Theological Foundations of Religious Liberty

by James E. Wood, Jr.

I

The emergence of religious liberty as a valid principle, as one of those axiomatic commitments that is almost universally recognized, is surely one of the major achievements of our time. In spite of the fact that there is overwhelming evidence to indicate that religious liberty is far from being a reality in much of today’s world, perhaps nowhere fully realized, religious liberty has become a normative principle for almost all nations and, conversely, the denial of religious liberty is virtually everywhere viewed as morally and legally invalid. Consequently, guarantees of religious liberty presently appear in most national constitutions throughout the world, including those governments committed to atheism or irreligion. While religious liberty can hardly be said to be descriptive of conditions as they are in many countries throughout the world today, there is profound significance to be found in that the concept of religious liberty has come almost universally to have normative value.

Despite this universal commitment to religious liberty, there is no universal consensus as to its basis, either between religion and secularism or among the great world religions themselves. Modern man while categorically advocating religious liberty has remained largely oblivous to its philosophical or religious bases as well as its historical roots.

This almost universal commitment to religious liberty on the one hand and the lack of any universal consensus for the basis of religious liberty on the other hand points to a real danger. In the absence of any conscious philosophical or religious basis, obviously religious liberty is simply widely supported for a variety of practical reasons. There are those, for example, who support religious liberty solely because of expediency. This is readily understandable from the perspective of the history of religion. Whenever religion has enjoyed patronage, prestige, and power it has resisted the granting of freedom in conflict with its own teachings and truths. Religious minorities throughout history have been the natural allies of religious liberty. Unfortunately, religious minorities when transformed into religious majorities or given political or social power generally cease to be allies of religious liberty either in principle or in practice.

It is quite possible to argue for religious liberty simply on the basis that the modern secular state views religion as a private concern of its citizens and that religion has no role to play in the public and social spheres of human society. Again, the state may also embrace the idea of religious liberty simply because it holds an apathetic view toward religion and seeks to avoid for purely political reasons any entanglement in the disagreements and dissensions between the religious communities themselves. Finally, religious liberty may be viewed not as an inalienable right, but as a concession to be granted by the state only insofar as religious liberty is not in conflict with the individual citizen’s national allegiance and loyalty. Thereby, religious liberty may be simply the result of the assumption of the secondary character of all religious loyalties.[1]

Admittedly, the rise of the secular state and an increasingly pluralistic society within most nation states have greatly contributed to the almost universal recognition given to religious liberty; but this pragmatic basis alone, without some understanding of and commitment to the foundations of religious liberty, will not suffice to sustain the principle or to prevent religious coercion, discrimination, and/or persecution during the crisis period of a nation’s history. To be secure, religious liberty must ultimately find its basis or rationale within the respective faiths or systems of thought of mankind. Although any real universal consensus as to the foundations of religious liberty would presently appear unlikely, some recognition of and dedication to some firm foundations of religious liberty are necessary if its defense is to become rooted within the value system of mankind.

II

Within the Christian tradition there have been wide and varied interpretations made of religious liberty and its theological foundations. Happily, there is emerging today for the first time in many centuries a growing consensus within the Christian world community concerning the principle of religious liberty and its theological foundations.[2] There is increasing recognition that religious liberty means at least this: The inherent right of a person to religious commitment according to his own conscience, in public or in private to worship or not to worship according to his own understanding or preferences, to give public witness to one’s faith (including the right of propagation), and to change one’s religion—all without threat of reprisal or abridgment of his rights as a citizen.

For Christians, religious liberty is theologically rooted first of all in God’s nature and in His dealings with men. Freedom for man is rooted in God. Man’s very capacity for freedom is from God. To be truly free is therefore to be at one with God; for freedom is where God is present. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is present, there is freedom.”[3] Men reconciled to God are free men. “Freedom is what we have—Christ has set us free! Stand, then, as free men, and do not allow yourselves to become slaves again.”[4] To be sure the Christian freedom alluded to here is an inner freedom, which ultimately does not depend on social and political conditions, although this inner freedom is the basis of man’s right to external freedom. But it is important for Christians that the Biblical revelation identifies God as the source of freedom and that the manner of God’s dealing with men is in freedom. While religious liberty is not an explicitly revealed truth in the Bible, it has, as Amos N. Wilder has stated, “unshakable grounding” in the Scriptures.[5] There is clearly a Biblical basis for religious freedom but in the final analysis “it is not single passages in the Bible, it is God’s whole way of approaching mankind that gives us our lead.”[6]

