Reading
A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors a Separation of Church and State

DG Hart has written a new book, the title of which is identified above. I have not yet read the book, but there is a fascinating discussion about its premise on De Regno Christi [The Reign of Christ] website Dr. Hart explains the book thusly:

What A Secular Faith proposes to do is examine a set of assumptions about religion and American politics held primarily by Protestants. The book examines eight of these assumptions, identifies them with important historical figures, from John Winthrop and John Witherspoon to Martin Luther King, Jr., and George W. Bush, and shows how they developed among American Protestants as these believers tried to defend and maintain a Christian America.The first chapter accordingly begins with John Winthrop’s appeal to the biblical refrain of a “city on a hill” and examines the eschatology that has informed American Protestant appeals to their nation’s providential role in human history. The problem, as I see it, is that a flawed eschatology has resulted in two significant errors. The first is an identification of God’s redemptive purposes with the U.S.A. Although many Reformed Christians know better than to equate the U.S.A. with Israel, many Presbyterians do think of America in religious categories that fail to do justice to sovereignty and legitimacy of other nation-states, as if America were better because of its Christian heritage. A second and more important error has been to undervalue the institutional church as the locus of God’s saving work. Because of sufficiency of Christ’s ministry, God’s redemptive purposes are now being carried out not by Israel (or any nation) but by the church, a trans-national and spiritual institution.This does not appear to me to be a very controversial argument for anyone who has imbibed the redemptive historical insights of a Geerhardus Vos or a John Murray. And yet, recognizing that God’s saving work is now spiritual and not physical, ecclesiological and not civil, is a proposition that does not sit well with Protestants who continue to think in some way of America as a Christian nation

With the success at the box office of Amazing Grace, the ideas of how or whether Christians are to be agents of change in government [civil authorities] is certainly a topic of current interest. Darryl Hart poses 3 questions he thinks important for “laying down the gauntlet” of thinking on the 1st chapter of his book:

1] To what extent does eschatology determine one’s understanding of the relationship between church and state?
2] Is the idea of a Christian America a hangover of postmillennial optimism (with pre-millennialism being the pessimistic flipside)?
3] In other words, is the spirituality of the church merely the logical consequence of a-millennialism?

A while back I posted on millennial views. Darryl Hart proposed that millennial views have greatly influenced the way Americas look at their relationship to the civil authorities and maybe we must step back and see why Christians are deeply involved in politics and analyze if that is a proper response for Biblical Christians. Read the comments at De Regno Christi, you will find them fascinating.