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Imagine if Michelangelo had been commissioned by the Pope to paint the Last Supper and then decided to express his own religious freedom. Actually, you don't have to imagine it because Monty Python has done the work for us. There are 28 disciples. Too many. Well, of course it's too many. Yeah, I know that, but I wanted to give the impression of a real Last Supper, you know, not just any old Last Supper. Not like a last meal or a final snack.
I wanted to give the impression of a real mother of a blowout. There were only 12 disciples at the Last Supper. Well, maybe some of the other ones came along after us. There were only 12 altogether. Well, maybe some of their friends came by, you know. Look, there were just 12 disciples and our Lord at the Last Supper. The Bible clearly says so. No friends? No friends. Waiters? No. Cabaret? No.
Now a last supper I commissioned from you and a last supper I want. With twelve disciples and one Christ. Please tell me what in God's name possessed you to paint this with... It works, mate. Works? Yeah! It looks great. The fat one balances the two skinny ones. There was only one Redeemer. I know that, we all know that. What about a bit of artistic license? Well, one Messiah is what I want. I'll tell you what you want, mate.
You want a bloody photographer, that's what you want. And that's the problem with religious types. No wiggle room. In fact, it's often said that it was the intolerance of Christians from the Apostle Paul to the Renaissance Popes that led to the Enlightenment's cry for freedom of religion and even freedom from religion.
Religion fosters bigotry and violence toward difference. Enlightened secular thought fosters peace and pluralism. The church demands conformity, the secular state encourages diversity. And few Enlightenment thinkers put it more forcefully than Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and an avowed critic of religious intolerance.
"Be it enacted by the General Assembly," he wrote in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, passed on the 16th of January 1786, "that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship."
nor shall he otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinion on matters of religion.
It's a wonderful statement, and it was the basis five years later of the US Constitution's First Amendment, which I hold in my little hands right here. It famously guaranteed freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to protest, and freedom of religion.
These things are now the common assumption of all Western democracies. A modern secular Aussie or Brit is just as well versed in the importance of freedom in matters of religion or irreligion as any citizen of the land of the brave and land of the free.
Less well known is where these ideas first came from. Today I'm going to introduce you to some very ancient Christian theologians whose ideas became much more famous than their names. And thanks to a recent discovery, we now know that even the very secular Jefferson knew full well the religious origins of religious freedom.
I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, The Problem of Jesus, by Mark Clark.
Every episode at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. In antiquity and in the cities of the Roman Empire, religion was an affair of the community as a whole, which meant that
any religious rites or ceremonies or practices were understood to be the responsibility of all the citizens. The whole idea that developed in early modern times that you would have religious communities who were independent of the religion of the city was quite foreign.
That's Professor Robert Lewis Wilkin. He's Professor Emeritus of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, a very good place to study the origins of religious freedom.
His many books include The First Thousand Years, which I loved, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, and The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. Most recently, he wrote Liberty in the Things of God, The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom. The evidence is clear, he says, whatever the multiple failings of Christians to tolerate difference through history. It'd be wrong to think that liberty in religious matters was a secular discovery.
The real story is much more complicated. He spoke to me from his home in Virginia. In the cities of the Roman world, especially in Asia Minor, many Jews had settled in the years, hundreds of years before the rise of Christianity. And because their way of life was so distinctive, they worked out an arrangement with the city officials that they could keep their own way of
and practiced what they believed and would not be disturbed, at least most of the time. But Christians were not given that privilege. I want to ask then, why did the Romans persecute the Christians? And in particular, I'm thinking of the great persecution at the dawn of the fourth century. So when a religious festival would come around...
and Christians would not participate, it was clear to their neighbors. And so they were offended. And some of the stories that we have, which are really accounts of the martyrs, the governor of the province or the chief official in the city said, why don't you keep our ways? We are religious people. Why do you have to follow your own way?
And they found that, of course, offensive. So it was a simple matter of not following, not respecting, not honoring the religious rights, which were part of everybody's experience. And they stood out. And we have fairly extensive what are called the Acts of the Martyrs. And these are, in many cases, firsthand accounts of
Why can't you follow our ways? If you want to live among us, why don't you follow what we do? Now, the Christians, of course, claimed that they were a people who were worshiping a God who was the God for all. So they were seeking converts. And so they were, in that sense, divisive.
