Darryl G. Hart is a Church and American religious historian (yes, those are two distinct categories), and a ruling elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I've read several of his books and attended some of his lectures, mostly of a historical and sociological bent, and am rather appreciative of his lonely quest to ground Christian identity in the marks of the visible Church rather than the ineffable experiences in which most American baptists and evangelicals try to root their assurance of salvation. As sympathetic readers of this blog know, it's a quixotic endeavor, and in much of his scholarly work I find Hart a supportive voice in the campaign to restore the visible Church to her God-ordained primacy.
However.
Some years ago now, I heard an interview in which a political thinker of some note (no, I can't remember who it was) was asked what he thought of something
Ann Coulter had recently said. After a moment of sincere hesitation, he responded to the effect that he considered Ann Coulter a performance artist, not a political analyst; and since he didn't think she believed what she said, he didn't feel any obligation to refect on her words either. I think much the same thing when I read Darryl Hart on the relationship of Church and state or of Christian to these United States. There's a serious philosophy in there, but he demands a consistency and purity which seems to me utterly disconnected from the world in which we live.
While I am accordingly dubious of much which appears on his
blog, this month I was driven to jaw-dropping astonishment by his
review of Richard Gamble's
In Search of the City on the Hill, which appears in the current
Ordained Servant. I haven't read Gamble's book, which explores the ways in which a metaphor Jesus deployed in the Sermon on the Mount to describe his disciples and the Church was appropriated into American political rhetoric. An interesting topic, that, and perhaps Gamble succeeds in even-handedness and nuance. Hart does not. His stance becomes a self-defeating posture in the final paragraph of his review (commas supplied by my compulsion to line-edit):
Far too often Christians in the United States have let partisan politics
obscure their higher commitment to Scripture. That is why evangelical
Protestants, for instance, overwhelmingly supported Republican
candidates who, despite the misuse of biblical language, appeared to be
defending traditional American ideals. Of course, as Gamble shows, those
ideals were not Jesus’s or Winthrop’s. But patriotism proved to be a
more forceful influence than Scripture’s own teaching.
Re-read that paragraph if you like (I certainly have), or go read it in its original context. Hart seems to suggest that evangelicals who vote for candidates who defend traditional American ideals are somehow betraying Scriptural ideals. Wait: really? Writing as someone who chooses to vote for fringe candidates rather than compromise my (admittedly idiosyncratic and unspeakably lofty) principles, I nonetheless understand why other Christians make a different choice. If one believes the best way forward is to participate in the system as it currently operates, perhaps in the hope of gradual reformation towards more genuinely constitutional principles, that's a legitimate choice which, in itself, doesn't compromise one's allegiance to Christ's Lordship (at least so far as I can tell). Given that prior choice, why wouldn't a Christian vote for candidates who appear to defend traditional American values, not to mention what was once the consensus moral position in our national culture?
With (I am given to understand) Richard Gamble, Hart appears shocked, shocked, that 20th century politicians would appropriate a Biblical metaphor and Christians not rise up in furious umbrage. Now, I hate to point this out to historians, but America is an English-speaking country, and the two greatest influences on all educated discourse amongst English-speaking peoples are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. As a high-Church presbyterian, I believe only the Church is the city on the hill in the way Jesus meant that metaphor. As an American devoted to the propositions on which this nation was founded, I in all sincerity believe these United States are also a city on a hill and a light to the nations, but in a way quite different from the way in which the Church is. If I can believe both of those things, then a man of Hart's learning and education ought at least to understand that such a reconciliation of beliefs is possible, and that one can think of America as a city on a hill without being a blinkered idiot who has abandoned all commitment to Biblical principle in the public sphere.
Darryl Hart has some interesting points to make about the way Christians conceive of their role in the political arena. Perhaps if he presented them with more nuance and seriousness, those points would be taken seriously.
Over at the First Things website, James R. Rogers provides a fascinating analysis of a legislative battle in Virginia in the 1780s, when Patrick Henry introduced a bill which would impose a tax which would go to support pastors, the maintenance of Church buildings, and a system of public schools. Those in the Christian home schooling movement who have apotheositized Patrick Henry would do well to consider his arguments alongside those of his successful opponents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and ask who best understood the proper relationship of the state to the Church.
Some years ago now, I heard an interview in which a political thinker of some note (no, I can't remember who it was) was asked what he thought of something Ann Coulter had recently said. After a moment of sincere hesitation, he responded to the effect that he considered Ann Coulter a performance artist, not a political analyst; and since he didn't think she believed what she said, he didn't feel any obligation to refect on her words either. I think much the same thing when I read Darryl Hart on the relationship of Church and state or of Christian to these United States. There's a serious philosophy in there, but he demands a consistency and purity which seems to me utterly disconnected from the world in which we live.
Van Til argued that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is the sole means by which to resolve the philosopher's inability to reconcile the one and the many. In the midst of an otherwise middling "God of the Philosophers" in the June/July 2007 issue of First Things, Wolfhart Pannenberg has a paragraph which I think Van Til might have liked. (Emphases are original.)
Congratulations, barbarian hordes. You win this round. But you're not getting my snarky superiority complex until you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
“How do I tell you abut my conversion to Christianity without making it sound like an alien abduction or a train wreck? Truth be told, it felt like a little of both.” Rosaria Butterfield returns to the train wreck metaphor several times in The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (which I review here), and she justifies it with ample evidence. Her encounter with the Gospel turned everything upside-down and inside-out, so much so that her current life bears almost no resemblance to her life before Christ.
Centuries from now when our descendants are living in caves, hiding from the robot overlords ruling the dystopian landscape, they will know the moment humanity became too weak and flabby to defend itself arrived with the "S'more to Love STL-400 4-S'more Maker." Designed for those who find it too complicated to toast a marshmellow on a stick, then insert it between two graham crackers and a piece of milk chocolate (if you're not too ashamed to identify yourselves).