"Whenever men claim to be able to see the Kingdom of God as a growing organism or - to describe it more suitably - as a growing building, what they see is not the Kingdom of God, but the Tower of Babel." Barth from his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans

Ahhh, playing basketball and drinking bud light, I think I'm emerging from the no of God.

J.P. Paauwe Post #1

I fully plan on returning to the Henri de Lubac book, but for the time being I'm going to switch gears and briefly talk about J.P. Paauwe, an early mid 20th century Dutch Reformed polemic, Paauwe was excommunicated from the Royal Dutch Reformed church in 1914 regarding a confessional disagreement over the proper criteria for admitting church members(for reference - Paauwe thought Kuyper was a liberal), from there he established his own strain of continentally Reformed Protestantism, that had an affinity for historic Reformed systematics (save ecclesiology), but had a radically different understanding of the mediatorial nature of the Church - Paauwe's writings are scarcely available in English, but recently a good friend of mine provided me with several volumes of recently translated Paauwe sermons.
I see Paauwe as being about 80 years ahead of the fundamentalist reformed tradition in NA and possibly helpful in understanding current theological/ecclesiastical trends and from these writings, I'm hoping to better understand, within the Reformed tradition, if schism can still benefit the church(seeing as though reformed Protestantism is currently as schismatic as ever in NA, and possibly trending towards being more so), if the dogmatically reformed have confessional categories for a-confessional (sacramental or other) practical ecumenism, how rigidly confessional schismatic traditions formulate their ecclesiology, understand theological anthropology and practice Christian ethics as an expression of piety? Given Paauwe's context, and his theological disposition his writings could prove to be very helpful, but this is all postulation - more to come later.