God’s revelation of Himself comes to us in freedom; it is neither capricious nor coercive. Rather, an essential characteristic of the Gospel is that God has chosen to make Himself known in love and that, therefore, He does not use force to win our allegiance. “The basis of religious liberty is the very fact that Christ did not come in heavenly splendour and worldly majesty to subjugate any possible resistance and force all and everybody to subjection.”[7] The entire Biblical revelation of the New Testament breathes the spirit of freedom. Christ made Himself of no reputation and took upon Himself the form of a servant and humbled Himself even unto the death of the cross.[8] The invitation of Christ in the Gospels is “If you want to…”[9] By its very nature this is an invitation in freedom. Neither concern for God’s rightful sovereignty over men nor God’s inevitable judgment on disobedient men could alter the manner of Christ’s approach to mankind. “Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any man hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into his house and eat with him, and he will eat with me.”[10]

Christian ecumenical thought, both Catholic and Protestant, has given recognition to this truth. Vatican Council II declared: “God calls men to serve Him in spirit and in truth: hence they are bound in conscience but they stand under no compulsion…. This truth appears at its height in Christ Jesus, in whom God manifested Himself and His ways with men … His [Christ’s] intention was to rouse faith in His hearers and to confirm them in faith, not to exert coercion upon them. … He bore witness to the truth, but He refused to impose the truth by force on those who spoke against it…”[11] The World Council of Churches in New Delhi affirmed: “God’s redemptive dealing with men is not coercive. Accordingly, human attempts by legal enactment or by pressure of social custom to coerce or to eliminate faith are violations of the fundamental ways of God with men. The freedom which God has given in Christ implies a free response to God’s love… ,”[12]

For faith to be faith it must be a voluntary, personal, and free act, an act born out of freedom. Faith is not faith if its voluntary character is abridged by coercion. Freedom is integrally bound up with God’s revelation of Himself and in His relations with men. In God’s very disclosure of Himself, freedom is a part of that revelation. God is not overpowering in His revelation to the point that man is subdued against his will. Man’s very capacity to resist God’s overtures of grace is in itself a profound testimony of the degree of divine respect for freedom. God does not compel faith, for faith itself a gift of God, is by its very nature a free and voluntary act. As Augustin Leonard has stated it, “An imposed faith is a contradiction in terms … faith must be free if it is not to destroy itself.”[13] For the Christian, recognition of freedom in God’s revelation is basic to religious liberty. “No intellectual ingenuity, no organized institution, no kind of compulsion and no power of persuasion can change the fact that God deals with men as free and responsible beings and that he expects from them an uncoerced response.”[14] Doubtlessly, the World Council of Churches affirmed for Christians everywhere the truth of this as follows: “…the revelation of God in Christ is a revelation that men are not forced to accept. He calls men to make a willing and obedient response to Him in faith, to answer with a free and confident ‘yes’ to the eternal action of His love in which He reveals Himself. This utterly free assent is undermined and destroyed when human coercion enters in.”[15]

While this inner Christian freedom does not require an external civil or political freedom, civil and political freedom are desirable primarily as a means of creating that kind of environment which will allow an unhindered expression of religious faith and commitment without civil or political advantages or disadvantages. It is this inner Christian freedom which is, in the final analysis, the Christian basis of external or social religious freedom. This external freedom is thereby the outward expression of that inner freedom with which God has set us free. The right of religious liberty, at least for the Christian, is first of all the right to give outward expression to or manifestation of the inner freedom one has found in Christ. By its very nature, external coercion in religious matters is a denial of religious liberty and thereby God’s purpose for man.

Religious liberty is theologically rooted in man’s nature and in his inalienable right to respond freely to God’s revelation. Created in the image of God, man’s likeness to the Creator consists in his freedom. In a profound sense, Soren Kierkegaard was right when he wrote, “Man is himself primarily and genuinely in his free choice.”[16] To be a person is to have the capacity for freedom and to exercise that freedom, and it is this capacity for freedom which distinguishes man as being in the image of God. That is to say, freedom for man is rooted in God and to be free is ultimately to be at one with God—to be at one with His love and purpose for the world. The human right to religious liberty is, therefore, first of all the right to give outward expression to or manifestation of the inner freedom one has found in God.