They were not happy simply to be among their own tribe, as were the Jews. And so the very presence of Christianity was divisive within the towns and cities because they did not live separately. They lived right in the midst of everyone, went to the same grocers, went to the same meat markets, you know, they were to the same barber.
And you must remember that in the Mediterranean world, life was lived outside.
Christianity was an affront to Roman sensibilities. Throughout the empire, religion was an important civic activity and often functioned as a thing of the state. And so Christians' refusal to take part in pagan rituals, not to mention their claim that there was another lord of lords, came across as disloyal to the emperor and a threat to social cohesion.
Famous philosophers at the time, like Porphyry, 234-305, started to denounce Christians as cultural traitors. How can these people be thought worthy of our patience, he wrote. They have turned away from those things divine. To what sort of penalties might they not justly be subjected?
The argument was clear. The gods had protected Rome since the dawn of time. Anyone who abandoned the gods forfeited the right to imperial protection.
And so on the 23rd of February, AD 303, Emperor Diocletian issued the first of four decrees against the Christians, ordering the destruction or seizure of church properties, the burning of Christian scriptures, the sacking of all Christians in government and academia, and eventually the execution of anyone who wouldn't sacrifice to the traditional Greek and Roman gods.
Many Christians died in this eight-year period as emperors and co-emperors maintained the policy. And then something truly earth-shaking happened. Emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian. That story deserves a whole episode if I can convince director Mark and producer Kayleigh to do so. Feel free to write in your support of my idea.
Anyway, Constantine declared his allegiance to Jesus Christ and suddenly put an end to all persecution of the Christians. And of course, he did what any self-respecting emperor might do. He coerced everyone to follow his religion, just as previous emperors had done for the pagan gods. Actually, he did nothing of the sort.
Instead, he issued an edict. Well, really it was just a published letter. But it's called the Edict of Milan, and it's an extraordinary document in the history of ideas. It guarantees libertas in matters of religion.
Freedom and full liberty has been granted in accordance with the peace of our times, to exercise free choice in worshipping as each one has seen fit. This has been done by us so that nothing may seem to be taken away from anyone's honour or from any religion whatsoever. It was a letter...
But it came to me called an edict. And it didn't spring out of the blue. Several Christian writers, Tertullian, who lived around the beginning of the third century in North Africa, in Carthage, and then during the early fourth century, Lactantius, another writer, both had written treatises about
One case to another, to a Roman governor, and another case, a more general treatise, in which they had argued that religion was a matter of internal inner conviction, and therefore it couldn't be coerced. Religion can't be coerced. It can't be forced on anyone. Listen out for that phrase throughout the episode, because it's going to be really important.
Tertullian, the great 3rd century Christian theologian and public advocate for the faith, wrote these words in a letter to the Roman governor, Scapula. It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions. One man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion, to which free will and not force should lead us.
Tertullian's language of a right to free worship sounds very modern, but it is ancient and Christian. And then there's Lactantius, a Christian professor of rhetoric who lost his job in the Great Persecution. He's particularly important because we know he had direct contact with Constantine. In fact, Constantine immediately employed Lactantius to be a private family tutor.
Anyway, here's what Lactantius wrote. There is no need for violence and brutality. Worship cannot be forced. It is something to be achieved by talk rather than blows, so that there is free will in it. There is nothing that is so much a matter of willingness as religion. Now Lactantius, who lived at the time of Constantine, actually was the tutor to Constantine's son. So there's a kind of a direct link there.
And so what happened was Constantine realized that the persecutions had not worked and that something had to be done to change the political and social environment. And so he persuades his fellow emperor Licinius to write this letter, which is then sent out to various parts of the Roman world, in which he says that Constantine
religion should be not coerced. And he's not talking just about Christians. He says everyone should be free to practice the religion that they wish. And this then becomes the kind of principle that is going to be remembered, though not actually observed. That's the sad part. And so by the end of the fourth century and the...
reign of Emperor Theodosius, he proclaims that the religion of all people in the empire should be the religion of Christianity. And by that, he means, of course, the Nicene Creed. And he even mentions the Bishop of Rome as a kind of a marker of that.
It might be important to catch that timeline. For two generations after Constantine, there was an official Christian policy of toleration in matters of religion. That's roughly the time span from the Second World War to today. But it didn't last. What happened then in the course of two generations...
