God in a straitjacket...

In his work, Reflections on John Calvin and the Church Struggle in Geneva, David Wright records John Calvin's

...refusal to read the world, humanity and the church except in terms of God's purposes. His was an irreducibly theological mind, and his world was one in which God was forever doing all manner of things. He thus presents a fundamentally important corrective to much of the broad mainstream of the old denominations in the West, and perhaps also to segments of established evangelicalism, for which God does very little in the world today.

The reigning theological ethos is pervasively Deist. God does nothing through preaching, he does not answer prayer, he never acts in judgment...

We conduct our church assemblies and committees with a perfunctory initial prayer and perhaps a closing benediction but these tell one very little about the expectations and the basic instinctive convictions of what happens in between. God converts no one, and we would not be so simple as to believe that he heals anyone.

God is not to be feared, we need not worry about impugning his honour, nor whether our worship conforms to his will and pleases him. He has nothing to do with any of the adversities of life. He does not chastise, rebuke, humble, afflict, raise up--or cast down. When Calvin comments on his crippling gout, 'God has bound my feet fast with fetters,' we smile indulgently...

A church whose preachers and teachers fail to help Christian people to interpret their life and their world theologically--which means also of course Christologically and pneumatologically--is aiding and abetting radical secularisation."

-from Reflections on John Calvin and the Church Struggle in Geneva, by David Wright, Professor of Patristic and Reformed Christianity, University of Edinburgh, New College.