God-given, man’s personhood is the foundation stone of man’s right to religious liberty. Religious liberty, therefore, is the recognition of the right of the individual acting alone or in community, not a gift of the state. It is because of the potential destiny of man that the rights of men are to be regarded as inalienable and inviolate. The divinely ordered nature of man constitutes the basis for all of man’s human rights and civil liberties. It is the rationale, whether acknowledged or not, for democracy and constitutional government in which the rights of man are accepted as binding. Ultimately, the basis of all human rights is the dignity and sacredness of the human person by virtue of God’s creation. Religious liberty is an inherent right of man in order that he may respond to God without hindrance or coercion, and thereby experience the reconciliation which God yearns to see effected in all men. Men are to be free in matters of conscience and religion, first and foremost in order that God may be sovereign of their lives and that in turn men may freely respond to that sovereignty and bring about the ordering of their lives according to the will of God. As A. F. Carrillo de Albornoz expressed it, “Our religious freedom in human society finds its justification in our dependence on God’s will.”[17]

Religious liberty is rooted in the inviolable sacredness of the human conscience. Man has juridical rights because he possesses certain inalienable moral rights as a person. Basic to all of man’s moral rights is religious liberty, without which all of man’s civil rights are abridged. The truth is that religious liberty is fundamental to civil liberty. Increasing recognition in the modern world has been given to the essential role of religious freedom as being basic to all other human rights, that “religious freedom is the condition and guarantee of all true freedom.”[18]

The former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and former President of the American Baptist Convention wrote, “In the forum of conscience, duty to a moral power higher than the state has always been maintained…. The essence of religion is belief in a relation to God involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation.”[19] Recognition of this moral right to religious liberty was expressed seventeen centuries earlier by Tertullian. “It is matter of both human and natural law,” he said, “that every man can worship as he wishes…. It is not in the nature of religion to impose itself by force.”[20] Man has a sacred obligation to obey his conscience. For “man’s one and only means of learning God’s will for him is the voice of his own conscience.”[21] Because freedom of conscience is essential to a man’s personhood in the image of God and his way of response to God, no man should be compelled to act contrary to his conscience. To be sure, the exercise of one’s conscience must be limited by the protection of other men’s rights and the maintenance of a just social order. Even these limits, however, must not be imposed arbitrarily or partially, but in the spirit of equality and non-discrimination.

One of the foundation principles of religious liberty is that religion, as with God, must wait upon the voluntary responses of men. The dignity of the human person is too sacred to be violated by religious coercion and enforced conformity, which are a denial of the dignity and sacredness of human personality. God Himself has too much regard for the dignity of the human person to ignore the sacredness of man’s rights. Religious liberty is thus the legal recognition on the part of the state of the sacred right of a person to decide matters of ultimate belief and commitment for himself. As Vatican Council II rightly proclaimed, “The protection and promotion of the inviolable rights of man ranks among the essential duties of government.”[22] And as the World Council of Churches affirmed at the time of its organization more than twenty years earlier, “The nature and destiny of man… establish limits beyond which the government cannot with impunity go.”[23]

The foundations of religious liberty rest upon not only the sacredness of human personality and the inviolability of the human conscience, but also, paradoxically enough, upon the sinful nature of man. The dialectic of Christian anthropology is that man is created in the image of God and, at the same time, he is by nature a sinner. There can be no infallible human authority or institution, partly because of the sacred right of each man to follow the dictates of his own conscience in his quest for truth, but also because of the sinful nature to be found in all men and therefore in all institutions. No Christian and indeed no church is entitled to the claim of having attained to any final, infallible dogmas of truth. Every Christian and every church ought to be aware that any apprehension of truth is necessarily only partial because of the sinful and finite nature of man. This imperfection of man is to be understood as descriptive not only of man’s moral behavior but also of his theology as well! In reviewing the Protestant Reformation, Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “The intolerance of the Reformation is the consequence of a violation of its own doctrinal position. Its doctrine of justification by faith presupposed the imperfection of the redeemed. Logically this includes the imperfection of redeemed knowledge and wisdom.”[24] Significantly, most of the Reformed confessions acknowledge that as Christians we know “only in part,” as do many of the Baptist confessions of faith. The Baptist Confession of 1646 declared, “We confess that we know but in part and that we are ignorant of many things which we desire and seek to know; and if any shall do us that friendly part to show us from the Word of God that we see not, we shall have cause to be thankful to God and to them.”[25] Both Martin Luther and John Calvin recognized the truth of this principle. The New England Puritan John Cotton taught “that all power that is on earth be limited, church power or other.”[26] The Protestant emphasis on justification by faith actually precludes the possibility of any claim of infallibility for one’s own doctrinal formulations or one’s understanding of truth. The claims of men and institutions to infallibility are to be viewed with profound skepticism. “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God”[27] is not only descriptive of man’s nature, it is also a thoroughly democratic presupposition. The sinful nature of man negates the possibility of the absolutizing of human authority, religious or political, and by limiting all human authority provides an important foundation for religious liberty.

