Christianity and Freedom

Christianity and Freedom, Vol. I, surveys the contributions of Christians to the theory and practice of freedom from the earliest days of the church to nearly the present. The book begins with several essays discussing early Christian thinkers who advocated religious liberty. This section raises a theme that appears in other essays in the volume: Persecution often led Christians to make arguments for religious liberty generally, not just for themselves. Lactantius, a Christian tutor for Constantine’s children, wrote a case for religious liberty that was used verbatim in the Edict of Milan. Robert Louis Wilken notes that early Christian arguments from Tertullian and Lactantius were revived during the Protestant Reformation when religious pluralism had again become an important cultural challenge. In the post-Reformation era, these ideas helped set the stage for modern ideas of religious liberty and toleration. This broad-based insistence on religious liberty began to change with Augustine. Initially an opponent of religious coercion, Augustine later shifted to allow for coercion of heretics in some situations, a change which John Rist’s essay demonstrates was inconsistent with Augustine’s own theological principles and, while influential, did not determine the shape of religious liberty in the West. In a later essay, Ian Christopher Levy shows that the medieval Latin world allowed for a degree of religious liberty for both non-Christians such as Jews and heterodox Christians; further, the medieval world recognized a set of inviolable rights that could not be infringed upon by either church or state.

Christianity · Coercion (linguistics) · Epistemology · Persecution · Pluralism (philosophy) · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Religious persecution · Religious pluralism · Theology · Toleration · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies