Imago Dei.

After attending to Tertullian, Wilken quickly summarizes subsequent developments in thought concerning religious freedom, moving toward an analysis of the changes brought on by the Reformation. In chapter two, he briefly discusses how ideas that had been first set forth in defense of persecuted Christians were reformulated and reinterpreted for Christians who began oppressing others. Wilken notes that some of Tertullian’s i...

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