Religious liberty is theologically rooted in the limited state in which civil authority has no jurisdiction over matters of religious belief and practice. The power of all government, indeed all human authority, is inevitably limited by the inalienable rights of man. These rights stand over against claims of omnipotence and absolutism on the part of the state which, though ordained by God, was created by man for public good. One essential duty of the state is to promote and protect the inviolable rights of man. This has been widely recognized in modern times by the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, the World Council of Churches, the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican Council II, and the Baptist World Alliance.[28] By its very nature, the authority of the state is civil or human, and this authority is derived from the consent of the governed. The denial of religious liberty is beyond the rightful jurisdiction of the state if for no other reason than that it violates the fundamental rights of man. The state has no right to use political means for the promotion or the prohibition of religion. Acknowledgement of the state’s limited role in religious matters is recognition of the sacredness of man’s rights in religious affairs which are to be properly regarded as so sacred as to be beyond the authority and jurisdiction of civil government. This is precisely the theological basis for disestablishment and the separation of church and state, in which government is expressly prohibited from establishing or maintaining any jurisdictional power over religion. Religious liberty limits the secular power of both the church and the state, but protects the sanctity of man’s conscience in matters of ultimate concern. One of the earliest Baptist leaders in colonial America, John Clarke, expressed it perceptively when he wrote, “A flourishing Civil State may stand, yea, and best be maintained … with a full liberty of religious concernments.”[29]

To illustrate from my own tradition, for example, Baptists have a long history of contending for the limited state in which religious liberty would be fully guaranteed by civil authority. The Baptist Confession of 1612, “Proposition and Conclusions concerning True Christian Religion,” signed by dissidents who had fled the persecution of James I in England, proclaimed “that the magistrate is not by virtue of his office to meddle with religion, or matters of conscience, to force or compel men to this or that form of religion, or doctrine: but to leave the Christian religion free, to every man’s conscience, and to handle only civil transgressions (Rom. xiii), injuries and wrongs of man against man, in murder, adultery, theft, etc., for Christ only is the king, and lawgiver of the church and conscience (James 4:12).”[30] This confession has been generally accepted as “perhaps the first confession of faith of modern times to demand freedom of religion and separation of church and state.”[31] In the Standard Confession of 1660, English Baptists, having affirmed their support of civil authority declared: “… we and all men are obliged by Gospel rules, to be suject to the higher Powers, to obey Magistrates, Titus 3:1 and to submit to every Ordinance of man, for the Lord’s sake, as saith 1 Peter 2:13. But in case the Civil Powers do, or shall at any time impose things about matters of Religion, which we through conscience to God cannot actually obey, then we … do hereby declare our whole, and holy intent and purpose, that … we will not yield, nor …in the least actually obey them … [but] suffer whatsoever shall be inflicted upon us, for our conscionable forbearance.”[32]

Recent ecumenical thought has also rightly acknowledged the limitation of political power as a major foundation of religious liberty. “From the Christian view the State has but limited, not unlimited, authority from God. Secular authority is not entitled to rule over man’s conscience. The government concerns itself with peace and order, with economic and social welfare, but it does not rule over man’s conscience.”[33]

