Roger Williams, Prophet and Pioneer of Soul-Liberty

by Arthur Barsazou Strickland

Great was the consternation in Salem when news reached there of the baptism of Williams and others who had been members of their church. The Puritan church took action at once. The letter announcing to the church at Dorchester the exclusion of the offenders is interesting:

Reverend and dearly beloved in the Lord:

We thought it our bounden duty to acquaint you with the names of such persons, as have had the great censure passed upon them, in this our church, with the reasons thereof, beseeching you in the Lord, not only to read their names in public to yours, but also to give us the like notice of any dealt with in like manner by you, so that we may walk toward them accordingly, for some of us here have had communion ignorantly with some of other churches. 2 Thess. 3:14. We can do no less than have such noted as disobey the truth.

Roger Williams and his wife, John Throckmorton and his wife, Thomas Olney and his wife, Stukely Westcott and his wife, Mary Holliman, Widow Reeves.

These wholly refused to hear the church, denying it, and all the churches in the Bay, to be true churches, and (except two) are all rebaptized.

After some time Roger Williams left the Baptist church he had organized in Providence. Because of this fact many have asked the question, “Was Roger Williams after all a Baptist?” His life-story reveals the fact that he held the Baptist views before he left Plymouth. Elder Brewster detected the Baptist heresy in his teaching to the people of the Pilgrim colony and warned the leaders of the Bay Colony of this tendency to “Anabaptistery.” Williams’ ministry in the Bay Colony reveals the fact that he was against everything which was related to the Episcopacy or that might even lead to a “presbytery.” He refused to minister to the Boston church because it was related to the Episcopal State Church of England. He also questioned the propriety of the ministers’ conference in New England, for fear they might establish a presbytery which would rob the local church of its congregational privileges. His whole life in America was universally true to the accepted Baptist position relative to church polity.

At the time of Williams’ baptism, English Baptists were agitated in regard to the proper administrators of Christian baptism. Many crossed to the Continent and were baptized by ministers in Holland. Williams was soon troubled also in regard to the same question. Was he properly baptized? That was the question which confronted him. He would not juggle with his conscience. He knew of no Baptist minister or baptized believer ordained to the ministry in America when he was baptized. His own baptism was by an unbaptized person. He made diligent study of the question and could not satisfy his mind that there was a real succession of proper administrators. In the awful decline of the church he was convinced that the sacred succession had been broken. He believed that either that succession must be in existence, or God must raise up a new “apostolate,” to commence again the sacred succession. True to principle, he felt he must withdraw from the church at Providence. In the years which followed nothing which he said or did ever changed the facts that he was the first recognized pastor of the first Baptist church that was organized in America, that he was the first known case in America of a believer being immersed upon profession of faith into the fellowship of a local Baptist church, and that he was the organizer of the first Baptist church in America.

In the years which followed his separation from the church at Providence, he left no uncertainty as to his Baptist views on every question save that of the proper administrator of baptism and its kindred subject of ordination. In all other views he was a loyal Baptist until his death. In his day, the Baptists were divided into two recognized divisions, namely, Particular and General Baptists. Dr. Henry M. King, of Providence, one of the successors of Roger Williams in the pastorate of the Providence church, describes Roger Williams as a “High-church Baptist.”

The late Reuben A. Guild, for many years librarian of Brown University Library, and a thorough student of the original sources of information, writes thus of Roger Williams in his history of Brown University:

In regard to the other great doctrines held by the Baptists, liberty of conscience, or soul-liberty, the entire separation of Church and State, the supreme headship of Christ in all spiritual matters, regeneration through the agency of the Holy Spirit, and a hearty belief in the Bible as God’s divinely inspired and miraculously preserved word and the all-sufficient rule for faith and practice, he was throughout life a sincere believer in them all and an earnest advocate of them, as his letters and published works abundantly show.