>
> There is certainly the theoretical possibility of great anxiety in the
> doctrine of election and preterition. But existentially, the result of
> the black/white choice tended rather toward absolute certainty than to
> doubt, not only among the laity, but also among the founders, like Calvin
> or Luther. For most lay believers, that was the original beauty of the
> "inhuman doctrine:" that the unquestioning certainty of their faith was
> the proof that they'd been elected. Nothing else was necessary. And when
> all else has been forgotten -- when our consumer culture has lost every
> other trace of puritan morality when it comes to imagery or dress -- that
> one idea seems to have travelled down intact: that we're going to heaven,
> no question about it. And it seems to be the source of the idea that
> still permeates American culture, that we are the chosen people, with the
> god-given right to order the world.
>From my 'insider observation' of 'Afrikaner' Calvinism in South Africa
(before I managed to escape...:), I think it is quite possible that the
only thing which keeps the anxiety at bay is the certainty of American
capitalism. The reorganisation of white power in South Africa in the late
1980s, early 1990s saw an increase in family murders, and the split of a
section of the Dutch Reformed Church into evangelism (a much more
activist, less certain form of Protestantism), before everything calmed
down and the white population realised that the power of their money still
kept the 'maid' and 'garden boy' in line.
Americans I've spoken to get very offended when I suggest that the spate of mass murders in the States is anything but the result of a 'lack of morals in the home'. Somehow they don't seem to want to see that the fascination with death, the desire to 'go out guns blazing' might just be a result of the pathology of power - and the fear of losing it.
Peter P.S. Without Calvinism, I don't think South Africa would have had 'Battery 9' - an Afrikaans industrial band who are rate up there with the best, as far as I'm concerned. -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx