Individual Soul Liberty
“In case you hadn’t noticed, it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what you are talking about,” bemoans the modern poet Taylor Mali. His performance of his poem entitled, “Totally Like Whatever, You Know?” is worth the search on YouTube.1 Taylor Mali is by no means a Christian—in fact, he is a committed secular humanist—but if you watch his performance, I am sure that you will find yourself in ready agreement with much of what he says. Mali is picking up on our society’s total commitment to determined and dogmatic relativism. In fact, he accuses the generation of being “aggressively inarticulate.”
The approach that Mali critiques comes packaged in terms such as “openness,” “multiculturalism,” and “tolerance.” As Christians we tend to see the obvious contradictions in these approaches. Common sense teaches that the statement “there are absolutely no absolutes” is self-defeating, yet this mood has effectively become the common sense of our society. This has so affected us that writing an article calling Christians to tolerance is likely to be immediately perceived as a call to accept unbiblical and morally bankrupt practices as “okay.”
Society has managed to make clear divisions in its perception of truth. For instance, there are few people who think that gravity is true for some and not true for others, and yet these same people are willing to accept competing truth claims in the realm of values and religion. Tolerance has come to mean a disavowal of truth claims and an acceptance of moral relativism. Let me state clearly—this has never been the true meaning of tolerance. Tolerance used to mean that real differences were allowed to coexist and to be vigorously debated. I’d wager that if you met Taylor Mali and engaged him with the claims of Christianity, you’d get a real conversation—a good debate. The new “tolerance” has insulated our world from those real engagements with the truth claims of the Bible. When you engage someone who buys into the new “tolerance,” the conversation can be very amenable, but it will inevitably end with something like this: “What’s true for you is true for you, and I am glad that it works for you, but it’s not for me.”
Our Baptist heritage has a rich tradition of the right approach to tolerance; in fact it is one of our distinctives— individual soul liberty. Roger Williams, the founder of the Rhode Island colony and an early American Baptist, captured this well in his tractate “A Plea for Religious Liberty.” In this pamphlet Williams defines the doctrine for us:
It is the will and command of God that (since the coming of his Son the Lord Jesus) a permission of the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men in all nations and countries; and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the sword of God’s Spirit, the Word of God.2
Roger Williams was committed to what others of his time were not: a confidence in the Word of God and the Spirit of God to convert the sinner. He understood that men were only truly changed by the regeneration of their hearts and that you could not form a civil society that would alone bring people to a right standing before God. This was the approach that both Protestants and Catholics had taken. In Europe the church and state were inextricably linked, but here in the New World, Williams would distinguish himself from the Protestant denominations and the Puritans because he understood that he was not establishing a kingdom but rather a place where one could have a different faith without the fear of losing life or limb. Williams also understood that this kind of society would be the best for true gospel promulgation. He wrote,
It is as necessary, yea more honorable, godly, and Christian, to fight the fight of faith, with religious and spiritual artillery, and to contend earnestly for the faith of Jesus, once delivered to the saints against all opposers, and the gates of earth and hell, men or devils, yea against Paul himself, or an angel from heaven, if he bring any other faith or doctrine.3
As is evident, Williams was not by any means backing off the claims of Christianity; rather, he was expressing his confidence in those claims to accomplish their divinely designed work.
As Baptists in twenty-first-century America, no lesson could be more relevant. The truth is, and has ever been, that political action and social engagement will never provide the final answer to societies’ needs. We must be about the task of gospel engagement. True Christian tolerance is a commitment to God’s Word and Spirit alone to overcome the vain philosophies of this world. The application of true tolerance is not just that I live next to my neighbors peaceably but that I engage them with the truth.
Nathan Mestler, BA, MDiv, ThM (cand.), was, at the time of first publication, professor of Theology and Bible Languages at International Baptist College and Seminary. Nathan is now the president of IBCS.
(Originally published in FrontLine • March/April 2014. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)