CTC 65
From Reformed Forum Wiki
| Christ the Center | |
 |
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| Episode | 65 |
|---|---|
| Guest(s) | Michael Horton |
| Panel | Jeff Waddington, Lane Keister, Camden Bucey |
| Christless Christianity | |
Length: 53:00
Date: April 17, 2009
Contents |
[edit] What's New Review
- Lane: Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different by Tullian Tchividjian recently called to [www.crpc.org/ Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church] (founded by the recently deceased D. James Kennedy, PhD.). (Tchividjian accepted the call to Coral Ridge on the condition that it could merge with his New City Church, which it did.) Published by Multnomah Books (2009) with foreward by Timothy Keller. Puffs by a number of recognized scholars including today's guest, Michael Hortonas well as others by D.A. Carson, Joel Belz, Kevin DeYoung, Thabiti Anyabwile, Luder Whitlock and Arcand Hughes. It's a book about culture-- how the Christian interacts with culture, and so it will dovetail nicely with our discussion of Dr. Horton's book.
- Jeff: Also, just due out the April 2009 issue of The Ordained Servant online. This deals with cultural transformationalism, at least that's the theme of the lead editorial by Dr. Greg Reynolds, pastor of Amoskeag Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Manchester, NH. It revisits [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr Niebuhr]'s classification of how Christ relates to culture. A very thoughtful editorial.
- And then Carl Trueman reviews the five books by David Wells. (Courageous Protestantism? Some Reflections on David Wells’s Analysis of the Contemporary Church: A Review Article.) (Wells's series begins with No Place for Truth and culminates with The Courage to be Protestant.)
Camden: The five-part trilogy.
Jeff: Yes. The five-part trilogy. Now, David Wells gives a brief response, interacting with Trueman. And a book review by Diane Olinger (Danny Olinger's wife), a memoir by Larry Woiwode. And a Barry Trevor has a review of The Shack, which is very enlightening.
Camden: That's one way to put it!
Jeff: Yup.
Camden: The review or the book?
Jeff: Well, the book is not particularly enlightening, but the review is. And Barry Trevor's review quotes somebody named Lane Keister at Greenbaggins.
Lane: Which is the first time that my name has ever been in print, quoted by anybody.
Jeff: Well, you're famous now.
Camden: Congratulations. The blog has hit the big time!
Lane: I think it might have something to do with the fact that I read Barry Trevor's thesis at Westminster Seminary. When I told him that, he got really happy.
Camden: Well, maybe there's a little quid pro quo, but we won't take your joy away from you. Is there anything else to mention before we get going?
Jeff: I think that was it.
Camden: Excellent. You can get more book news as it comes out at ReformedForum.org/rmr. We try to put out Reformed Media Review episodes as soon as we can, so when some news and new releases pile up, we'll definitely put another episode out. And you can get your information and news there.
Jeff: Yeah. Every other decade.
Camden: We haven't been as regular as we like, but it's there nevertheless.
[edit] Interview With Michael Horton
[edit] Description
Jeff Waddington, Camden Bucey, and Lane Keister (of [greenbaggins.wordpress.com Greenbaggins Blog] fame) interview Dr. Michael Horton about his book Christless Christianity, which discusses the trends, particularly in the American church, and what has happened to the church over the past several decades.
[edit] Panel
[edit] Guest
[edit] The Book
Christless Christianity: Baker Books (November 1, 2008). Available through Amazon and others.
[edit] The Problem
Camden: It's obvious that the church in the United States has not exactly been what we would call Biblical in a lot of ways. There are strands, there are pockets of excellent Christianity, and Christianity is growing and thriving, but there are sweeping trends as well that aren't headed in the direction we ought to be-- Biblically. And Dr. Horton, would you like to just explain some of the major issues and talk about your desire to write this book? And also why the White Horse Inn thought it so important last year to devote an entire year to the subject? Horton: Sure. Well, thanks first of all for letting me talk about some of these things I think we're all sort of burdened by. I don't think, first of all, that we're in an unparalleled time in history. The church always has trouble taking its eyes off itself and putting them on Christ, just as we as individual Christians do as well. I think we can be distracted even by good things from seeing Christ at the center.
I was influenced in part by the work, for instance, of Christian Smith and other sociologists who analyzed American Christianity even including Evangelicalism and concluded that really what we had going on now in mainstream Evangelical Christianity is what Smith calls moralistic, therapeutic deism. My concern was to analyze that and to see concrete examples of what he's talking about, to define it theologically-- how the church has historically talked about these errors of self-trust, and assuming that people are essentially born good and just need a little help, direction and encouragement. And then looking at the situation, and trying to apply certain passages to the challenges that face us in a very man-centered even ecclesiastical environment.
[edit] Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
Camden: Moralistic, therapeutic deism. That sounds like a pretty interesting intellectual movement, but at the same time it's a lot more common, and people are probably more familiar with that subject than they think they are.
Horton: Yes. Exactly. Christian Smith-- we had him on The White Horse Inn too, and he said many of the same things. Really, he wasn't looking for something that would simplistically characterize all of American spirituality-- especially among younger people, but he found one. He said that it's a thread running through all the interviews he did over five years. The study is published by Oxford University Press. The thing that held it together was that a lot of young people just believed that people are basically good, most people go to heaven when they die because they're good. Some people might go to Hell, but they're not worried that they might be among them. God is nice. He exists for my happiness. (And here's the therapeutic part). God exists to make me happy and give me my best life now-- make sure that I have peace of mind. And the deistic part is that God is kind of removed until I whistle and He comes sort of like a butler. Otherwise, He's not judging, he's not saving, He's not really getting involved that much, unless I invite Him in.
