Reviewed by Evan Haefeli | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 631 words from this article are provided below; about 546 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Evan Haefeli | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Evan Haefeli, Columbia University

The Challenges of Roger Williams: Religious Liberty, Violent Persecution, and the Bible. By James P. Byrd Jr. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002. 286 pages. $40.00 (cloth).
Exactly what religious freedom meant to Roger Williams has been a topic of debate for generations of scholars from Vernon Louis Parrington to Perry Miller to Edmund Morgan. Was he ahead of his time? Behind? What set him apart from so many of his erstwhile friends and allies in Massachusetts? Through a detailed examination of Williams's interpretation of key biblical passages, James P. Byrd Jr. offers an authoritative statement on how Williams understood religious liberty.	1
As Byrd points out, the Bible was the definitive source of New England's religious beliefs. How colonists used it, therefore, deserves close scrutiny. Some historians have been quick to applaud Williams's stand for religious freedom without paying enough attention to the fact that, for Williams, liberty of conscience was not a liberal ideal but a biblical necessity. Even those who acknowledge the centrality of biblical exegesis to Williams's life have not closely studied how he read the scriptures. Instead they often give the impression that the major difference between Williams and his Massachusetts oppressors was one of style, not substance. Williams, they point out, favored a typological approach to biblical interpretation that was at odds with orthodox methods. Yet for Byrd this view continues to miss the point.	2
In New England religious disputes ultimately turned on the words of the Bible. One of the great values of Byrd's work is his seventy-page appendix, which is a reference guide to the biblical citations in Williams's published works. Now scholars know which book spoke most to Williams (Revelation) and which genre he found most compelling (the Pauline epistles). Readers learn a little about how these facts compare with the biblical tastes of his contemporaries, for a collateral benefit of Byrd's approach is to reveal some of the scriptural reasoning of Williams's foes. Most of all, this compendium allows Byrd to find some recurring themes in Williams's deployment of Scripture in the cause of religious freedom.	3
The Challenges of Roger Williams is primarily a detailed examination of where and how Williams read the Bible differently from his opponents on the matter of church-state relations. At the center of the argument between Williams and those who advocated state enforcement of religious conformity (also known as persecution), Byrd has identified four different parts of the Bible. First are the Old Testament tales of relations between the Israelites and various monarchs (Jewish and pagan). Then there is the "parable of the weeds" (88), in which Jesus described the analogous coexistence of wheat purposely sown with weeds and good living alongside evil until the time of the harvest/Apocalypse. Third are Paul's writings on the proper relationship between true believers and their civil magistrates. Finally, Byrd discusses several passages from the Book of Revelation, from Jesus's admonitions to churches in Asia to the story of the whore of Babylon and the beast. For the benefit of readers less familiar with the Bible than he, Byrd addresses each of these stories in a separate chapter, quoting the passages in question and then discussing how Williams and others have glossed them to support their differing positions on the divinely sanctioned relationship between church and state.	4
Byrd renders accessible the theology animating Williams's life and letters. Each chapter shows Williams engaged in overt scriptural disagreement with various Protestant religious authorities, usually John Cotton but also John Calvin, John Winthrop, various Separatists, and Anabaptists. Depending on the text at hand, Williams managed to agree with all of them some of the time, but none of them all of the time.	. . .

There are about 546 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.