Why Are People Coming to the Reformation?

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Michael Horton

Five centuries ago, in taverns and public

Kim Riddlebarger

houses across Europe, the masses would gather for discussion and debate over the latest ideas sweeping the land.

Michael Horton

From one such meeting place, a small

Cambridge inn called the White Horse, the

Kim Riddlebarger

Reformation came to the English speaking world, carrying on the tradition. Welcome to the White Horse Inn.

Michael Horton

Welcome back to the White Horse Inn, where tonight we are discussing what are the reasons why people are coming over to the Reformation? We have already done two programs, one with Father Peter Gilquist of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, a former evangelical leader, really, who became orthodox, along with about 2,000 evangelical workers in various evangelical ministries. Last week, we heard from Tim Staples in studio. Tim was a convert to Roman Catholicism from evangelicalism. And so we thought we'd have a third program. Why are so many evangelicals coming into the Reformation faith? It is interesting to see that for the first time, really in a long time, young evangelical Christians, men and women, are coming into the Reformation faith. Instead of seeing it as a place of dead orthodoxy, they are energized by a new vision for their lives as Christians. And so in this program, we want to take a look at that particular question we, we have as a special guest to help us out with that, Dr. Robert Godfrey. Robert Godfrey is the president of Westminster Theological Seminary in California. He's a great friend of ours on the White Horse Inn. Many of you have heard him a number of times, and it's our pleasure to have him with us on the program. Okay. A lot of people, first of all, ask, we get this question a lot these days. What is an evangelical Christian in the first place? If there are a lot of people out there leaving quote, unquote, evangelicalism to join the Reformation, we want to be very clear about it. We believe they're actually coming to evangelicalism. Why do we use the word evangelical in two different senses?

Kim Riddlebarger

Well, probably the best recent book on it has been Kibodo's the Young Evangelicals done in the late 60s, in which he describes the coalition that took place in our lifetimes, forming around the founding of Christianity Today, the evangelistic crusades of Billy Graham, the founding of Fuller Theological Seminary, a whole young group reading the writings of C.S. lewis and so forth and so forth and so forth that sort of coalesced into a group out of fundamentalism. And they wanted a name for themselves, and in looking for a name, they decided to call themselves the evangelicals.

Michael Horton

So they wanted to hold to the fundamentals of the faith that the fundamentalists were known for defending and yet be more ironic and welcoming in their approach.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

Well, the term fundamentalist had taken on a pejorative connotation. And so you need a positive term for your movement. So you look to something that has some kind of historical antecedent. You look back to the Reformation and say, well, we're the heirs of the Reformation, we'll be the evangelicals. And the irony is that this is a movement, not a church based phenomenon. And in many ways the American influence upon the whole culture of fundamentals and the whole religious culture has by and large pushed many of these evangelicals away from historic evangelicalism with the stress on conversion experience, with the stress on style and a certain style of doing things. If you're evangelistic, it doesn't matter necessarily the content of your evangelism, but if you're reaching out to people, you're called evangelical. And it has more to do with an amorphous kind of a blob type. Well, Alan Bloom's Come at the American Religion. It's more to the American religion than with historic Protestant theology.

Michael Horton

Where did the word evangelical come from?

Kim Riddlebarger

Well, it's historically the transliteration of the Greek word for gospel. What the early Lutherans wanted to be known for was the gospel. And when they were asked what they wanted to be called, the first suggestion was that they were followers of the via polynica, which was what an academic would answer, as opposed to the via antiqua and the via moderna. And somebody said, that'll never be understood by the peasants. So they finally ended up saying, call us the evangelicals.

Michael Horton

But I think the point that Rod and Kim were making is very important in terms of the evangelicals in the late 40s and 50s wanting to move away from fundamentalism significantly because fundamentalism had become marginalized, had ceased to be a significant influence in American culture generally, and that one of the overriding concerns of the new evangelicalism was to get back into the conversation, get back into the conversation, become influential again. And in that sense they were picking up the sort of 19th century revivalist heritage that had also been called evangelical.

Well, let's talk about what happened then between the time of the Reformation and the time of Billy Graham, the changes that that term evangelical went through. First of all, the evangelical revivals and particularly the influence of John Wesley. John Wesley of course, at various times in his ministry, certainly in the minutes of the Methodist conference, presents a view, a real challenge to show how Methodism is consistent with evangelicalism. How did Wesley and the Wesleyan system get sort of attached to evangelicalism?

Kim Riddlebarger

Well, it was really through John himself returning from his sort of strange mission to Georgia, meeting some Moravian Brethren on the ship back and thinking the ship was going to sink. He noticed these people seemed not afraid to die as a result of that, decided that he would go visit Zinzendorf's community, the Moravian Brethren deeply influenced by Lutheran pietism. And so there's the connection for Wesley with the Lutheran branch of things as he searches out for assurance of salvation. And Peter Buhler helps him with this. And the whole Wesleyan movement then picks up the term the evangelical revival. I don't know if that was self called, but certainly it's been named that by later thinkers.

Michael Horton

Now didn't he admit that during those earlier years of his ministry, even as an evangelist, even as a missionary, that he himself hadn't been converted, he hadn't really understood the gospel?

