Name: Slaying Leviathan
ISBN: 9781952410727

Glenn S. Sunshine

Limited Government and Resistance in the Christian Tradition

Slaying Leviathan

Sean Wilson

A very easy read, almost conversational in its style. And given the space constraints, I thought this was a good overview of the major developments in Christian political thinking, as well as tracing those influences down to their secularised descendants. He covers a lot of ground in a reasonably short book.
Sunshine is trying to defend the thesis that Christians have, from the beginning although not consistently, thought in terms of separation of church and state and supported religious freedom in the civil sphere. Thus, Augustine’s support of the civil magistrate forcing heretics to recant during the Donatist controversy, or the fact that the magisterial reformers were generally comfortable with state churches are cast as falling away from this purer vision: “Christianity is the only major world religion to begin and spread without government support” (12).
However, Sunshine gets himself into a bit of a knot with the claim that “religion and government in Christianity are separate institutions with different spheres of authority and with distinct responsibilities” (10). If he means that the institutional church is and ought to be distinct from the civil government, that’s one kind of claim; it is another kind of claim to say that Religion occupies a sphere hermetically sealed from Government. 
Sunshine describes a tug-of-war between Church and State over the last several centuries. If we don’t want a Leviathan, then who is the referee in this game? The ascended Lord Jesus seems like a good candidate in my view.
The most value in this book comes from its high level overview of the history of thought on this topic, but I think the thesis to which he’s driving is, at best, underdeveloped.

Slaying Leviathan Limited Government and Resistance in the Christian Tradition