If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."
The article is pretty fair except for one point:
. . . it [New Calvinism] offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!) . . .
Maybe I'm a little rusty on my theology, but I think that is a little bit too deterministic sounding. But then again, who am I to judge, I've never even read the Institutes.
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Has anyone seen the article in TIME from 1947?
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,801853,00.html
Very interesting. I especially liked the quote,
"The message of Calvinism to modern man is that he must repent from his idolatry, which is his greatest and root sin. His idolatry, in that he has made a God of himself and made a problem of the living God of the Scriptures. . . .
"We have had enough religion, religious philosophy and religious psychology. It is time we again found the living God . . ."
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