DR. MICHAEL HORTON'S CHRISTLESS CHRISTIANITY

After my ordination service back in March I sat down with my former supervising pastor from Park Cities Presbyterian Church. As we talked he said he thought the Rev. Dr. Michael Horton was THE premier Reformed systematic theologian in America today. I'd read Horton's 2006 God of Promise: Introducing Covenant Theology my last semester at Dallas Seminary (not because it was assigned), and it was excellent. But THE premier Reformed theologian? I was skeptical of such an accolade. Nonetheless, my former pastor is very thoughtful and even-keeled. He doesn't often sail the rough seas of hyperbole. In fact, I can't recall him ever overstating a case of any sort to me. So when he said this, I took notice.

After finishing Dr. Horton's 2008 book Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church, I am tending to agree with my pastor. Horton is certainly a top-shelf Reformed theologian. I don't think it is an overstatement to say his book is the Babylonian Captivity of our day, only, rather than being captive to a corrupt magisterium, the church is captive to a pervasive cult of individualism and enthusiasm that could be defined theologically as a mixture of Pelagianism and Gnosticism.

Horton calls the prevalent American religion moralistic, therapeutic deism. It is moralistic in its belief that people are basically good and simply need good advice on how to save themselves. It is therapeutic in its diagnosis of humanity's problem as feelings of guilt and the unnecessary burden of living according to rules. God exists primarily for our happiness. It is deistic in its restriction of God's involvement in the world. God has set certain natural patterns in place for our self-realization, but he is not personally offended by our sin. In this religion the distinction between law and gospel is blurred so that no one is confronted with the gravity of their sin and therefore no one is amazed with the wonder of the gospel. People who are impressed with themselves will not be impressed with Christ except insofar as he serves their own personal agendas.

Horton calls the church to return to the ministry of Christ through the ordinary means of grace, Word and sacrament. The church needs to be the church, only then will people be transformed by the gospel of her Head. Here are a few choice morsels:

The Good News concerning Christ is not a stepping-stone to something greater and more relevant. Whether we realize it or not, there is nothing in the universe more relevant to us as guilty image-bearers of God than the news that he has found a way to be "just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3:26) (22).

It is not heresy as much as silliness that is killing us softly. God is not denied but trivialized--used for our life programs rather than received, worshiped, and enjoyed (24).

Today's self is restlessly bent on reinvention mainly in order to get rid of the nagging sense of guilt that creates tremendous anxiety despite its unknown origins (35).

People need to see--for their own good--that self-realization, self-fulfillment, and self-help are all contemporary twists on an old heresy, which Paul identified as works-righteousness (40).

Gospel doesn't come naturally. It comes as Jesus (48).

If Christianity is about public truth delivered through an external word, then ministry and evangelism require educated leaders who can expound and apply that truth for the benefit of those under their care. By contrast, if Christianity is reduced to personal experience, then its leadership will consist of the most successful entrepreneurs and managers of extraordinary staged events (51-52).

Liberals and revivalists both de-emphasize God's transcendence and tend to see God's Word as something that wells up within a person rather than as something that comes to a person from outside (58).

Start with Christ (that is, the gospel) and you get sanctification in the bargain; begin with Christ and move on to something else, and you lose both (62).

[Joel] Osteen's message is also a good example of the inability of Boomers to mourn in the face of God's judgment or dance under the liberating news of God's saving mercy. In other words, all gravity is lost--both the gravity of our problem and of God's amazing grace. According to this message, we are not helpless sinners--the ungodly--who need a one-sided divine rescue. (Americans, but especially we Boomers, don't take bad news well.) Rather, we are good people who just need a little instruction and motivation (71).

This gospel of submission, commitment, decision, and victorious living is not good news about what God has achieved but a demand to save ourselves with God's help. Besides the fact that Scripture never refers to the gospel as having a personal relationship with Jesus nor defines faith as a decision to ask Jesus to come into our heart, this concept of salvation fails to realize that everyone has a personal relationship with God already: either as a condemned criminal standing before a righteous judge or as a justified coheir with Christ and adopted child of the Father (74).

