Consistency Digg’d Out: Dispelling Images of Contradiction

in Roger Williams’ Opposition to the Quakers

Submitted to Professor Bill Pitts Baylor University

October 20, 2008

by Craig R. Clarkson Baylor University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for REL 5336 – History of American Christianity I

Fall 2008

Clarkson, 1

One wonders what Roger Williams (1603?-1683) thought about as he rowed his “old

bones” some thirty miles from Providence to Newport, Rhode Island, throughout the hot summer

day of August 8, 1672, arriving “toward the midnight before the morning appointed” for the first

of a two-part disputation with three Quaker leaders.1 Williams had originally intended to dispute

with Quaker founder and leading spokesman George Fox (1624-1691), who was in the midst of

an American tour but had moved on from Newport prior to the arrival of Williams’ challenge.2

Of the fourteen propositions Williams had put forward for disputation, the first seven were slated

for discussion in Newport and the remaining seven for a later date in Providence (see Figure 1).3

Williams’ opponents in the upcoming disputation were to be Rhode Island Quakers John Stubs,

John Burnyeat and William Edmundson.4

1 Roger Williams, George Fox digg’d out of his burrowes (Boston: John Foster, 1676),

37.

2 The circumstances surrounding Fox’s departure are disputed by each side in the debate.

The Quakers maintained that Fox had departed by ship before Williams’ letter could be delivered

to him. William’s maintained that his challenge had been intentionally delayed so that Fox,

“slyly departing,” good avoid the certain embarrassment of being bested in dispute with

Williams.

3 Williams originally envisioned each part of the disputation to take one day with the

possibility of extending into the following morning for any unfinished business. The debate in

Newport covered two propositions in two full days of debate (one proposition per day) before

new rules were agreed upon to speed things along. Thereafter, the remaining five propositions

for Newport and all seven Providence propositions addressed in one day each at their respective

locations. On the function of disputation as a commonly accepted means among dissenters for

the search for truth, see David S. Lovejoy, “Roger Williams and George Fox: The Arrogance of

Self-Righteousness,” New England Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Jun 1993): 209-11.

4 John Burnyeat would go on to pen, with George Fox, a rebuttal to Williams’ account of

the debate. The literary products of the Williams-Quaker controversy are as follows. In 1659

Fox published The great mistery of the great whore unfolded (London). Williams found Fox’s

writing “so weak and silly, so anti-Christian and blasphemous, and yet so imperious and

scornfull, so cursing and censorious, damning and reprobating all that bow not down to their new

upstart image” that his “spirit rose up within me, and I believe the holy Spirit of God…resolved

and quickened my spirit to the present undertake and service” [Williams, George Fox digg’d out,

2]. Some time after the disputation, which was held in the summer of 1672, Williams wrote

Clarkson, 2

Perhaps Williams mentally rehearsed his proofs for some or all of the propositions.

Perhaps he fumed over Fox’s absence. Perhaps he thought of his earlier failed attempt to

contend with the Quakers at one of their monthly meetings or the increasingly acerbic

correspondence between himself and his erstwhile friend, now turned Quaker, “J.T.”5 Was

Williams aware of any irony attending his vehement opposition to the Quakers and his equally

intense advocacy for freedom of religious conscience, a principle upon which he had founded

what had become Rhode Island and Providence Plantations after his (along with John Clarke)

efforts at obtaining a patent from Charles II in 1663? Nearing if not already seventy years of age

– Williams’ birth date is uncertain – perhaps his physical exertion removed all such pondering.

The goings-on in Williams’ skiff remain veiled, but this whole historic episode presents an

apparent tension between William’s advocacy for “soul liberty” and his passionate attack on the

Quakers.

George Fox digg’d out of his burrowes (Boston: John Foster, 1676) as an account of the events

from memory. Williams took direct recourse to his own copy of Fox’s text during the debates

and significant portions of his account are case by case refutations of what Fox had written, with

over 180 pages of the 503 page text consisting of an appendix detailing even more such cases.

Fox and Burnyeat responded in 1678 with A New-England fire-brand quenched: or an answer to

a lying, slanderous book (London).

