Just Passing Through

Growing up, I sang a hymn with the opening line, "This world is not my home I'm just passing through."  We don't hear that sentiment much anymore in conversations about Christian stewardship and the environment, but it undoubtedly still shapes many Christians' hesitation about fully embracing the climate change struggle.  Writing in the New Atlantis (HT: Touchstone), S.M. Hutchens explains:

The principal difference in the horizons against which orthodox Christianity and earth-piety work is that the earth as it presently exists is the eschatological telos of the latter’s vision, while for the former it is subsumed under the more general category of Creation. The concept of Creation carries with it belief in the biblical God as its Creator, and thus acquires subordination to a purpose in which it exists not as the end of a vision, as it must be to non-theists who believe in no other home, but a means to the accomplishment of a divine purpose that transcends and shall eventually subsume it.

Here, then, is the first inescapable offense Christianity gives to earth-piety: the earth as we know it empirically is not a final thing but a first creation. The second offense is that Christianity’s principal reason for the earth’s existence is to serve the cause of human redemption, to be defined and carried out not by what seems reasonable to man, but the purpose and method of God. The earth is presented to the faith as sacramental, and as sacrament its end is to be consumed so that a second and higher Creation may come. Its end is as the end of man who has been made from and returns to its dust, who must pass away so the Second and Eternal Man can arise to take his place in a new heaven and earth, the old having passed away. It is difficult to exaggerate the breadth and depth of the chasm that exists between biblical religion and earth-piety.

Most (all?) MoJ-ers believe that faith is relevant to political deliberations regarding the common good.  But does the passage quoted above suggest that faith's relevance is not all-encompassing? The Christian belief in the earth as a "first creation," rather than as a "final thing," seems practically impossible to translate into secularly accessible terms.  Is this an example of a belief that is, in the Christian's exercise of prudential judgment, best left at home when entering the public / political sphere?  (Perhaps another example is leaving biblical prophecies about the nation of Israel out of our public deliberations about foreign policy?)  And if I'm correct, do we leave these teachings out of our political conversations because of the degree of Christian uncertainty regarding the timing of these events (the divinely ordained end of the earth as we know it; the realization of prophecies regarding Israel), or is there a reason derived from the substance of the teachings that separates them from biblical teachings about the sanctity of life, sexual morality, etc.?