RSSRichard Gamble on A Secular Faith
Wilson’s article reminded me of last year’s exciting discussion of D.G. Hart’s excellent A Secular Faith. I will not rehash my objections to the book but will restate my deep appreciation for Darryl’s cogent arguments and much needed warnings.
At any rate, RP minister Aaron Goerner sent me this Richard Gamble review of A Secular Faith. The review ran in the OPC magazine Ordained Servant. Keep in mind that this Richard Gamble is not the RPTS Gamble but the Hillsdale College Richard Gamble. Readers of this blog are familiar with the former but need to be better aquanted with the latter. A significant conservative voice among Reformed Protestants. Both are excellent scholars, politically and theologically conservative, but the Hillsdale version is better groomed– just kidding Rick.
Baus
January 19th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Richard M Gamble’s review of Hart’s book is essentially this:
In A Secular Faith, historian Darryl Hart takes up the confusion of church and state in modern America… In his trademark way, Hart steps out of the unimaginative historical framework that arranges political and theological conflicts in America along a spectrum from “liberal” to “conservative.” Instead of that conventional device, he works through a set of popular but largely unexamined “truisms” about the right ordering of church and state in America to show that these cultural presuppositions cut right across categories of liberal and conservative, fundamentalist and modernist, evangelical and mainline, postmillennialist and premillennialist, Catholic and Protestant.
Underneath the public wrangling, adversaries within American Christianity and politics -—such as Jim Wallis and Richard John Neuhaus—- essentially agree about the church’s mandate to transform the culture. [thus neocalvinism, because it does not agree that the institutional church has such a mandate, remains outside of Hart's discussion --ed,Baus] Since Winthrop first “fused divine intentions for the church with human efforts to construct a just and harmonious society,” Hart writes, Americans of all varieties have had the bad habit of measuring the church’s success or failure by the degree to which it perpetuates Christendom, redeems politics, promotes public order and morality, gets a voice in the “public square,” and sustains liberal democracy.
Hart’s argument stands on the refreshingly countercultural premise that Jesus and the apostles founded Christianity to be an otherworldly, apolitical, and unavoidably divisive faith practiced largely in private by adherents who live “hyphenated” lives as citizens of two cities. Hart sees these attributes as normative for the Christian life. In its “classic formulations,” he writes, Christianity “has very little to say about politics or the ordering of society.” It has something to say, certainly, and its fundamental teachings have demonstrably had “implications for politics.” But it offers no blueprint. Simply put, “the basic teachings of Christianity are virtually useless for resolving America’s political disputes, thus significantly reducing, if not eliminating, the dilemma of how to relate Christianity and American politics.”
While ancient Israel had indeed been founded as a theocracy that fused cult and culture into a single whole, Christianity divided the state off into a separate, though legitimate, realm. The church, not the state, inherited Israel’s status as the chosen nation. “Christianity,” Hart writes, “separated what the Old Testament bound together.” The secular state has no calling and no capacity to become the City of God. Its legitimacy as an institution in no way hinges on its being sanctified by the church. Separation helps maintain the integrity of both church and state by allowing each of them to fulfill its calling without transgressing or co-opting the other’s. Unlike the Israelites of old, Christians are called to live a “double life” as exiles and strangers, often forced, as was the Apostle Paul, to choose between the conflicting demands of God and Caesar.
Hart finds American Christianity confused and distracted by its quest for political and cultural influence. Christians of all types distort and misconstrue their faith by substituting a new calling and mission for the church’s biblical mandate. In their well-meaning but misguided quest to enhance Christianity’s cultural and political relevance in the world, activist Christians end up trivializing their faith. They trivialize their spiritual liberty into demands for crèches in front of city hall and trivialize weighty biblical doctrine into merely good advice for upholding public morality.
To those who sense that something is wrong with the dominant political theology in America, Hart reintroduces the possibility that Christianity was never meant to make a good civil religion. The secular realm usually finds its defenders among ideologues who fear that the church poses a grave threat to the health of the state. To a degree, Hart concurs. But he defends the secular realm primarily as a means to defend from politicization the church’s higher calling.
If A Secular Faith succeeds only in making Christians more self-conscious about how they think and speak, more alert when politicians appropriate the church’s metaphors, more likely to return to first principles when they defend their model of the church, then Hart will have made a significant contribution to maintaining the integrity of both church and state. He may even open the modern Christian’s imagination to the possibility that the much-criticized secular state carves out the very environment in which the church is freest to be the church. As for those who care more about a robust Americanism than a healthy church, Hart invites them to “find another religion.”