I was amazed. I said you're talking about Unitarians, right? And he said no, unfortunately the statistics were exactly the same for people who were raised/have been raised in Evangelical churches.
Jeff: I've read the book by Christian Smith, and it's an eye-opener. I have to admit that I was never a big fan of the youth ministry that I was exposed to as a young person, and perhaps to some extent his book confirmed my own biases. But Mike, can you share with us how we got to where we are? And then if you could share with us maybe your own assessment of and answer to the same question.
Horton: Yeah. Smith doesn't really talk about the historical side of it. In fact he got a little frustrated on our program sort of in the middle of it-- letting his own personal views slip out, not speaking as a sociologist-- but saying where on earth are the pastors, teachers, Sunday school teachers, youth pastors, and parents who are supposed to pass this stuff down? What are they doing? And he was sort of irritated by it all and he said, you know, I think that we used to have something called catechism.
Jeff: Right. Right.
Horton: And he said, where is this happening? In homes and churches. And I think historically so many factors play into this.
- One is the pragmatism of our age-- it says we really only need to know that which is useful for our daily lives. Well, then you have to convince people how the doctrine of the Trinity is useful for their daily lives before it's considered important, whereas I think the doctrine of the Trinity says, Hey! Figure out how your life can correspond to this-- not vice-versa. And I think the same is true of our understanding of sin, redemption, justification, sanctification, glorification, what it means to be in Christ rather than in Adam-- all of these things are really the story that make up our Christian identity. And yet we are trying to figure out how Christ can have a supporting role in our life movie.
And I think we're missing out on a lot here. Not just pragmatism and consumerism and marketing and all of the other things we talk about, but I think it's our native, default setting to basically say The Gospel can't be that free, can't be that good. Like the people Jesus spoke of when He said to what can I compare this generation? You're like the children playing the funeral game and nobody mourns, and then they play the marriage game and nobody dances. Basically He said John the Baptist came preaching repentance and nobody really got the seriousness of their sin. I [Jesus] come the Gospel-- the Good News-- and people say that's too good to be true. I think that's basically our native setting. And so what we hear in churches a lot of times these days I think is bad news that really isn't as bad as the Bible puts it, and good news that really isn't as good as the Bible puts it.
[edit] The Enlightenment
Lane: Dr. Horton, I had a question for you. I was wondering how you would analyze this problem that you've just described in terms of influence of Enlightenment thinking and maybe also the fragmentation of knowledge that that has brought to modern day thinking. Head vs. heart. Doctrinal vs. practical. That kind of thing.
[edit] Kant
Horton: Absolutely. Think of especially Immanuel Kant. He said Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.. And so on the basis of his absolute certainty of the moral law within, he wouldn't look outside himself to an authority that delivered a Gospel. And he explicitly said even if someone were to bring good tidings to me from Heaven, howbeit with the greatest of authority -- of course, he's talking about the Gospel-- that cannot be a basis for my certainty about ultimate truth. And so he began to talk about the universal, practical morality that is absolutely certain. And this is a pure universal religion of love and duty and morality vs. an ecclesiastical faith, which is about an atonement, dogmas, churches with their words and sacraments and creeds. And I think that when we meet a person on the street today, catechized in Oprah and just daily living today, and they say things like "well, I'm spiritual but not religious. I don't go to church but I think of myself as a pretty moral person." When they say things like that they're just echoing Kant. And when [www.brianmclaren.net Brian McLaren] and other Christians today say the same thing, it's not post-modern, it's most-modern! It's just right out of the play book of the Enlightenment to say "the really important stuff is moral, the moral law within. And the stuff that we can sort of you know, take or leave, is the dogma, the doctrine. It's deeds, not creeds."
[edit] And Today
Camden: I always enjoy it on the White Horse Inn when you send Shane Rosenthal out to those Pastors' Conferences.
Horton: I always enjoy it when we send Shane out anywhere.
Camden: Well that's one way to put it, too. But I'm always struck by the responses that you receive from these pastors, and that's the kind of message they often times come back with. "Well, at our church we're not so much concerned with doctrine. We're concerned with peoples' lives." or "We're concerned with how people live." or morality. That sort of thing. It's not the value of content of the faith, it's really just not there.
Horton: Exactly, it's like starting with Romans 12 instead of Romans 1.
[edit] Soul Searching
Christian Smith, with Melinda Denton: Soul Searching: The Religious And Spiritual Lives Of American Teenagers. (2005: Oxford University Press).
Smith and Denton are sociologists from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (but Smith has gone on to Notre Dame who conducted a five-year study of the religious views of American teenagers. According to Christian Smith, the actual professed religion of most young adults, whether they're being raised in Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Presbyterian, or Jewish homes, is what he called "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." What this means is that although many teens believe in God and go to church regularly, they end up defining belief in very vague and subjective terms, such as, "God exists," "He's there when we need him," "He wants us to be happy," "The purpose of life is to feel good," "Good people go to heaven," and so forth.