Well, the Christianity basically falls into the pattern which had existed before the rise of Christianity. But now it was not the Roman gods, but it was the Christian god. And that then extended right on through the Middle Ages. And the one exception would be the Jews. But even with the Jews, Christians did not observe what they said they should observe.
namely, they should be right to practice their own religion. Thinking of the inner resources of the Christian faith, where does this intolerance stream come from? Is it born of Christian doctrines, or is it, as perhaps you hinted a second ago, more a reversion to what was the ancient way of thinking of religion as a societal, as a civic good?
Well, I think it certainly is the latter, that religion was something that was to be observed by all people in the city. But of course, those people who did not practice the religion of the larger society and believed other things were, to use a theological term, were not Orthodox. They were heretics.
They believed things that were contrary to the scriptures and contrary to Christian doctrine. So there was a reason why they should be excluded or mistreated. And that comes up again and again and again and again, even though there are voices that defend the ancient principle. But it's both a societal matter and a theological matter.
You can't have people who deny the divinity of Christ. They're not the kind of people you want to have living in your community.
And that's exactly the response many forms of Christianity took in the coming centuries. Not all of them, and probably not as many as you think, actually. But there were enough Christian bullies through the centuries for me to know that Christians should never feel smug about this idea of religious freedom.
There is disturbing evidence of Christians persecuting Jews, executing pagans and torturing heretics. I've just written the biggest book of my life on the topic of the bullies and saints of Christian history. More about that some other time.
My point is that even though this notion of religious liberty was never wholly lost in the church, even in the so-called Dark Ages, there's another episode we need to do on the Dark Ages, it's nonetheless true that the church frequently reverted to the old imperial ways, where coercion in religion seemed perfectly sensible for the stability of the state and the cohesion of society.
I'd like to race forward to the time of the Reformation, where it was proposed that there were two kingdoms, two realms, a religious and a secular. What is the significance of that idea, and did it work? Well, it's working now. It has been working for centuries.
One of the most, you know, when you write a book like this, part of the satisfaction is just turning up unexpected writings and text opinions. And in my case, because I was basically had spent my life working in the early church and to a certain extent in medieval church.
The Reformation in the modern period was really pretty fresh territory. And of all the things that I turned up, there was one. This was in France around 1560. And I remember that the Reformation came to France, 1540, 1550, largely through Calvinists, not Lutherans, Calvinists.
Just a note in case you're not familiar with the Friendly Calvinists. They were the followers of John Calvin, one of the leaders of the Reformation movement that challenged the orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church. The Reformers' call for a return to the Bible and protest against Catholic teachings is what led to them being called Protestants. Calvin was, of course, a Frenchman, spoke French, wrote in French, and
And around 1560, a Frenchman wrote to a friend of his and he said, could you believe when we were younger that there could be two religions practiced in one city and even in the capital of France, Paris? I think that says everything.
The assumption up until the mid to late 16th century and the 17th century was that every community practiced one religion. And so that's why religious differences, conflict, were so destructive for the well-being of society. Everyone thought that you couldn't really have a safe religion
and peaceful society if people didn't hold the same religion. And that's really what the Reformation led to. And I mean, when you think about it, I mean, most people don't think about it. It would be very nice, wouldn't it? If all your neighbors went to the same church that you did, I think that'd be very nice.
I'm sure a lot of people think that's heretical to say that. But when you realize the division in our country or your country, where everything is divided up, you sometimes yearn for those days. But in any case, they're long gone. And that's why religious freedom is so necessary, because there are always going to be some who are in power.
who are not pleased with the dissenters. Because religion is not a matter of doctrine. You know, it's a matter of education. That's where a lot of the issues are fought out today. What are you going to teach kids in the schools? Well, the Netherlands was a good, I have a chapter on the Netherlands. And what I learned there, of course, is that if the Catholics were in power in a certain city,
They would then persecute the Calvinists and vice versa. What happened eventually was that the country was divided and the southern part, which became Belgium, which became Catholic, and the northern part became reformed. The Netherlands are very, very interesting, very significant. The history of religious freedom looks pretty dismal at this point.
Whole countries are being divided up on the basis of different versions of the same faith. Not much tolerance there. So how is religious tolerance and freedom reborn in the modern world? Well, as with so many things, a story like this is mixed. There are modern secular champions and there are religious ones, but they all stand on the shoulders of giants.
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into a financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.