Williams’ George Fox digg’d out of his burrowes was the only work by Williams to be

published in America during his lifetime. In fact, anti-Quaker writings by Williams and other

authors from outside the Puritan orbit of the Bay colony were published in Boston – the

animosity between Williams and the Bay colony notwithstanding. Massachusetts governor John

Leverett funded the publication of George Fox digg’d out of his burrowes; thus, “Massachusetts

leaders willingly accepted the assistance of odd allies in the battle against Quakerism” [Carla

Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991), 160]. See also, Carla Gardina Pestana, Liberty of Conscience and the

Growth of Religious Diversity in Early America, 1636-1786 (Providence, R.I.: The John Carter

Brown Library, 1986), 38.

5 These episodes are recounted in Williams, George Fox digg’d out, 1-34.

Clarkson, 3

Fortunately, this tension is just that: apparent. It is easily resolved by a careful

understanding of how Williams framed his argument against the Quakers and the animus behind

Williams’ promotion of religious liberty. A knottier tension emerges, however, as the first is

dispelled. Despite affinities in Separatism and, especially, Seekerism, Williams categorically

and passionately denounced the Quakers. What is it about the Quakers that seems to have so

raised Williams’ ire? It is the aim of this paper to describe both aspects of the Williams-Quaker

controversy: its consistency with Williams’ principles of religious freedom and the tension of

theological similarities and differences between Williams and the Quakers as he understood

them.

In order to properly understand and dispel the apparent contradiction between Williams’

advocacy for freedom of conscience and his controversy with the Quakers it is necessary to

understand something of Williams’ position concerning the former. Volumes have been written

about Williams’ controversy with the Bay colony Puritans (and subsequently with the Separatists

of Plymouth Plantation), which prompted the founding of Providence with the principle of

religious liberty. For the purpose of investigating the Williams-Quaker controversy a brief

historical sketch and a view of the salient features of Williams’ advocacy for religious freedom

will suffice.

Essentially, there are three points of troublemaking attributed to Williams in his ouster

from the Bay colony and his failure to find a long-term sanctuary in Plymouth Plantation: his

advocacy for strict separatism from the Church of England, his advocacy for the rights of the

Native Americans regarding the land, and his opposition to magisterial arrogation of jurisdiction

Clarkson, 4

over spiritual matters.6 Williams’ first trouble in the Bay was associated with his opinion that

the magistrates were pressing beyond their jurisdiction by punishing breaches of the “first table,”

the first four of the Ten Commandments, which were concerned with the person’s duties and

responsibilities toward God. During a stint away from the Bay in Plymouth, Williams’ criticism

against the validity of the Plymouth patent because it trampled upon the property rights of the

Native Americans soured his relationship with them. Ultimately, Plymouth and the Bay colony

concurred that Williams was a problem. In his recollection of the final breech with the Bay

colony Williams acknowledges four charges “rightly summed up” by an unnamed magistrate:

“Mr. Williams,” saith he, “holds for these four particulars:

“First, that we have not our land by patent from the King but that the natives

are the true owners of it, and that we ought to repent of such a receiving it by

patent.

“Secondly, that it is not lawful to call a wicked person to swear, to pray, as

being actions of God’s worship.

“Thirdly, that it is not lawful to hear any of the ministers of the parish

assemblies in England.

“Fourthly, that the civil magistrate’s power extends only to the bodies and

goods and outward state of men.”

I acknowledge the particulars were rightly summed up, and I also hope that as

I then maintained the rocky strength of them to my own and other consciences’

satisfaction, so (through the Lord’s assistance) I shall be ready for the same

grounds not only to be bound and banished but to die also in New England as for

most holy truths of God in Christ Jesus.7

Also summed up in these four charges are the three basic dimensions of Williams’ controversy

with the two colonies: Separatism, the Native Americans, and civil authority exercised over

spiritual matters.

6 For a more in-depth look at the sequence of events that precipitated Williams’ removal

to Providence, see Henry Chupack, Roger Williams (New York: Twain Publishers, 1969), 43-49.

7 Roger Williams, Mr. Cottons Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered (London,

1644) reproduced in Perry Miller, Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition

(Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 93.

Clarkson, 5

While all three of these points of contention find a place in Williams’ refutation of the

Quakers, it is the third – civil authority exercised over spiritual matters – that has occupied most

studies of Roger Williams. From this dimension come two distinct but related elements of

Williams’ thought: church-state separation and religious liberty. That the two are distinct

concepts is intimated by Williams himself in a treatise written and published in London on “the

church, the ministry and ordinances of Jesus Christ”:

At present, I humbly conceive, that the great duty, of the magistrate, as to

spirituals, will turne upon these two hinges.

First, in removing the civill bars, obstructions, hinderances, in taking of those

yoaks, that pinch the very soules and consciences of men, such as yet are the

payments of tithes, and the maintenance of ministers, they have no faith in….

Secondly, in a free and absolute permission of the consciences of all men, in

what is merely spirituall, not the very consciences of the Jews, nor the

consciences of the Turkes or Papists, or pagans themselves excepted.

But how will this propagate the gospell of Christ Jesus?

I answer thus, the first grand design of Christ Jesus is, to destroy and consume

his mortal enemy Antichrist. This must be done by the breath of his mouth in his

prophets and witnesses. Now the nations of the world have impiously stopt this

heavenly breath, and stifled the Lord Jesus in his servants.8

Whereas the first of Williams’ “hinges” relates to separation of church and state, the second

relates to religious liberty.

Notable in Williams’ second point is that he does not merely argue for freedom of

conscience among various Protestant Christian sects. Rather, freedom of conscience is argued

universally. In a 1651 letter to Massachusetts governor John Endecott (1588?-1665), Williams

writes of “conscience, a persuasion fixed in the mind and heart of a man, which enforces him to

judge…and to do so and so with respect to God, His worship, etc. This conscience is found in all

8 Roger Williams, The hirelings ministry none of Christs, or, A discourse touching the

propagating the Gospel of Christ Jesus (London, 1652), 2, 24. For a documentary presentation

of the controversy over religious freedom, see Irwin H. Polishook, Roger Williams, John Cotton,

and Religious Freedom: A Controversy in New and Old England (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice-Hall, 1967).

Clarkson, 6

mankind, more or less, in Jews, Turks, Papists, Protestants, pagans, etc.”9 Similarly, Williams

defended this wide application of religious liberty even as he acknowledged the appearance that

it supported those in error.

I have impartially pleaded for the freedom of the consciences of the Papists

themselves, the greatest enemies and persecutors (in Europe) of the saints and

truths of Jesus: yet I have pleaded for no more than is their due and right, and…it

shall stand for a monument and testimony against them, and be an aggravation of

their former, present, or future cruelties against Christ Jesus the head, and all that

uprightly love Him, His true disciples and followers.10

Furthermore, the primary emphasis of the literary dispute over religious liberty was persecution,

as evidenced in Williams’ two major contributions: The bloudy tenent, of persecution, for cause

of conscience (London, 1644) and The bloody tenent yet more bloody (London, 1652).

My end is to discover [=uncover] and proclaim the crying and horrible guilt of the

bloody doctrine [of persecution] as one of the most seditious, destructive,

blasphemous, and bloodiest in any or all the nations of the world, notwithstanding

the many fine veils, pretenses and colors of not persecuting Christ Jesus, but

heretics, not God’s truth or servants, but blasphemers, seducers; not persecuting

men for their conscience, but for sinning against their conscience, etc.

My end is to persuade God’s Judah (especially) to wash their hands from

blood, to cleanse their hearts and ways from such un-Christian practices toward

all that is man, capable of a religion and a conscience, but most of all toward

Christ Jesus, who cries out (as He did to Saul) in the sufferings of the least of His

servants: Old England, Old England, New England, New England, King, King,

Parliaments, Parliaments, General Courts, General Courts, Presbyterians,

Presbyterians, Independents, Independents, etc., why persecute you me?11

9 Roger Williams, The Copie of a Letter of R. Williams of Providence in New England, to

Major Endicot, Governour of the Massachusetts, upon occasion of the late persecution against

Mr. Clarke and Obadiah Holmes, and others at Boston the chiefe Towne of the Massachusetts in

New England, 1651, reproduced in Miller, Roger Williams, 159.

10 Roger Williams, “Letter to the Readers” in The Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody: by

Mr. Cottons endevour to wash it white in the Blood of the Lambe (London, 1652), reproduced in

Miller, Roger Williams, 173.

11 Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent yet More Bloody, excerpt in Polishook, Roger

Williams, John Cotton, and Religious Freedom, 66. One of the recurring issues in the

controversy, evident here, is the distinction drawn by John Cotton (1585-1652) and other

Puritans between unjust persecution for conscience and legitimate punishment of a conscience

that sinned against itself by not coming to an acceptance of the truth. Williams rails against “Mr.

Clarkson, 7

For Williams, the way to counter error is not by means of civil coercive authority and

persecution but by open contest and trust in God.

Instead of fire and sword and stoning the opposites [religious opponents], instead

of imprisonment, banishment, death, [God] has appointed exhortations,

reprehensions, denunciations, excommunications, and together with preaching,

patient waiting, if God peradventure will give repentance.12

Cotton’s monstrous distinction…, not because they sin in matters of conscience (which he denies

the magistrate to deal in), but because they sin against their conscience” [Williams, The Copie of

a Letter of R. Williams of Providence in New England, to Major Endicot, reproduced in Miller,

Roger Williams, 160, 165]. In that letter, Williams also makes use of the same challenge that

persecutors may be in error and thereby persecute Christ:

Oh remember, it is a dangerous combat for the potsherds of the earth to fight with

their dreadful potter! It is a dismal battle for the poor naked feet to kick against

the pricks; it is a dreadful voice from the King of kings and Lord of lords:

“Endecott, Endecott, why huntest thou me? why imprisonest thou me? why finest,

why so bloodily whippest? why wouldst thou…hang and burn me?” Yea, sir, I

beseech you remember that it is a dangerous thing to put this to the may-be, to the

venture or hazard, to the possibility [that you punish godly men]. “Is it possible,”

may you well say, “that since I hunt, I hunt not the life of my Saviour and the

blood of the Lambe of God? I have fought against many several sorts of

consciences; is it beyond all possibility and hazard that I have not fought against

God, that I have not persecuted Jesus in some of them?”

Sir, I must be humbly bold to say, that ‘tis impossible for any man or men to

maintain their Christ by their sword and to worship a true Christ, to fight against

all consciences opposite to theirs, and not to fight against God in some of them

and to hunt after the precious life of the true Lord, Jesus Christ?...’Tis but worldly

policy and compliance with men and times (God’s mercy overruling) that holds

your hands from murdering of thousands and ten thousands were your power and

command as great as once the bloody Roman Emperor’s was [Williams, The

Copie of a Letter of R. Williams of Providence in New England, to Major Endicot,

in Miller, Roger Williams, 163].

12

Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenent yet more Bloody, excerpt in Polishook, Roger

Williams, John Cotton, and Religious Freedom, 84.

Clarkson, 8

While Williams was certainly in a position to shape the government of Rhode Island and enforce

his own vision of godliness (as he saw being done in the Bay colony), he developed Rhode

Island on the principle that coercion had no place in matters of faith and conscience.13

This is the context into which the Quakers inserted themselves in a great westward

expansion into the British settlements and colonies of the Atlantic world. The Quakers

themselves encountered periods of persecution in the Bay colony and along with other dissenters,

such as the so-called antinomian camp of Anne Hutchison, found sanctuary in Rhode Island.

While Barbados became a main hub for American expansion and mission, the Quakers quickly

established a substantial presence in Rhode Island and by the time of Williams’ disputation with

them, the Quakers dominated the civil government.14

L. Raymond Camp attributes Williams’ challenge to the Quakers to both his theological

convictions and “his negative feelings about the Quakers’ control of the Rhode Island

13

Pestana, Liberty of Conscience, 36. At the same time, freedom of conscience was

never allowed to give way to anarchy. Here, the other distinct principle – separation of church

and state – tempered spiritual liberty. The road from freedom of conscience to anarchy was also

the road from the spiritual estate to the proper exercise of civil authority [Chupack, Roger

Williams, 58]. In a now famous open letter to the people of Providence Williams explained

himself using the analogy of a ship. All passengers, “Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks” were

afforded liberty of conscience, but those in command were charged with maintaining “justice,

peace, and sobriety” as well as providing for common defense. Thus, those who failed the

common trust toward “peace or preservation” in “person or purse” or those who acted in a

seditious and mutinous manner fell under the jurisdiction of those in command to “judge, resist,

compel, and punish” [Roger Williams, “To the Town of Providence, ca. January 1655,” in Roger

Williams, Glenn W. LaFantasie, Robert S. Cocroft, and Bradford F. Swan, The Correspondence

of Roger Williams, 1654-1682 (Providence, RI:Brown University Press/University Press of New

England, 1988), 423-4].

