In response to the anomie and rootlessness of postmodernity, Reformed Christianity offers:
1. A genuine covenantal community
2. An historically-rooted religious experience
3. A vigorous intellectual tradition which can answer the claims of postmodernists
4. Relationship with a Holy God who has not been so immanentized as to be toothless and irrelevant

Well, I have significant sympathy with many elements of Reformed practice, but let me point out that Eastern Orthodox churches are likely to counterclaim all your claims, there, over against Reformed churches, successfully. Never mind that “anomie” is what Roman Catholicism charged against Protestants, and Protestants against dissenters, and yet “dissenters” describe the evangelicals and fundamentalists who make up the majority of self-described “Protestants” today.

Now, directly vis-a-vis “postmodernity,” I think you have to ask yourself what visage the “postmodern” wears. Is it the mask of the pre-Socratic Greek tragedian, the Dionysian counterpart to Apollonian (scholastic, liturgical) practice? Is it the Gothic black lipstick and tongue piercings of subcultures seeking other currencies for “individuality”? Is it the cruelty-free bare face of the “authentic” and “natural” self, or the practiced dress casual business dress of the advertising exec whose construction of nature the Whole Foods shoppers go camping in? Is it the face of Hu Jintao’s Olympics (the postmodern part of that paradigmatically modern totalitarian display being China’s show of “capitalism”) or Bush’s “compassionate conservatism”?

For the Christian, the anomie which concerns us, which founds the antinomy in which culturally grounded “proofs” and “immanentizations” of God (or other people) must lie, is one and many: it is every kind of being averse to one God, and is as constant, insusceptible of solution, and already resolved by Christ as mortality itself.

If Reformed Christianity has anything to offer, it is in the Christ of Scripture, not the supersession of other traditions. If it has any weakness, it is in its intellectual tradition’s integrity with the modern experience–an experience of modification, for better and worse, of truth–not a revelation. For that, we await the Consummation.

Cheers,
PGE

PG-

First of all, thanks for taking the time to write out such a well-informed response. That said, I’m a little puzzled. . .

“Well, I have significant sympathy with many elements of Reformed practice, but let me point out that Eastern Orthodox churches are likely to counterclaim all your claims, there, over against Reformed churches, successfully.”

Having spent several years living in an Orthodox country, I’m going to have to strenuously differ. They may be able to make some claims in the realm of theory, but in the realm of praxis I’m going to have to say… Um, NO. And given that the post was focused on “American Christianity,” where the Orthodox are at best a tertiary influence, I’m not sure why you even brought them up.

More to the point however, I wasn’t discussing the relative merits of various Christian denominations, so I’m not sure how they would even be relevant. The only critique of other churches which was even implied was directed toward Social Gospel liberalism. . . Reread my post and see if you can find even a hint of Calvinist triumphalism in it.

My questions were concerned specifically with Reformed Christianity and its relationship with the wider culture. I think it has some great strengths which will aid it in reaching society, but at the same time it is such a product of the Reformation and Enlightenment periods that I think it may have difficulty adjusting to postmodernity.

If you would like to debate the relative merits of Orthodoxy vs. Calvinism at some point, I’ll be happy to throw up a post on the subject.

I brought up Orthodoxy partly because I knew you’d respond in an informed manner, and it would make the discussion interesting.

Also, because among American Christians (specifically the academic set), one of the interesting trends I noticed a few years ago was a tendency to move from broad and even quasi-charismatic evangelicalism right *past* Reformed churches to (American) Greek Orthodoxy. These days (particularly since the Episcopalian controversies heated up) the pull of Anglicanism seems much stronger.

I admit to a bit of “stirring the pot” in the above; I didn’t mean to accuse you of triumphalism, though.

I’m sincere, though, in pointing out that the Reformed (and my MacArthurite friends will insist that I not collapse “Calvinist” and “Reformed” together, despite my PCA friends tending to habituate me to doing so) intellectual tradition is, in many ways, the weakness as well as the strength of that segment of the church.

As to denominations, I regard them as tools for preserving the divided-ness of the church, and as usurping the local church, so . . .

If forced to choose at gunpoint between Westminster West, Antioch, Rome, Canterbury, and Me-ville, I’d end up at Westminster every time. But then I’d start reforming.

Cheers,
PGE

Hello,

Might I add that Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and the Anglican church is non-Christian and non-Biblical. They deny the person and work of Christ and the salvation message as Paul used it in Ephesisans 2:8.

Jean Chauvin