The limited state is not only a derivative of the sacredness of man’s rights, but also the sovereignty of God, which together “constitute an irremovable limit of the State which it cannot with impunity transgress.”[34] The truth was expressed for Christians by Peter and John in the affirmation, “We must obey God rather than men.”[35] God’s sovereignty is man’s most transcendent loyalty, which necessarily supercedes one’s loyalty to human and civil authority. The limited state stands as a safeguard against an uncritical exaltation of the state, one inevitable consequence of which is the abridgment of religious liberty. The totalitarian state, which is an unlimited state, grants a qualified freedom of religion, but specifically restricts the activities and programs of the church and clergy. The limited state does not restrict religion per se, but, on the contrary, excludes the state’s jurisdiction from religious affairs. “The sovereignty of God excludes an absolute of human power. It excludes both the absolute sovereignty of the state and the absolute sovereignty of the people. All known authority is limited by divine authority and by divine law.”[36]

H. Richard Niebuhr incisively wrote of the foundation of religious liberty in terms of the limited state. “Religious liberty is rooted in the acknowledgment that loyalty to God is prior to every civic loyalty; that before man is a member of any political society he is a member of the universal commonwealth in which he is under obligations that take precedence over all duties to the state; and that the state must therefore acknowledge man’s rights to perform such duties. Religion, so understood, lies beyond the provenance of the state not because it is private, inconsequential, or other-worldly matter but because it concerns men’s allegiance to a sovereignty and a community more immediate, more inclusive, and more fateful than those of the political commonwealth. Religious freedom … is an acknowledgement by the state of the limitation of its sovereignty and of the relative character of the loyalty it is entitled to claim.”[37] Religious liberty, legally guaranteed, recognizes that man has ends and loyalties beyond the jurisdiction of the state by virtue of man’s sacredness as a person and his inviolable rights. The state, therefore, has no right either to intrude on God’s dealings with man or to invade on the inner life of man.

III

There is not only a theological, but also an historical basis of religious liberty. While the foundations of religious liberty are properly to be seen first and foremost in terms of certain theological axioms, the basis of religious liberty in the modern world must also be seen as the consequence of the secular state, religious pluralism, and international relations and international law. The very concept of religious liberty as we know it today emerged slowly and was not realized until the modern era, although long advocated by various Christian thinkers and particularly by the free churches of the Radical Reformation.

Religious liberty is historically rooted in the emergence of the secular state. The major advances toward religious liberty came not from church confessions of faith, councils, or synods, but from constitutions, legislatures, and courts of law. The concept of religious liberty was rooted in the notion of “liberty of conscience,” a phrase of modern origin which came into use after the Protestant Reformation and appeared most prominently in writings during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Even though the Protestant Reformation did not generally espouse the principle of religious liberty, it did represent a revolt against authority and in turn fostered the emergence of new nation-states and a new secular spirit throughout Europe and Great Britain, out of which the view of the secular state was born.

The emergence of the secular state is of major historical significance to the growth of religious liberty in the modern world. The actualization of the secular state, so directly related to religious liberty in today’s world, is not without theological basis in Christian history. Earlier advocated by Marsilius of Padua and the Radical Reformer, Roger Williams, the acknowledged architect of the American tradition of the separation of church and state, sought to provide a theological basis for the secular state. Williams insisted that the authority of the state is “not religious, Christian, etc., but natural, human, [and] civil,” and therefore is “improper” in proscribing conscience or religious affairs. The state can never assume the role of God who alone is Lord of conscience. “All magistrates in the world, both before the coming of Christ Jesus and since,” Williams wrote, “are but derivative and agents … serving for the good of the whole.”[38] Consequently, this meant for Williams that “no civil state or country can be truly called Christian, although true Christians be in it.”[39] More than a century later, Isaac Backus, a leader of American Baptists in the eighteenth century, argued that a Christian view of government requires that a state restrict its authority and rule to the purely secular. “Now who can hear Christ declare that his kingdom is NOT OF THIS WORLD, and yet believe that this blending of the church and state together can be pleasing to him?”[40] Religious matters are to be separated from the jurisdiction of the state not because they are beneath the interests of the state, but, quite to the contrary, because they are too high and holy and thus are beyond the competence of the state. For “the free exercise of private judgment,” Backus wrote, “and the inalienable rights of conscience are of too high a rank and dignity to be submitted to the decrees of council, or the imperfect laws of fallible legislators.”[41]

The secular state is one in which the state is independent of church or ecclesiastical control and the church is independent of state or political control. In application, the secular state stands as a bulwark for religious liberty in its denial of the state’s using religious means for the accomplishment of religious ends. The secular state is one in which churches are equal in the sight of the state and that no church has any advantages or disadvantages of establishment. The secular state, as such, is neither Christian, nor Hindu, nor Buddhist, nor Muslim, nor Shinto, nor religious, nor irreligious. The truly secular state is one in which the state seeks neither to promote nor to prohibit the free exercise of religion, in which neither religion nor irreligion enjoys an official status.

