KIRIKUD JA ÜHISKONDLIK KORD: BAPTISTLIK VAATENURK. (Estonian)

The Churches and the Social Order: Baptist Perspectives. (English)

The article explores a Baptist approach to the relationship of ‘free’ churches to society and in particular to the state. It describes ‘monopoly religion’ as the attempt to establish one approach as the uniform religion of a society. In the West this took the form of ‘Christendom’. A divergent understanding arose with the Anabaptist and Baptist movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This denied the right of rulers to override the religious conscience in its duties to God. From 1644 his instinctive approach found intellectual expression through figures such as Roger Williams and John Milton laying the foundations for a political ideology of religious freedom. Although this took root only slowly it has eventually achieved dominance in a range of liberal democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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