14 Frederick Barnes Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (New York: Octagon

Books, 1980 [1960]), 12. According to Tolles, between the years of 1672 (the year of the

disputation) and 1768 “ten Quakers served for a total of thirty years as governors, and other

Friends held office as deputy-governors and assemblymen” [Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic

Culture, 49].

Clarkson, 9

government and their impact upon legislation.”15

The latter motivation is overstated both in

terms of the consistent advocacy of church-state separation and religious freedom that pervades

Williams works and from the evidence in Williams’ own account of the controversy. First, one

can concede that among Williams’ “ends” for which he undertook the endeavor was:

the vindicating this colony for receiving of such persons whome others would not,

we suffer for their sakes, and are accounted their abettors: that therefore together

with the improvement of our libertyes…I might give a publick testimony against

their opinions in such a way and exercise, I judged it incumbent upon my Spirit

and Conscience to doe it (in some regards) more than most in the colony.16

But this motivation is oriented toward the reputation of the colony and its sovereignty over

against its opponents; no mention is made of any particular platform or legislative agenda of the

Quakers. Rhode Island was continually fraught with the territorial ambitions of its neighbors and

Williams was often pressed into service for defense against the machinations and criticisms of

those who would like to see Rhode Island discredited.

Here, Camp is partially right in considering the Quakers’ political presence to be a

contributing factor to Williams challenge. The confluence of opprobrium toward the Quaker sect

and their position in colony government posed an acute threat as a weapon that might be wielded

by Rhode Islands enemies. Nevertheless, fearing that the antics and enthusiasm of the Quakers

might be used against Rhode Island, Williams took it upon himself to show that the free

exchange of ideas could refute their religious errors. Even in his proof of proposition fourteen

regarding the Quaker tendency toward arbitrary government and their persecutory spirit (see

Figure 1), Williams does not turn the debate toward politics or particular instances of government

policy or legislation.

15

L. Raymond Camp, Roger Williams, God’s Apostle of Advocacy: Biography and

Rhetoric (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1989), 177.

16 Williams, George Fox digg’d out, 40.

Clarkson, 10

Furthermore, the grounds for debate were religious, not political. Williams was true to

his conviction that open exhortation and exchange of ideas were the path to correcting error;

Williams opted for refutation of heresy over suppression. Thus, Williams left the judgment over

victory and defeat in the debate “to every person’s conscience, as they will answer to God.”17

Even while passionately proclaiming the Quakers’ grave and insidious errors, Williams’ own

argument against the Quakers’ spiritual arrogance limited his opposition to an appeal to

conscience: “neither dare I pass sentence of damnation upon any: for judgment belongeth to the

Lord, and we must stand or fall to our own master.”18

Throughout his account of the controversy

Williams confides the case to individual conscience.

This attentiveness to the religious grounds of the debate is essential for correcting the

historiographical misunderstanding of those who limit their interpretation of Williams’ life and

work by portraying him solely as an early political and social liberal. Seeing Williams as a

political thinker and pioneer tends to hail Williams as a proponent of freedom from religion

where the supreme value is the sanctity of the conscience.19

For such interpreters as these,

Williams’ ardent opposition to the Quakers appears as an inconsistency and a blemish. Indeed,

as Edwin Gaustad has so succinctly put it, “Some people might indeed believe in religious liberty

17

Ibid., 5.

18 Ibid., 15.

19 For a historiographical polemic against this school of Williams interpretation see the

pivotal article by Mauro Calamandrei, “Neglected Aspects of Roger Williams’ Thought,”

Church History 21, no. 3 (Sep 1952): 239-258 and LeRoy Moore, Jr., “Roger Williams and the

Historians,” Church History 32, no. 4 (Dec 1963): 432-451. Emblematic of this school are

George Bancroft, Samuel Hugh Brockunier, James Emanuel Ernst and Vernon Louis Parrington.

For more historiographical positions supporting the religious over the political interpretation of

Williams, see the following: Miller, Roger Williams, 28, 241; Robert J. Lowenherz, “Roger

Williams and the Great Quaker Debate,” American Quarterly 11, no. 2, pt 1 (Summer 1959):

157-165; Chupack, Roger Williams, 19-20, 133; and Lovejoy, “Roger Williams and George Fox:

The Arrogance of Self-Righteousness”: 212, 222.

Clarkson, 11

because, for them, religion matters so little. Roger Williams, on the other hand, believed in

religious liberty because religion mattered so much.”20

It is Williams’ fervent religious

commitment that serves as the hermeneutical key for unlocking not only Williams’ apparent

intolerance toward the Quakers but also the basis of that disagreement despite similarities

between the two parties in the controversy.

At the most basic level, Williams and the Quakers held affinities as dissenters, “arch-

Separatists,”21

and victims of persecution who advocated religious liberty. Frederick Tolles,

describing the origins of the Quakers, provides some ground for a shared primitivism and

Seekerism from the Quaker side. The Quakers sought to manifest “a basic religious ethos

derived from the very heart of the primitive Christian teaching,” referring to their movement as

“primitive Christianity revived.”22

This quest for the primitive church is closely related to the

Quaker repudiation of existing church forms. For Tolles, the epitome of George Fox as a

“religious seeker” is found when he “grew dissatisfied with the dusty answers he got from the

official spiritual guides of his day, and listened to an inward voice.”23

Williams, too, was something of a Primitivist and a Seeker. Though never self-

identifying as a Seeker, Williams spent the years after his departure from the Bay colony and

Plymouth searching for a church dispensation in accord with the primitive church of the apostles.

This quest at one time led Williams to Baptist life, when in 1639 he founded the first Baptist

20

Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 107-8.

21 Lovejoy, “Roger Williams and George Fox: The Arrogance of Self-Righteousness”:

208. Lovejoy’s article is an extended comparison and contrast between the two.

22 Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture, 2.

23 Ibid., 1. Likewise, Quakerism took its first breaths amid “seekers” in Lancashire,

England, following Fox’s vision upon Pendle Hill [Ibid., 4].

Clarkson, 12

church in America. But his tenure as a Baptist was short-lived (as little as four months) as

Williams became convinced that no ministry or church in existence stood directly in the line of

apostolic succession.24

Because the apostolic succession had been severed and, thus, no church

in his time was pure or validly gathered, what was needed was for Christ to personally intervene

and re-found a visible church in the world. Until then, true Christian worship had ceased and it

was prophets who would lead Christ’s people through the wilderness in the interim.25

This ecclesial model, with its prophets called and empowered by the spirit of God, seems

to offer a point of connection between Williams and the Quakers, who similarly repudiated

existing church structures and saw themselves as empowered by the spirit of God as God’s

messengers of truth to all (including those trapped in the error of prevailing church

institutions).26

Yet these similarities are insufficient to curb Williams’ opposition to the

Quakers. It just might be, as Jason Dykehouse suggests, that Williams’ ire was up over the fact

that the Quakers had abandoned Seekerism’s “externally eschatological worldview,” which

anticipated an imminent intervention by Christ for rebirth of the church through apostolic

24

Thus, according to Chupack, Williams rejected the Baptist’s spiritual succession. The

Roman Catholic Church was ruled out because Williams likewise held the conviction that God

would not perpetuate the ministry and the church via anti-Christian conduits. According to

Williams, that line had been lost with the rise of Constantine Christianity [the ‘apostasy’].

Chupack, Roger Williams, 60, 115-6.

25 Sydney V. James, “Ecclesiastical Authority in the Land of Roger Williams,” New

England Quarterly 57, no. 3 (Sep 1984): 329. See also, Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams:

The Church and the State (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 50-6.

26 For an in-depth and informative analysis of how Williams’ views of the church and its

ministry fueled his extreme separatism and his eventual development into a “seeker,” see chapter

2, “The Church and Its Ministry,” in Morgan, Roger Williams, 28-61. Jason C. Dykehouse

provides an important investigation into Roger Williams’ Seekerism and the difficulties

surrounding definitions of the Seekers as a sect in “Where Has Roger Williams’ Seekerism

Gone? A Reassessment of Williams’ Relation to the Sixteenth-Century Sect,” American Baptist

Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Dec 2005): 356-75.

Clarkson, 13

commission, for an internalized and mystical worldview that flew in the face of his staunch

Calvinism.27

Williams’ account of the disputation supports such a theory.

In the debate over the second proposition Williams accused the Quakers of “denying any

visible church of Christ at all” and maintaining that “the church was in God and so not visible.”28

The ramifications of this position, according to Williams, were the denial of church officers,

baptism and the Lord’s Supper. To this point Stubs countered that Williams himself was guilty

of the same, of “not living in church ordinances my self.”29

Williams’ response hinges upon the

distinction between visible and invisible.

After all my search and examinations and considerations I said, I do profess to

believe, that some come nearer to the first primitive churches, and the institutions

and appointments of Christ Jesus than others, as in many respects so in that

gallant and heavenly and fundamental principle of the true matter of a Christian

congregation, flock or society, viz. actual believers, true disciples and converts.

Living stones, such as can give some account how the grace of God hath appeared

unto them and wrought that heavenly change in them. I professed that if my soul

could finde rest in joyning unto any of the churches professing Christ Jesus now

extant, I would readily and gladly do it, yea unto themselves whom I now

opposed.30

For Williams, the church and its ordinances remain visible and external in their nature, despite

that fact that no actual instances of them are in existence or can come about without a new

apostolic commission from Christ. While Williams and the Quakers may both be Seekers in

27

Dykehouse, “Where Has Roger Williams’ Seekerism Gone?”: 370.

28 Williams, George Fox digg’d out, 102.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 103. See also 165-6, where Williams again argues that the Quakers deny the

church and ordinances. Williams goes on to argue that even were the church rightfully

considered invisible, “their churches and congregations are known and visible.” Thus there is an

external and visible manifestation of the church that includes standards, but they ignore such

standards by having continual recourse to the arbitrariness of their supposed revelations and

inner light. See also, Morgan, Roger Williams, 59.

Clarkson, 14

their repudiation of existing church forms, Williams remains a Seeker in his anticipation of

divinely re-instituted visible church and sees the Quakers as having given up this essential aspect

of ecclesiology by having “found” the church inwardly and invisibly in their own inner light.

In addition to disputation over explicitly ecclesiological questions, there are two key

issues that exemplify Williams’ distinction between the visible and the invisible, where Williams

takes on the Quaker doctrine of the inner light and finds it not only unsatisfactory but downright

demonic in light of his Calvinist convictions: scripture and theological anthropology.31

At its

most basic Williams argument that the Quakers “doe not own the holy scriptures”32

refers to how

“this holy book and writing of God should be so undervalued and slighted, yea vilified and

nullified, if compar’d with their pretended new found light within them.”33

Because of the

spiritual arrogance that comes with their doctrine of the inner light, the scriptures are not

submitted to in humble obedience and obeyed and the regeneration and sanctification of the

children of God is “hindred and quenched, by neglecting of the holy fuel of the holy scriptures

31

Morgan aptly describes George Fox digg’d out as a “disorganized, repetitious,

tiresome, and sometimes eloquent diatribe” [Morgan, Roger Williams, 56]. The text is replete

with circuitous and interwoven themes that make it difficult to identify (and then describe) only

the most important themes pertaining to Williams’ opposition to the Quakers. For example,

Williams never misses an opportunity to criticize the incivility of the Quakers, especially the

alleged propensity of their women to strip naked in public. Likewise, Williams has much to say

about such topics as the Quaker denial of the human nature and person of Christ, their spiritual

arrogance and self-proclaimed “infallibility,” their irrationality and contradictions, their faulty

views of repentance and salvation, their vulnerability to a persecutory spirit, and their formal, if

not material, equivalence with “papists” and Jesuits. In what follows, I provide what I consider

to be the two most fundamental arguments presented by Williams – scripture and theological

anthropology – under which virtually all other themes can be brought into relationship and

perspective. For additional analysis of George Fox digg’d out of his burrowes and a comparison

and contrast of Fox and Williams, see Lovejoy, “Roger Williams and George Fox: The

Arrogance of Self-Righteousness” and Chupack, Roger Williams, 133-44.