The emergence of the secular state has clearly aided the cause of religious liberty in the modern world, and therefore should not be viewed as an enemy of religion, but as an ally of religious liberty. The truth is that the secular state is one which the church should strongly welcome. As Gayraud S. Wilmore has incisively written, the church “has nowhere to stand except with the secular. It refuses to make an idol of religion. It makes common cause with the authentically secular without being permanently wedded to it. It believes in the secular not only as an instrument of divine providence and judgment but also a partner with the church in the work of reconciliation.”[42] Those Christians who are wary of the secular state in the modern world would do well to note that political absolutism and state deification have all too often accompanied the notion of the Christian state. Certainly history warns that the concept of the Christian state is as hazardous for true religion as for religious liberty.

Religious liberty is historically rooted in the emergence of religious nonconformity and pluralism. Aided by both secular and theological thought, liberty for truth in the Western world gradually gave way to liberty of conscience, namely the liberty to seek and respond to the truth as one apprehended it. In the absence of any objective basis for truth, mutual toleration naturally followed. Roger Williams saw the protection of this religious nonconformity and pluralism as “the will and command of God.” “God requireth,” Williams wrote, “not an uniformity of religion to be enacted and enforced in any civil state, which enforced uniformity sooner or later is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in His servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.”[43]

It is the legal recognition of the religiously pluralistic society, a phenomenon increasingly descriptive of societies throughout the world, that has provided one of the major pragmatic foundations of religious liberty in the modern world. Religious pluralism has come to be a deterrent to religious totalitarianism and to the denial of religious liberty. In the West, for example, the very disintegration of a united Christendom, or mundus Christianus, actually advanced the cause of religious liberty throughout the Western world. The right of Catholics and Protestants to restrict the freedom of dissenters and heretics was gradually eroded, and religious liberty as a principle came to be widely espoused, so much so that in the twentieth century there has developed a broad consensus, among both churches and states, in support of religious liberty. Unfortunately, there are still those churches and those religions which today, in the face of the pluralistic character of today’s world, are willing to espouse religious liberty as an abstract principle, but whenever and wherever possible they seek to maintain privileges for themselves. To do so, however, is to deny the character of religious pluralism, wherever legally guaranteed, and thereby to weaken one of the major foundations of religious liberty, so essential to the spirit of world community, in today’s world.

Finally, religious liberty is historically rooted in international relations and international law. That is to say, historically speaking, the principle of religious liberty was greatly aided by and in large measure to the consequence of international relations that resulted from the ratification of treaties between states. “International law and religious liberty,” as M. Searle Bates expressed it, “grew in intimate association.”[44] In the nineteenth century, with sovereign states identified with different religious traditions, it became common in the drawing up of treaties to include provisions for the right of nationals of each contracting party in the territory of the other. Since these foreign nationals were often identifiable by both their nationality and their religion, it was inevitable that specific safeguards were provided for freedom of conscience, worship, and religious work “upon the same terms as nationals of the state of residence.”[45]

The Treaty of Berlin in 1878 at the close of the Russo-Turkish War, with its provisions for equal rights of religious minorities, is an excellent example of the role of international agreement for religious liberty. Other treaties of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among many others, which provided guarantees of religious liberty were: the American Treaty with Japan in 1858, the General Act relating to African Possessions, signed at Berlin in 1885, and the Minorities Treaties of 1919–1923. More and more states throughout the world voluntarily entered into constitutional and treaty commitments to secure religious liberty for their own citizens as well as for foreign residents. Meanwhile, the great universal religious, with an increasingly wide geographical distribution of their adherents and communities, challenged those ethnic or national states which were built on the idea of a single religious tradition or a particular church. With the advance of the modern missionary movement Christian churches were formed throughout the world as voluntary associations of religious minorities. The principle of religious liberty came to be affirmed by virtually all national governments as a part of national law.

