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In 1644 Roger Williams, original theorist of the separation of church and state, traveled to London to print his classic call for religious toleration, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution. Parliament ordered copies of the book burned, but Williams saved some and brought them back to Rhode Island.

This August, when Phoebe Simpson, a librarian at the Rhode Island Historical Society, opened some other historical writings on a shelf with rare books, she discovered one of the few 1644 editions of Bloudy Tenent that remain (only five other copies of this edition are known to exist). "I just broke out in goose bumps," Simpson said in an interview. "It was the pure excitement of touching something that Roger Williams touched."

Williams came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. A man ahead of his time, he interpreted the bloody religious strife of 16th- and 17th-century Europe as a warning from God against mixing religion and politics. After he extended this disestablishmentarian critique to the colony itself, he was banished and forced to seek refuge in the wilderness. There, he purchased a tract of land from the Native Americans and founded Rhode Island.

A great task lies ahead for all Christians: to move toward mutual understanding across the global church's many cultures. Today, two museums are playing their roles in linking Asian and Western Christians.

The Korean Christian Museum at Soongsil University in Seoul, South Korea, is the first museum in that country to tell the story of how Christianity vitalized Korean culture after it officially reached the peninsula around the 17th century. Among the sculptures, books, and other artifacts is a copy of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress translated into Korean in the 19th century. The museum also holds a large collection of relics brought in through China between the 7th and 8th centuries, including a 7th-century Nestorian stone cross excavated in Gyeongju.

Meanwhile, in North Chatham, Massachusetts, another museum draws Japanese "pilgrims." These visitors come to the Chatham Historical Society's Atwood House Museum to remember a sea captain who was instrumental in helping a young Japanese man reach America in 1865. Captain Horace Taylor brought young Shimeta Neesima to America aboard his ship, the Wild Rover, represented in a painting at the museum. Neesima was one of the first Japanese to escape the country during its years as a closed society. Receiving a sought-after Christian education in America, Neesima was eventually ordained as a Congregational minister at Mount Vernon Church in Boston and then returned to Japan to found, in 1875, one of its first Western-style universities, Doshisha University in Kyoto. Today, Neesima is remembered as one of Japan's greatest Christian leaders.

If your travel budget doesn't currently allow for a trip to Rome to walk the tunnels of the catacombs and visit the basilicas of the early Roman Christians, two visual and informational feasts can give you a sense of being there. First, check out www.catacombe.roma.it. The site, created by Roman Catholics, includes many photographs and brief, clear explanations of the history, symbolism, and spirituality of the catacombs.

Second, you can browse the glossy pages and unique "overlay" format of Philippe Pergola's compact, spiral-bound Christian Rome: Past and Present: Early Christian Rome—Catacombs and Basilicas (Oxford University Press/Getty Trust Publications, 2002). As the introduction proclaims, "The oldest concrete evidence concerning the Roman martyrs and the early Roman Christians is preserved in eloquent abundance in the Roman catacombs." The book also shows, through overlay transparencies, how a number of the catacombs and basilicas have been restored through the centuries.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History & Biography magazine.
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