32 Williams, George Fox digg’d out, (proposition four) 4, (debated) 137-162.

33 Ibid., 49.

Clarkson, 15

and other holy means appointed.”34

Lest this collection of dispersed points do an injustice to the

passion of Williams’ prose there is this:

This shews the Quakers horrible wickedness, that although they love the holy

scripture…as well as doth their lying Father [Satan], yet turn they the truth of God

into a lye, and with the ugly spider sucks that which he turns into poyson, even

from the same flowers of paradice, the holy scriptures, from whence the hony

bees, the true believers, suck the pure hony of eternal truth and comfort.35

Having broken free from any mooring in the external authority the Quakers sink into irrationality

and worse, because “a rational soul must be able to try whether the spirit pretending to be a true

or lying spirit, and that it must have some rule or touch-stone to make their tryal by, that the rule

must be my own reason, or some testimony of unquestionable witnesses satisfying my reason, or

some heavenly inspired scripture or writing which my reason tells me came from God.”36

Thus,

throughout the treatise Quaker faults such as incivility, spiritual arrogance and “Jesuitical

equivocation” are attributable this lack of standard and authority in which the Quakers put

themselves above scripture.

A similar situation obtains when it comes to theological anthropology; that is, the Quaker

assessment of human nature. It is here that Williams staunch Calvinism and its doctrine of

human depravity run head-on into the Quaker doctrine that the inner light is present in all people.

For Williams, Quaker salvation as the awakening of the inner light, thus places the basis of

salvation within the human nature does a grave injustice to the operations of grace.

The papists and Quakers shake hands in the most hellish doctrine of justification

by what is within us, by what Christ works within us, in short, by what is called

34

Ibid., 137.

35 Ibid., 155.

36 Ibid., 127.

Clarkson, 16

sanctification put for justification, and the forgiveness of sin, in and for the merits

of the Lord Jesus freely imputed and given to us.37

Thus, Williams considers “the papists and the Arminians, the Pelagians and the Semipelagians,

and the Quakers” equivalent terms. And again, lest this collection of dispersed points do an

injustice to the passion of Williams’ prose there is this:

For the foundation both of the papists and Quakers faith is laid upon the sand of

rotten nature which they (both) only adorn and trim as the dead carcasses and

coffins with roses and lillies and other flowers and garlands, their own penance

satisfactions, alms, prayers, fastings, sufferings, which are but womens filthy

clouts, and dung of men and beasts put into the balance of Gods infinite justice,

instead of the infinite righteousness and satisfaction of the son of God.38

This issue of theological anthropology has profound implications. Just as Williams attributed a

wide spectrum of Quaker faults to their devaluation of scripture, so Williams also attributed a

litany of doctrinal problems to the Quakers’ faulty view of human nature, underneath which

rested the doctrine of the inner light. Of paramount importance was that such a view of human

nature obviates the need for Christ.39

It was the ultimate spiritual arrogance, the root of the

Quakers’ doctrinal deficiency concerning repentance, faith, hope, peace and joy.40

Through the lens of Williams’ doctrines of scripture and human nature one can see the

breadth and depth to which Williams saw that the Quaker doctrine of inner light took what

should be external – authority, righteousness, the church and its ordinances – and moved them

37

Ibid., 203.

38 Ibid., 235.

39 Ibid., 194, 198, 203, 255, passim.

40 Ibid., 179-87. Not forgetting that Williams’ original contention with the Bay colony

and Plymouth revolved around three issues – separatism, Native Americans, and religious liberty

– it is noteworthy that Lovejoy uses the Quakers’ and Williams’ conceptions of Native

Americans and theological anthropology as a vehicle for contrasting their thought [Lovejoy,

“Roger Williams and George Fox: The Arrogance of Self-Righteousness”: 218-20].

Clarkson, 17

internal.41

This was a point of difference more than able to overcome any affinities there might

have been between Williams’ and the Quakers as dissenters, Separatists, Primitivists or Seekers.

For Williams, the Quakers had taken these impulses in an unacceptable direction and ended up

fanatics and enthusiasts. As a result, Williams contended with the Quakers publicly to persuade

all who would hear to a truth of which they could judge according to their consciences.

Attentiveness to the religious foundation of Williams’ advocacy for freedom of conscience and

the doctrinal foundation of his repudiation of Quaker doctrines dispels the apparent tensions

between Williams’ convictions and his controversy with Rhode Island’s Quakers.

41

Thus Morgan notes that “because of the Quakers’ deficient sense of the distance

between man and God, they confused flesh and spirit, visible and invisible, church and world”

[Morgan, Roger Williams, 60].

Clarkson, 18

Clarkson, 19

Figure 1. Roger Williams' Letter Challenging George Fox Consisting of 14 Propositions for Disputation42

42

Williams, George Fox digg’d out, 3-5.

Clarkson, 20

Clarkson, 21

Clarkson, 22

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