As late as World War II, however, religious liberty was not recognized as a matter of international law. A study prepared in 1942 for the Joint Committee on Religious Liberty of the International Missionary Council declared, “No writer asserts that there is a generally accepted postulate of international law that every State is under legal obligation to accord religious liberty within its jurisdiction.”[46] It is of profound significance, therefore, that following the organization of the United Nations in 1945, concerted efforts were soon directed toward the formulation of a principle of religious liberty as a fundamental right to which all member nations were to subscribe and in recognition of the vital relationship of religious liberty to relations between states. One of the basic principles included in the Charter of the United Nations is that of “the dignity and equality inherent in all human beings,” and that, therefore, all member nations “have pledged themselves to take joint and separate action in cooperation with the Organization to promote and encourage universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” As Charles Habib Malik, Christian statesman and former President of the United Nations Assembly and Rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1948, recently wrote, “The movement for human rights which is rising to a crescendo all over the world owes much of its impetus to the original ferment supplied over the years by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”[47]

Today religious liberty has become an international necessity. The international dimension of contemporary life inevitably requires all world faiths to espouse religious liberty for all men everywhere since “an international community could not prosper without mutual civil tolerance and universal respect for men’s consciences”[48] and special privileges have become a practical impossibility. “An essential element in a good international order is freedom of religion. This is an implication of the Christian faith and of the world-wide nature of Christianity. Christians, therefore, view the question of religious freedom as an international problem. They are concerned that religious freedom be everywhere secured.”[49] This is the background for viewing in proper perspective the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. The growing interrelatedness among all nations has underscored in the modern world that if peace and harmony are to be established and maintained among mankind, it is essential that guarantees of religious liberty must be constitutionally provided everywhere. Admittedly, there are those that say the espousal of religious liberty in recent years by various Christian denominations is as expedient in the modern world as the denial of religious liberty seemed to be expedient to the churches during the Middle Ages and the Reformation period. Political patronage to the churches, it is observed, has been in steady decline during the past century and a half. Also, outside the West, Christianity is represented by scattered, Christian minorities in the midst of the great resurging traditional civilizations of the East. Even the larger established churches in the West have felt the need to express concern for the status of these Christian minorities which have emerged, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, in much of the West the widespread defections from Christianity have caused the churches to come to be regarded as representing only small minorities in largely alien and hostile cultures.

While this practical, existential argument in support of religious liberty is irrefutable, A. F. Carrillo de Albornoz is right in affirming that “this pragmatic argument, of itself, would have no final validity if the right to religious freedom had not already been based on eternal, universal principles.”[50] The practical argument for religious liberty as an international necessity becomes a valuable argument only after theological and philosophical foundations have been laid down as the basis for religious liberty. Such reasoning, in the final analysis, only underscores further the need for unqualified Christian commitment to religious liberty in principle and in practice, based upon a reaffirmation of the theological foundations of religious liberty within the context of Christian faith and witness.

Notes

1. Cf. H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 70–71.
2. While any real commitment on the part of ecumenical Christianity, Protestant or Catholic, to the principle of religious liberty has been slow to emerge, growing recognition given to religious liberty may be seen in Declaration of Religious Liberty of Vatican Council II and the pronouncements on religious liberty made by the World Council of Churches ever since the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948. Cf. A. F. Carrillo de Albornoz, Religious Liberty (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967) and James E. Wood, Jr., “Religious Liberty in Ecumenical and International Perspective,” Journal of Church and State, X (Autumn 1968), 421–436. Since 1939, the Baptist World Alliance has repeatedly reaffirmed its commitment to the principle of religious liberty.
3. 2 Corinthians 3:17.
4. Galatians 5:1.
5. Amos N. Wilder, “Eleutheria in the New Testament and Religious Liberty,” The Ecumenical Review, XIII (July 1961), 411.
6. Niels H. Soe, quoted in A. F. Carrillo de Albornoz, The Basis of Religious Liberty (New York: Association Press, 1963), p. 56.
7. Niels H. Soe, “The Theological Basis of Religious Liberty,” The Ecumenical Review, XI (January 1958), 40.
8. Phillippians 2:7–8.
9. Matthew 19:21–22.
10. Revelation 3:20.
11. Cf. “De Libertate Religiosa: A Declaration of Religious Freedom,” Vatican Council II, Journal of Church and State, VIII (Winter 1966), 16–29.
12. Cf. The New Delhi Report: The Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches, 1961 (New York: Association Press), “Statement on Religious Liberty,” p. 159.
13. Augustin Leonard, “Freedom of Faith and Civil Toleration,” in Tolerance and the Catholic (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), p. 113.
14. Carrillo, The Basis of Religious Liberty, p. 74.
15. Evanston to New Delhi, 1954–61. (Geneva: Report of the Central Committee at the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches, 1961), Report on “Christian Witness, Proselytism and Religious Liberty.”
16. Soren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity (1850); quoted in Soe, “The Theological Basis of Religious Liberty,” p. 41.
17. Carrillo, Religious Liberty, p. 41.
18. World Council of Churches, Central Committee, Chichester, 1949; quoted in Carrillo, Religious Liberty, p. 35.
19. Justice Charles Evans Hughes’ dissenting opinion in United States v. Mackintosh, 283 U.S., October Term, 1930.
20. Quoted in Joseph Lecler, S.J., “Religious Freedom: An Historical Survey,” in Religious Freedom, edited by Neophytos Edelby and Teodoro Jimenez-Urresti. Concilium (New York: Paulist Press, 1966), p. 5.
21. Albert Hartmann, Toleranz und Christlicher Glaube (Frankfurt-am-Main: Knecht, 1955), p. 182.
22. “De Libertate Religiosa,” Journal of Church and State, VIII (Winter 1966), p. 21.
23. The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches: Held at Amsterdam, August 22-September 4, 1948 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), “Declaration on Religious Liberty,” pp. 93–95.
24. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (2 vols.; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), II, 238.
25. The Particular Baptist Confession of 1646 declared: “We confess that we know but in part and that we are ignorant of many things which we desire and seek to know; and if any shall do us that friendly part to show us from the Word of God that we see not, we shall have cause to be thankful to God and to them.” Cf. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith, pp. 175–177.
26. John Cotton, An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of Revelation (London: L. Chapman, 1655), p. 72.
27. Romans 3:23.
28. Cf. Wood, “Religious Liberty in Ecumenical and International Perspective,” pp. 424–436.
29. Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations; quoted in Anson Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States (3 vols.; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), III, 205.
30. William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith (Philadelphia: The Judson Press, 1959), p. 140.
31. Ibid., p. 134.
32. Ibid., p. 233.
33. Carrillo, The Basis of Religious Liberty, p. 84.
34. The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches: Held at Amsterdam, 1948, “Declaration on Religious Liberty,” p. 93.
35. Acts 4:19; 5:29.
36. Emil Brunner, Christianity and Civilisation (2 vols.; London: Nisbet and Co., Ltd., 1948), II, 17.
37. Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, pp. 70–71.
38. The Bloody Tenent, of Persecution for cause of Conscience, discussed, in A Conference between Truth and Peace (1644).
39. Quoted in James Ernest, Roger Williams: New England Firebrand (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1932), p. 429.
40. Cf. William G. McLoughlin, ed., Isaac Backus on Church, State and Calvinism: Pamphlets, 1754–1789 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 318.
41. Alvah Hovey, A Memoir of the Life and Times of the Reverend Isaac Backus (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1858), pp. 205–206.
42. Gayraud S. Wilmore, The Secular Relevance of the Church (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1962), pp. 24–25.
43. Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution… .
44. M. Searle Bates, Religious Liberty: An Inquiry (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), p. 476. From his study, Bates observed, “A review of the forty-seven writers of the more important general treaties on international law, following the time of Grotius, shows that fully thirty refer to religious liberty” (ibid.).
45. The Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation Between United States of America and the Republic of Liberia, Article I, Treaty Series, No. 956 (1940), p. 1; quoted in Bates, Religious Liberty, p. 486.
46. Norman J. Padelford, “International Guarantees of Religious Liberty”; quoted in Bates, Religious Liberty, p. 476.
47. O. Frederick Nolde, Free and Equal (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1968), p. 13.
48. Carrillo, Religious Liberty, p. 33.
49. The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches: Held at Amsterdam, 1948, “Declaration on Religious Liberty.”
50. Carrillo, Religious Liberty, p. 33.