More of that after the break. Music
Prime Minister Scott Morrison's divisive religious freedom laws have hit a snag, with One Nation declaring they have serious concerns about the unintended consequences of any change.
People do have a right to be bigots, you know. In a free country people do have rights to say things that other people find offensive or insulting or bigoted. We haven't got clearly defined boundaries anymore when it comes to religious discrimination like we do with sexual discrimination, like we have with age discrimination, like we have with disability and that is why we need a Religious Discrimination Act in Australia.
Religious freedom has been a hot topic in my home country in recent times, for many countries in fact.
This most recent public struggle began with the international movement to legalise same-sex marriage. I know that seems like old news now, but the implications for our topic are still with us. The marriage debate became a freedom of religion debate, as some groups tried to stake out their own claim to a protected viewpoint, the old traditional viewpoint, and others insisted that on a matter of justice like this, there should be no freedom to be a bigot.
Could a Christian cake shop owner refuse to make a gay wedding cake? Could a Christian church refuse to rent their premises to a transgender dance group? Could a Christian preacher even preach the old view without stepping over into hate speech? Believers and doubters are suddenly interested again in the nature and limits of religious liberty. That's where a little more recent history helps.
Can we talk about an Englishman who became an important American named Roger Williams? Why is he significant to this story, particularly the American story of religious liberty, liberty of conscience? Well, Roger Williams lived, flourished in the early part of the 17th century, just at the time when the Anabaptists, which then became the Baptists,
were beginning to gain strength. They began to form their own communities, which meant that they engaged their own clergy. So they created social units that were independent of the larger unit of the city. So when he comes to North America and the Boston area, he's a very disruptive figure.
Roger Williams arrived in Boston, Massachusetts as a Puritan, but also pretty quickly found himself at odds with the powerful colony leaders, who were also Puritans. Eventually, Williams' anti-establishment preaching got him ousted, and he established his own settlement, which he called Providence. It's now the capital of the state of Rhode Island. It's a beautiful place, actually.
Providence became, in his time, a bit of a haven for other religious misfits. He can't abide by the restrictions, which really meant that there was one religion in Boston, a form of reform religion, but nevertheless one. So he's constantly pushing against that. And the man that he engaged with, John Cotton, who was kind of the premier of
religious and in some ways political figure in the community. And he then begins to write against him. But what's interesting about Roger Williams
It's not only what he wrote. He wrote this one book that's been very famous, deals with these issues. But he gets into a debate with Cotton about the passage from Tertullian that had been written early in the 3rd century, but had then begun to be cited in the 16th and 17th century. This is Tertullian.
and a privilege inherent in human nature that every person should be able to worship according to his own convictions. For one person's religion neither harms nor hurts another. Coercion has no place in religious devotion. And Cotton took that passage from Tertullian to mean that there would be no public expression of religious differences.
Only private. And Williams said, it can't mean that. And of course, he was right. It can't mean that. So he developed his arguments. And because he was a very flamboyant personality, he founded a community in Rhode Island. So Roger Williams and his ideas were censured by the English parliament.
because there you had an established religion. But he's probably the most, not the most original, he's the most influential of the
the early writers. But there was another writer... Hey, just to navigate us on the timescale here, Roger Williams is active from the 1650s, decades before John Locke, the father of liberalism, and more than a century before the great Thomas Jefferson. There's another clergyman, even earlier than Roger Williams, who advocated very similar views about liberty in matters of conscience.
But there was another writer just at the same time named Thomas Helwes, who nobody knows anything about. He wrote a book called The Mystery of Iniquity. And Helwes, following the basic principles that religion is a matter of individual choice and conscience, took the step and said he hated the Catholics. He said they should be allowed freedom too. But then he went on to say even the Jews and Muslims hated
This is early 17th century. So you've got to give a lot of credit to these Baptists, these Anabaptists. I don't think that they are the ones whose ideas were the basis, but they knew how to make them work. And they did. Helwes and Williams are hardly talked about today.
They certainly rarely get the credit for the modern emergence of freedom in matters of religion. The biggest name, of course, was from a century or more after these theologians, and it's his more secular rendition of religious liberty, codified in the First Amendment of the American Constitution, that most of us recall.