The central message of Christianity is not a worldview, a way of life, or a program for personal and societal change; it is a gospel. From the Greek word for "good news," typically used in the context of announcing a military victory, the gospel is the report of an appointed messenger who arrives from the battlefield. That is why the New Testament refers to the offices of apostle (official representative), preacher, and evangelist, describing ministers as heralds, ambassadors, and witnesses. Their job is to get the story right and then report it, ensuring that the message is delivered by word (preaching) and deed (sacrament). And the result is a church, an embassy of the Triune God in the midst of this passing evil age, with the whole people of God giving witness to God's mighty acts of redemption (105).

That my life is not the gospel is good news both for me and for my neighbors. Because Christ is the Good News, Christians as well as non-Christians can be saved after all (118).

The more we talk about Christ as the Bible's unfolding mystery and less about our own transformation, the more likely we are actually to be transformed rather than either self-righteous or despairing (118).

We need to be evangelized every week (125).

There are really only two religions in the world: a religion of human striving to ascend to God through pious works, feelings, attitudes, and experiences and the Good News of God's merciful descent to us in his Son. The religions, philosophies, ideologies, and spiritualities of the world only differ on the details. Whether we are talking about the Dalai Lama or Dr. Phil, Islam or Oprah, liberals or conservatives, the most intuitive conviction is that we are good people who need good advice, not helpless sinners who need the Good News (128).

Jesus's example is not good news but a terrifying burden unless he is first of all one who saves me from my inability to follow it (136).

The church exists in order to change the subject from us and our deeds to God and his deeds of salvation, from our various missions to save the world to Christ's mission that has already accomplished redemption. He sends us into the world, to be sure, but not to save it. Rather, he sends us into the world to witness to Christ as the only Savior and to love and serve our neighbor in our secular vocations. Evil lies not outside us but inside; it is salvation that comes from outside ourselves (141).

What a relief it is when we are liberated from thinking that we are called to be the gospel! Now we can simply receive it and draw upon it daily for the confidence to look up to God in faith and out to our neighbor in love (156).

People are looking for authenticity, but this includes acknowledgment of our sin and self-righteousness and our need for Christ. What could be less authentic and honest than assuming that our lives can preach better than the gospel (157)?

This characteristically American approach to religion, in which the direct relationship of the soul to God generates an almost romantic encounter with the sacred, makes inner experience the measure of spiritual genuineness. Instead of being concerned that our spiritual leaders faithfully interpret Scripture and are sent by Christ through the official ordination of his church, we are more concerned that they exude vulnerability, authenticity, and the familiar spontaneity that tells us that they have a personal relationship with Jesus. Everything perceived as external to the self--the church, the gospel, the Word and sacraments, the world, and even God--must either be marginalized or, in more radical versions, rejected as that which would alienate the soul from its immediacy to the divine (169).

The one unassailable authority in the American religion is the self's inner experience. . . . No longer constrained by creeds and confessions, sermons and catechism, baptism and Eucharist in the covenant assembly, the romantic self aspires to a unique and spontaneous experience (170).

While Luther, Calvin, and their heirs sought to reform the church, the more radical Protestant movements have sought an immediate, inner gnosis. Where the reformers pointed to the external ministry of the church, centering on Word and sacrament, as the place where God promised to meet his people, enthusiasm (the Reformers' term for radical Protestant groups) was suspicious of everything external (174).

The evangel defines evangelism; the content determines the methods of delivery; the marks of the church (preaching and sacrament) define its mission (evangelizing, baptizing, teaching, and communing) (196).

Neglecting a covenant ecclesiology, evangelicalism exhibits a zeal for mission unhinged from the marks of the church. After all, if the gospel is about our experience and activity in personal and social transformation rather than how we can be regular recipients of God's gifts, the means of grace are beside the point. What we really need are means of commitment and action. However, this "missional" activism unhinged from the methods God has prescribed has not only failed to lead to an upswing in professions of faith among "all who were far off," but has led to burnout, instability, and dropout among believers and their children (197).

The primary theater for the service of the people is the world rather than service ministries in the church. Luther nicely captures the point I'm making here by saying, "God does not need your good works; your neighbor does" (198).

Where Christ is not King, he is neither Prophet nor Priest. Christ rules his church--instituting its structure and methods--precisely so that he can effectively deliver his good gifts to the world (205).

Without the marks, the mission is blind; without the mission, the marks are dead (205).

