Andrew Sandlin has recently written about the liturgical resurgence in Reformed circles, and you can read his take here. I think he makes several solid points, and of course as a high church Puritan, I think he misses much of what is going on. But my point is not so much the liturgical debate, but rather the assumptions about debating that this article reveals. This is offered in light of Andrew’s recent statements where he identifies himself in some fashion as a biblical postmodernist, an identification that lines up with Andrew’s distaste for certain kinds of certainty. That emphasis is highlighted early in his piece when he says, “So, I’m not claiming to offer some absolute, “objective,” unvarnished truth; nobody can do that.” But then at the conclusion of his arguments, he says this, “Which, of course, is not to say that Roman Catholicism is heterodox or that it stands outside Christendom, only that, like the new HC [high church] paradigm within Protestantism, it is wrong. Very, very wrong.”
Now I simply don’t know how to process this. One of these statements simply must be subordinated to the other — and not in logic class, but in the life of the church. And this is the concern I have with every form of postmodernism — it is not that certainty goes away (it cannot), but rather that it starts to move around.