Thomas Jefferson was a founding father of the United States and its third president from 1801 to 1809. He's also a character in a certain musical showing in Sydney at the moment. PHONE RINGS
Hey, darling. What was the Hamilton song you said that we should play in the pod? Because I somehow lost it from my script. What did I miss? What did I miss? Okay, thanks, darling. See you later. Bye. Yeah, that's all. Bye. So what did I miss? Virginia, my home sweet home, I want to give you a kiss. Josie and I saw that musical and I might have cried.
I might have, or got something in my eye. But Josie cried. Josie definitely cried.
Anyway, Jefferson possessed a giant intellect and authored many sort of political, philosophical documents, including the original draft of the Declaration of Independence and the American Bill of Rights. But it was his work on the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom that he thought was among his greatest achievements, for which he, quote, most wished to be remembered. So we're paying him honour today.
In this work, he laid out his grounds for religious freedom based on the freedom of the human mind. More about that in a moment. Jefferson was not particularly religious, and he certainly wasn't a Christian. He famously created his own Bible, Google the Jefferson Bible, which excluded all the miracles and just kept the moral teachings of Jesus.
That didn't stop him, though, from thinking and engaging deeply with the issue of religious freedom in the state of Virginia. He described it as the most severe contest in which he'd ever been involved. And today, there are many other good secular minds that are passionate about this issue. Time to make another call.
Hi, Tim. Thanks so much for taking this call. I was a bit late. I got distracted. Not at all. That's Tim Wilson, an Australian politician and member of the Liberal Party. For overseas listeners, that's the more conservative party.
He served as Australia's Human Rights Commissioner from 2014 to 2016. And while he's not a religious man himself, he's been a pretty vocal advocate for religious freedom in this country. Is it only religious people who advocate for freedom of religion?
No, people advocate for freedom of religion because they believe both in people's rights to believe in different things and, of course, being atheist is itself its own form of exercising your freedom of religion. And also because if you want to live in a society that's tolerant and diverse, you have to respect people's different beliefs.
backgrounds and ways they see the world. So it's really about defending the rights of everybody. One newspaper article in an outlet that I won't name had an article about this topic. It was titled Freedom to be a Bigot. That's how a lot of people think of this debate about freedom of religion. What would you say in response to that, that it is just religious people wanting to be bigoted?
I don't agree with that. It's about people of diverse communities having the freedom to come together and act collectively, not just individually. So this is not uncommon. I mean, there are lots of organisations that get together to do good works, social and charitable works.
but they might be people united by a cause outside of religion. And that's why anchoring these ideas back to universal principles that affect everybody is the best way to ensure their integrity and their respect across the community. When it comes to
Attitudes of some faith towards other minorities or sections of the community. I mean, people are within their rights to have difficult and unpleasant views. You never need to defend freedom of speech from the excessive use of please and thank you. It's always when people cross the lines of social acceptability and they have different attitudes towards things differently.
like morality. And in a free society, that's a necessary precondition because people's attitudes, whether inclusive or exclusive of others, needn't be anchored in religion. They can be anchored in lots of different principles. And ultimately, if you want a society to progress, it has to be able to hold a window up to itself, to challenge itself, to confront difficult realities, and sometimes to recognize the limits of tolerance as well. Tim Wilson, thank you so much for taking the call.
Pleasure. You take care. And you. From your perspective, is it really a secularist enlightenment development that insisted on liberty? In other words, does one need this secular tradition in order to sustain a notion of religious liberty? Or does religion have its own resources? About the time that the book was published,
a very distinguished political commentator, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he said precisely what Judas said, that it was because of the religious wars that religious toleration was necessary. And so it came in because of these people who were more reasonable than the Christians.
But I think that's false. I think that the ideas that you find in the Enlightenment thinkers and the one, of course, who's most important is John Locke. And it's in his essay on toleration and religion or his letter on toleration and religion. I mentioned John Locke a moment ago. He was an English philosopher and one of the leading voices of the Enlightenment.
He lived in the aftermath of the European Wars of Religion that ravaged the continent for decades. They weren't really wars of religion, but maybe that's another episode.
Anyway, Locke wrote what's become a classic three-part reasoning for religious tolerance. First, it has to be accepted that human beings can't generally evaluate the truth claims of competing religions. Second, even if they could, enforcing a single true religion would fail because belief can't be compelled by force. And third, attempts to coerce religious uniformity rather than permitting diversity would lead to more social disorder.
