I don't have a lot of time right now to discuss but I read
this essay by Joshua Mitchell and think it might be able to contribute to the convo but at a step removed. Mitchell is an evangelical who teaches at Georgetown, a Catholic university. His basic thesis is thus:
Various Christian traditions, speaking in broad strokes, understand their theology through different lenses and those lenses then shape the way they do Church and relate to the world. E.g.
1. The Orthodox use Plato as their lens and thus see the world as a poor shadow or copy of the real and true spiritual realm. The goal of Orthodox practice is Theosis, spiritual union with God through shedding and purifying the material. I'm unclear on how the Orthodox relate to the state but a stab in the dark, considering both history and Platonic thought, would be something like: an indifference to what the state does and a blessing on its activities insofar as the state clears the ground for the church to perform its much more important functions of "theosifying". This may be why orthodox states are in part, less developed materially and scientifically than their Catholic and Protestant neighbors.
2. The Catholics via Aquinas, use Aristotle and thus see reality embedded in material things. The material is not something to be shed or eschewed but reformed via virtuous practice. Thus enters the state to help proscribe right and virtuous living. The Church and the State work together to reform the individual and guide him towards his teleological end.
3. The Protestant Reformers, divided between the Protestants (Lutherans) and the Reformers (Calvinists), reject the Greek philosophical tradition and instead view their theology through the lens of the Hebrews or better put, Biblical History.
a. Protestants (Lutherans):
" In Luther’s case, “Jew” and “Christian” are more than individual persons or gatherings of persons into a synagogue or ecclesia. They are ideal-type categories that correspond to two distinct historical moments within providential history, each of which specifies a distinct relationship between God and man. “Jew” is carnal, Law, exteriority, childhood-of-the-soul, etc., while “Christian” is spiritual, Gospel, interiority, adulthood-of-the-soul, etc. There is more. The relationship between these two moments is dialectical. The former prefigures and promises the latter. The former is the already-and-the-not-yet of the latter. The “Jew” is already-and-not-yet of the “Christian.” Luther’s answer to Rome’s Aristotle is this historico-dialectical relationship between Judaism and Christianity."
Mitchell, sees a line between Luther and German Idealism (Kant, Hegel and Marx) and thus to Nietzsche and post-modernity. For our purposes here though we might recognize that Lutheran theology sees the state as responsible for transformation of the individual and society with the church acting as chaplain.
b. Reformers (Calvinists):
"We might call this variant “Hebraic Christianity.” Here, the Jews are not a preamble to be converted, but an older brother to be learned from. Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion is clearly at the epicenter of this expansive bottom-up rather than top-down development...In man’s wounded, sinful condition, his proper relationship to God, and to what He promised us, has been revealed through the Old and New Testament covenants He established, by being bound to which, man attains unto federal liberty. The whole of the Bible, containing those covenants and more, is sufficient to the life of man in God’s creation."
America might be the example
par excellence of this theology turned towards statecraft:
"The key categories of the American self-understanding—wound, promise, covenant, federalism, trust—originate in Jerusalem, not Athens...America is the New Israel, the City on the Hill, the light to enlighten the nations, a battleground on which Satan and his legion tirelessly seek to undermine the promise of God’s New Israel. Did not King’s speech on the steps of Lincoln’s temple in 1963 call on America to live up to that promise? And a half century earlier, did not Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909) seek to lead stiff-necked Americans (Exod. 32:9), still fixed on the Founders’ constitution, out of their Sinai desert wanderings, along a path marked out by Progressivism—that last great undertaking of WASP America? Errancy and return: this is the New Israel’s perennially erratic path through providential history. America is not Aristotle’s polis, nor is it the faint glimmer of Plato’s iridescent City set up in the Heavens. America is the 40-year wandering of Exodus, searching for the American Dream-land of milk and honey (Exod. 33:3). Is not the frontier—from its “Westward” iteration in the nineteenth century to Musk’s expansive vision for Mars in the twenty-first century—an American recapitulation of Exodus for the New World, and for other Worlds, without end?
§18. America is neither the hierarchy of Rome nor that great deformation, the French Revolution, from which comes the idea of the equality of all, tout court. Between hierarchy and equality, Hebraic-Christianity affirms the equality of all, not in their dignity, but in their sinfulness, modified in light of the gifts and competencies mysteriously bestowed by God under the heading of “calling,” which each Christian must claim and act out in history."
Thus Calvinism is the stream that most fully integrates and "harmonizes" state and church. Distinctions between the two ultimately collapse because God is sovereign over all and the history of mankind leads inexorably towards the reign of the church in ordering the world.