Radner is not interested in explaining the malaise of mainline Protestantism or in discovering why our congregations are not growing. Rather, he thinks our illness is of a deep-seated and longstanding nature going back at least as far as the Reformation split that created a Protestant church (or rather, churches) alongside the Roman Catholic Church. His concern is with the legitimacy of that split, and even more, with our easy acceptance...
‘The End of the Church’ – How it applies to the PC(USA)
Ephraim Radner has written an interesting book. An Episcopalian priest, Radner argues that the present divisions within the church are themselves a sign of "pneumatic deprivation," that is, the abandonment of the church by the Holy Spirit. That is the message that the title of his book is meant to convey: The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Eerdmans, 1998).