Calling us to accomplish great things for God is part of the hype that constantly burns out millions of professing Christians. . . . If we think the main mission of the church is to improve life in Adam and add a little moral strength to this fading evil age, we have not yet understood the radical condition for which Christ is such a radical solution (211).

Ministers are simply God's waiters at the feast (219).

There is a direct correlation . . . between a theology of self-salvation and the church chiefly as a center of human rather than divine activism. No longer do we need formally trained ministers of the Word but charismatic and entrepreneurial leaders who can inspire activistic movements (220).

Once your faith is focused on what happens inside you instead of what happened outside you in history, it is easy to say that what you really need are good resources for private experience and moral improvement rather than any external Word (223).

[Charles] Finney's approach itself represents a "practical atheism" according to which the success of Christian mission depends on human technique, style, planning, and charisma "without having to surrender ourselves and our words to the presnece and work of the Word and Spirit." It is no wonder that the expectation of the Spirit's activity shifted from the church to the parachurch, from the ordinary means of grace to the extraordinary methods of inducing conversions, as Finney understood it (225).

An authorized gospel comes with an authorized ministry. It is ministers of God's Word--not people who like to carve out their own niches, share their own experiences, and determine their own emphases--whom God qualifies by training, testing, and approving and who bring us God's gifts in his name. Our goal is not to leave our own legacy but to dole out Christ's inheritance (235).

We need to recover that sense so pervasive in other periods: namely, that even Christians do not know what they really need or even want and that attending to their immediate felt needs may muffle the only proclamation that can actually satisfy real needs (240).

A church that is deeply aware of its misery and nakedness before a holy God will cling tenaciously to an all-sufficient Savior, while one that is self-confident and relatively unaware of its inherent sinfulness will reach for religion and morality whenever it seems convenient (243).

All that is necessary for us to become unwitting Pelagians is less preaching and teaching of the law and the gospel--downplaying the means of grace (Word and sacrament) in favor of our means of transforming ourselves and our world (244).

Americans, as we have already seen, have a fairly pronounced anti-intellectual streak. We are doers, not believers; pragmatists, not thinkers. Impatient with tedious study and reflection, we would rather be overcoming obstacles, conquering nature, and putting it to use more than understanding and enjoying it (245).

When we examine the ecumenical creeds and the confessions and catechisms of the Reformation traditions, one thing is clear: Christ is central, the Alpha and Omega of faith and practice. Teaching the faith to each generation through such standards, however, has become increasingly suspect of formalism and intellectualism in a culture that prizes autonomy and self-referential expression. . . . Accross our entire cultural landscape, the only law left seems to be "keep it light." (245-46).

Where did we ever get the idea that the best way to ensure the relevance of Christian faith and practice is to accommodate in this present age the discourse and practices of the age to come? How could we ever have imagined that the best way to win the world to Christ is to surrender the only legitimate tools that God has given for the breakthrough of Christ's kingdom in the very heart of this world's history of vanity (248)?

Outsiders become insiders through the Word and Spirit. Not by eliminating the strangeness that makes them outsiders, but by prayerfully anticipating God's powerful work through the strange message and methods he has appointed, we see the mission succeed through the marks of preaching and sacrament (252).

What is called for in these days, as in any other time, is a church that is a genuine covenant community defined by the gospel rather than a service provider defined by laws of the market, political ideologies, ethnic distnictives, or other alternatives to the catholic community the father is creating by his Spirit in his Son. For this, we need nothing less than a new creation, where the only demographic that matters is in Christ. When our churches are once again located there, both the converted and those whom we have yet to reach will become recipients of grace who can, in turn, love and serve their neighbors in the world. When that happens, we too should expect to hear fresh reports, even in America, that "the word of God spread, and the number of disciples multiplied greatly" (Acts 6:7 NKJV) (256-57).

The church in America will have to learn what it means to mourn before it can dance. Sticking to the story, fixing our eyes on Christ--even if it means distracting us from what we have diagnosed as our real issues--is the kindest thing a pastor can do for a congregation, the most precious gift we can receive and pass along to our neighbors, and the most relevant mission on earth. In the words of Dorothy Sayers, "It is the dogma that is the drama--not beautiful phrases, not comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations of loving-kindness and moral uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death--but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that one might be glad to believe" (259).