This post ought to be fairly straightforward, because this next chapter by Darryl was, taking one thing with another, outstanding. Of course I am suspicious of where he is placing it, but still the historical review he gives is very, very good. He begins with a discussion of the famous American trope, “a city on a hill,” lifted from the Sermon on the Mount in a sermon by John Winthrop, and lifted by countless tub-thumping American politicos since. He discusses the development of this idea through American history, distinguishes between the optimistic postmillennial Americans and the pessimistic premills, and then discusses Augustine’s distinction between the two cities, the city of man and the city of God. He also shows that both Luther and Calvin interpreted the phrase “city on a hill” in ecclesiastical terms.
There are only two comments that I would want to make, and, depending on what Darryl does with them later, they may not even be criticisms. The first is that firmer distinctions must be made between the robustly Christian vision of the early fathers like Winthrop and the anemic optimism of their pre-World War I descendants. There is a vast canyon between the early postmillenialists, who believed that the gospel preached would bring the nations to Christ, and the pale, washed-out optimisms of foreign policy dreamers two centuries later. Darryl is quite right that Massachusetts Bay Colony was “an effort to perpetuate Christendom” (p. 38). But this effort stands alongside countless other variants of Christendom, and has nothing at all to do with secularized “Christendom,” a “Protestantism without God” (p. 45). There were problems with the New England effort, chief among them impatience and over-reaching, but these problems have little or nothing in common with the vague, gaseous Uplift that the mainline denominations were peddling several centuries later.
The second comment is this: Darryl relies on Augustine, and cites Luther and Calvin on the “city on the hill” being the church, but I suspect his application misses the point. All three of these gentlemen had very decided views on the governmental distinction that needed to be maintained between the church and the state. But all three of them were also living in a time when the magistrate, dirty hands and all, still confessed Christ, and was still willing to listen to the Church when the Church spoke. Whether we are talking about Augustine and the Donatists, or Luther and the Peasants, or Calvin and Servetus, it is very clear that the division between Church and state was not as tidy in their minds as it appears to be in Darryl’s. My point is not to praise or blame these men in these instances, which can be done elsewhere. My point is more obvious — that if someone suggested to Luther, or Calvin, or Augustine that a rising candidate for emperor named Julian the Apostate appeared to be quite a fine fellow, classically educated and all, and his campaign literature is quite glossy, none of the three would respond with, “You know, that is a secular, political matter. Doesn’t really matter to me.” Not even close.
Think of it another way. The United States could have a constitutional amendment passed, acknowledging the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all things, make Augustine the bishop of Des Moines, outlaw abortion and homosexual marriage, and Augustine could still have written his book The City of God. To say that the temporary governments of this world are not the church of God is not the same thing as saying that they should not, or need not, be Christian. “Temporal” and “secular” are not synonyms.
If I owned a business, Wilson’s Widgets, and I wanted that business to be Christian, which I would, being a Christian myself, I could do this without in any way believing that in the eschaton I was going to be presented with a brand new Wilson’s Widgets sign, and a corner of glory land in which to set up shop. Just because something is not eternal does not give it the right to rebel against the authority of Jesus now, or to be agnostic about Him.
As we set about establishing the next Christendom, we must take care to avoid the pitfalls and grievous sins committed in the first one. But right now, we need to be avoiding another problem — our accommodation with the Enlightenment’s take on secular neutrality, the idea that secularism is even possible. With that in mind, consider that John Colwell, summarizing Oliver O’Donovan, says that “secular authorities have been in serious trouble since Jesus rose from the dead; his rising marks their end both in the sense of their termination and in the sense of the revealing of the authentic goal and mediated authority; the most pressing danger for the Church is not that of illegitimately appropriating to itself such secular power but rather of according to such secular power a legitimacy and significance that it no longer possesses” (emphasis mine).