Jenson on Calvinism.

"...Calvinism (unlike early Lutheranism) maintained the patristic and medieval doctrine of God unchanged. ... On the one hand, there is the metaphysical God, the final explanatory Ground of reality as we find it, who is reached by argumentative and mystical penetration back through reality as we find it. On the other hand, there is the proclaimed God, the Power of the future to differ from reality as we find it, who is known by words about Israel and Christ, addressed to historical and contingent hopes and fears.

[...]

"Thus the traditional doctrine of God shimmered with polarities between the two starting identifications of God, inside each, and crossways. In the system of medieval Christianity all these were reconciled and made religiously fruitful by the existence of the church. The church was a rationalized institution -- of miraculous grace. It was a public and political administration -- that administered inner power. It was a main structure of the standing order -- to make available eschatological transformation. It was the mediator between the distant exterior and public ground and the inner and private experience of Christ's presence. Remove this sort of church, leaving most else as it was, and you have classic Reformed theology.

"In Reformed tradition the two identifications of God, and the two appropriate relations to God, stand unmediated against each other. They are very nearly two different religions, united only by fiat."

-Robert Jenson, "The Kingdom of America's God." Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (54-55)

This description of Calvinism as the traditional doctrine of God minus the mediating institution of the hierarchical church is both illuminating and, I think, basically fair. Illuminating because it explains the issue behind predestination and the other Calvinist sticking points. And, in my limited reading, the most interesting work in Reformed theology usually has to do with the attempt to elaborate a principle that overcomes precisely the tension described here. In other words, Reformed theologians seem aware that they need to find a way to escape what Jenson describes here, and Jenson's fair in leaving this as a possibility.

Later in the essay, Jenson asserts that Enlightenment Deism is simply the metaphysical side of Puritanism without the Biblical side. Though I haven't read much Karl Barth, I'm curious about whether it's accurate to say he did the opposite of what the Deists did.