Book Description

John Garrett's Roger Williams: Witness Beyond Christendom is a radical new assessment of an American folk hero and significant figure in the history of Western civilization. Garrett goes deep into the life and thought of the seventeenth-century nonconformist, exploring the recurrent themes in his voluminous writings and showing how they are woven together as a personal apologia by this fascinating individual. Williams is presented as he interacts with the radical Separatists of his day -- the scholars, lawyers, nobility, and gentry of the Puritan era -- and as he becomes a missionary to the Indians, a stubborn sectarian, a politician, an anti-Quaker theologian, and an isolated has-been on a rude frontier. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, studies of Roger Williams were collections of information that varied from praise to blame. To some he was a father of American liberty; to others, impetuous and irresponsible. In the 1930s and 1940s, American liberal historians explored his political importance and his role as a pioneer of the free pluralistic society. The late Perry Miller of Harvard opened a new era in studies of Roger Williams when he directed students to the fact that Williams thought nearly all of the time in theological terms, so that his warped image had to be rescued from the defacements of the "liberal historians." John Garrett is familiar with the wide range of writing about Williams, but he does not engage in controversy with other writers. He goes directly to primary sources in an attempt to reconstruct the factors that shaped Williams and his thought. He has worked afresh with the available materials on both sides of the Atlantic, and relates Williams more fully than has been done before to the currents of contemporary history in both old and New England. He believes, like Perry Miller, that theology is a necessary clue to Williams's mind, but he does not think it is enough to look at the history of religious ideas in new England and Europe to decipher the enigma of this subtle and puzzling thinker. He shows how Williams lived with the Bible and used it as a direct guide for his life and thought. Only in this way, argues Garrett, can Williams be seen as a whole man: as thinker, politician, missionary, Englishman, American. The rebel is revealed by reference to his Christology; the pluralist by reference to his Eschatology; and the man by the interweaving of many complex strands of experience and thought.