And Locke says two things. I would say almost it comes straight out of Roger Williams or other writers. One, religion is a matter of private conviction, and therefore you can't coerce it. And that there are two realms that have different ends, the realm of politics, of society at large, and the realm of religion.
And it's not possible to explain how Locke said that without going back to the earlier Christian sources. There simply is no basis to claim anything else. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.
It's obvious to anyone who reads the Gospels that Jesus only ever sought to persuade people. He never coerced, and he certainly never advocated violence on behalf of the truth.
More than that, he demanded a policy of loving enemies, accepting persecution cheerfully and even praying for those who violently disagree. Consider these few statements, Luke 6, But to you who are listening, I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.
Or Matthew 11, blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad. More than that, Jesus seems to have publicly implied a kind of separation between the realm of the state and the realm of Christian practice.
He was once asked whether it's right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar. This was a hot topic for Jews in the period. Should we pay our invaders a tax? And Jesus says, well, bring me a coin. They bring him a denarius.
And then he holds it up or someone holds it up in front of him. And he says, whose image is on this coin? And they say, Caesar, meaning Caesar Tiberius, the son of Augustus. And then Jesus makes this famous statement. Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.
Now, I don't want to overplay this and suggest that Jesus had a full-blown doctrine of religious liberty and the separation of church and state. It was much later Christians who developed those ideas. Tertullian, Lactantius, Pierre Bayle, Roger Williams, and so on. But certainly the seeds of this thought are planted right here in this passage. It's in Mark 12, if you want to look it up. Jesus felt it was right to pay honor to the
the state as a separate field of moral obligation from one's devotion to God. In his first century context, one current view was that everything belonged to the state, that is, to Caesar. And so cooperation with state taxes and other state honors was absolutely mandatory. The other common view was that of the revolutionaries.
The revolutionaries in Jesus' day believed that God's kingdom ruled over all earthly kingdoms, and so we should stop paying taxes to Caesar and establish a theocracy for God's glory. Jesus deftly avoids both political extremes.
He makes clear on the one hand that it's right and good to acknowledge the reign of Caesar, the state, even when that state is not just secular but pagan in the case of the Roman state. At the same time, a Christian bears an obligation to God above all. Jesus says, give to God what is God's. These two obligations can and should coexist according to Jesus.
But where they clash, obviously the Christian will of course obey God first and cheerfully accept the punishment and ridicule that goes with being out of step with the state authorities. So Jesus didn't envisage complete acquiescence to the secular state.
But nor did he envisage a kind of theocracy where our devotion to God permits us to force others by state power to join in our devotion. So it is almost unthinkable that Christians in the centuries that followed him could imagine that Jesus' lordship meant that you could force people to convert at the point of a sword.
And that is what happened in, say, the 8th century, when Charles the Great, Charlemagne, the ruler of Europe, attempted to force the Saxons, the original Germans, to convert to Christianity. He waged what one scholar famously called a Christian jihad. Charlemagne's policy was effectively baptism or the sword.
But that isn't to say they weren't devout Christians at the very time urging Charlemagne to do the right thing and adopt the much older, the original Christian policy of gentle persuasion rather than coercion. One of Charlemagne's key advisors was a man called Alcuin of York, and he insisted, quote, a person can be drawn to the faith, but they cannot be forced into the faith.
They need to be fed on gentler teaching as babes on milk. And astonishingly, the year after Alcuin wrote this letter, the year 797, Charlemagne actually changed his brutal policy toward pagans in his realm.
There were, of course, other church rulers who departed from the way of Christ and adopted Christian jihad. But as with so much of Christian history, there were always reformers who called the church back to its original policies. Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. Love your enemy. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who mistreat you.
Boy, oh boy, do we need all that today. You can press play now. So I want to talk briefly about Thomas Jefferson, who was a famous secular champion for religious liberty and went into debates about it in the Virginia State House and so on. What about his influences? Were his influences wholly secular?
Or was he in any way influenced by these Baptists that you're talking about or the Christian tradition? Well, my reading of Jefferson is that he is sharing in, drawing on the same tradition that influenced Locke and Fourneau, who wrote a couple of generations, who was actually a contemporary of Jefferson.
And the way he puts things make it very clear that he's thinking along the same lines. So when it comes to religious freedoms, we have to keep in mind that there's a difference between toleration and religious freedom. The way it came to be understood by the Christian writers was that it was a right. It was a privilege. Toleration is a means of accommodation
of people you don't like but who are right in the midst of you. So there's not an in principle argument for that. You can make space for them and then, you know, generation passes and, of course, then you find them very offensive, troubling. But Jefferson has an in principle argument that it really is a right. I want you, please, to tell my listeners the delightful story
told in the appendix of your book of what you found when you personally inspected Jefferson's private collection a few years ago. Right. Well, this of course was the kind of thing that you spend your life not hoping for, but when it happens. I knew that Jefferson wrote a book called Notes on the State of Virginia.
And that was written before he was president, probably in the 1770s, 1780s. And he has a chapter on religion in that book, a small little book. And he talks about how in colonial Virginia, that Anglicanism was the established religion.
And so there was no space for other religious groups, in this case would have meant primarily the Baptists. And in that chapter in which he talks about religious freedom, he makes the statement that one person's religion cannot harm another. If you pick my pocket, that will hurt me. If you hit me or some other way.
But if I practice one religion, you practice another religion, that's not going to harm me in any way. And that's what Jefferson writes. Well, it turns out that that's precisely what Tertullian said. Tertullian said, one person's religion neither harms nor hurts another. Well, it's very unlikely when Jefferson wrote the book
notes on the state of Virginia that he knew about this Tertullian passage. I'm sure if he had, he would have included it. But his language is very similar. In fact, I wrote a number of the top Jefferson scholars and asked them, where did Jefferson learn about that passage? And none of them knew. And none of them were really very interested either, I discovered. So anyway,
Jefferson, apparently, after writing the book, had learned about this passage from Tertullian. How? Maybe from some Baptist preacher. And several decades after he published the book, he saw that there were some books of Tertullian that were being sold by a former professor in Richmond. And one of them had several writings of Tertullian.
So he wrote and he bought the books. And one of them had the treatise to Skopel, which is where the passage occurred. Skopel was the local governor. And he gets the book. And that's apparently how he was in. I actually went to the University of Virginia Rare Book Library and saw the place where he copied out in his own hand the passage. But I was still puzzled, you know, how he knew about it.
I went to the Library of Congress and sure enough, I knew they had some of Jefferson's volumes of Tertullian and spoke to the librarian and called up the book. So he brings it up, it was a small leather bound book, 17th century in Latin, two treatises of Tertullian, one to Schoppler. And I turned the pages and I'll be darned if when I turned to the passage in chapter two, Jefferson had underlined it.
and put a big X in the margin. I mean, it's the kind of thing you spend your life looking for. So I had, you know, something very, very delicious. But I wanted to be very scrupulous. I could not establish that he knew that passage before he wrote what he said on religious freedom.
But it indicates that there was a set of ideas there. And then when he saw them, he said, I can use this. So he writes it at the bottom of the page where he says, you can't force a person to believe something. And out in Latin, it says, ad scopulum, ad.
And so that was, for me, a thrilling moment. So my point is, Jefferson, I think, is working with ideas that go back deep into our Western Christian history.
Not only did Jefferson underline and place an X in his private copy of Tertullian, in his own copy of his notes on the debate about religion, he scribbled out in his own hand, in this published work, the Latin, because Jefferson knew Latin, the Latin of Tertullian. And I'm going to ask you, if you wouldn't mind,
to read out in Latin those scribbled words which Jefferson got from Tertullian. I'd love to. Taman humani juris et naturalis potestatis, est unicuique quod putavarit colore, nec alii obest alt protest alterius religio.
sed nec religionis es codure religionem, quae sponte sushipi debiat, non vi cum ad hostiae ab animo libenti ex postulentur. It is only just and a privilege inherent in human nature that every person should be able to worship according to his own convictions. For one person's religion neither harms nor hurts another.
Coercion has no place in religious devotion for it is by free choice, not coercion, that we should be led to religion. Offering a sacrifice must spring from a willing mind. It cannot be forced.
I love it. After almost 250 years, we now know that the father of the American tradition of religious liberty and the separation of church and state knew full well that his ideas, while sounding secular, were first articulated by Christian theologians many centuries earlier. What a delightful symbol of the secular inheritance...
From a deep and ancient Christian tradition. I think so. Thanks for joining us for another Undeception. If you like what you hear and you want to get more of it, please consider supporting the Undeceptions Project. Researching, writing and speaking to let the truth about Christianity happen.
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