Right. And I think that is part of the essential foundation of 18th century evangelicalism, that their principal motivation seems to be a reaction to what they view as formalism in the churches in which they were raised. The worship may be all right, the doctrine may be all right, but there's no heart to it, there's no life to it. And so that what Wesley and others were trying to find again was a heartfelt religion. And so the contrast was between the formalism of the old churches in which they'd been raised and a genuine conversion often experience that they saw as the turning point in their own lives.

Don't you when you go to read Wesley's history, his own spiritual biography or you look at his sermons, isn't there a certain sense of ambiguity about where he stood at any given time on the central article of evangelicalism? And that is justification by faith alone?

Kim Riddlebarger

I think that's true. It's hard to get people who are from that persuasion to admit that one thinks of Cannon's work on the theology of John Wesley with particular attention to the doctrine of justification. That's not by accident that Cannon's book was tilted that way because the critics from the Reformation side always sense this vagueness. He was so intent on people experiencing Christ directly that they figured that the doctrine of just justification, John, just didn't hold in any central sort of way. So he was forever trying to answer his critics in this direction. But in this case, I think the critics were correct. The thing that's kind of refreshing about Wesley is that he was so totally eclectic, but he was so honest in saying that he was. Yeah, he would pick up from anywhere, distill it through his brain, and a week later it was coming out in his preaching. But he said that that's what he did.

Michael Horton

So this already becomes a mark of evangelicalism, an eclectic sort of approach to.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

One of the places where this shows up, perhaps most clearly in Wesley is the doctrine of Christian perfectionism. How can you teach justification by an imputed righteousness and then turn around and talk about Christian perfectionism?

Kim Riddlebarger

Right.

Michael Horton

And yet he has his Aldersgate experience that he describes in very evangelical terms. He talks about justification in his sermon on Justification at Oxford in a very evangelical way.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

You bet.

Michael Horton

But then you turn around in his minutes, for instance, the Methodist minutes, and articulates a view of justification that really borders on works righteousness. And in fact, asks there in catechetical fashion, is this, how does this differ

Dr. Robert Godfrey

from salvation by works?

Kim Riddlebarger

Is it?

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Who is?

Michael Horton

And his answer is not a hair's breadth. So from his own lips there is this kind of not just ambiguity, but contradiction.

Kim Riddlebarger

Yeah. Think about it in terms of today's situation. Take Wesley as a paradigm case. What do you believe, John? Answer everything. That's part of the problem of evangelicalism today.

Michael Horton

It believes everything and just likes. Yes, likes whatever it reads, looks for the positive in everything, which is something that isn't all bad, but it doesn't draw together any kind of coherence to theology. And Wesley had a great tendency to read the ancient fathers of the church and 17th century moralistic authors.

Kim Riddlebarger

That's right.

Michael Horton

So that the primary theological influences on Wesley were not very good. And this is one of my own feelings about 18th century evangelicalism, that if you understand the dynamic of Christian life as conversion over against formalism, you run inevitably in a moralistic direction. Because in 17th century theology, conversion always is an element of sanctification. And therefore, if the very heart of Christian experience becomes conversion, and you're not very, very clear minded about what you mean by that, which Wesley wasn't, you really are making a sanctification category, the essential and central religious category.

And don't you think that's true in evangelicalism today?

Kim Riddlebarger

It definitely is, yes, absolutely.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

It's true by the number of calls and letters we get from people who are. Now, wait a minute, I heard you talk about justification, but where does sanctification fit into all that? I mean, that's the first question that arises.

Michael Horton

And the Christian life, there's always a question about the centrality of the Christian life. One of the things that people often say when they sort of discover Reformation theology is I would have said I was a Christ centered person. But now, goodness gracious, Christ is at the center of everything. And that isn't often the case, sadly, because of our preaching. But it's because they picked up a book written by somebody 200, 300, 400 years ago who did say it clearly. Who did say it clearly. Let's move then, after the time of Wesley, let's move to the Great Awakening. And that was formative on both sides of the Atlantic. The evangelical revival in England and the Great Awakening in America involved a lot of the same or some of the same people. Why was the Great Awakening necessary in the view of people like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield?

Well, again, the context was primarily one of formalism. There were lots of people who had been raised in the church, faithfully attended the church, but there was a deep seated suspicion in the minds of many of the ministers and others that these people were not genuinely converted. And there was this great longing then and expectation of the need for revival, for awakening, for a sovereign work of the Spirit to bring new enthusiasm, new health, new life to the churches of New England and the Mid Atlantic colonies as well, so there was a great growing desire and expectation that that's what was needed to renew the Puritan experiment of a Bible commonwealth, of a holy city, a light set on a hill.

Would you say that just as in the evangelical revival, Arminian and Calvinistic notions tended to get blurred and actually toned down so that there could be some sort of a, a common focus on the evangelical spirituality rather than on evangelical doctrinal distinctives, that the same thing happened in the Great Awakening, especially as it begins to tumble into the Second Great Awakening.

I think the Great Awakening itself in America was solidly dominated by Calvinists, so that the central theology remained unorthodox. Calvinist theology. It seems to me that the strain the Great Awakening puts on Calvinist church life, as it had been known in the 16th, 17th, early 18th century, was that this new experience of God's powerful presence as they felt it in the Great Awakening, led some of the leaders of the Awakening to say to lay people, you need to be in congregations where this power is present and felt. And it shifted the whole character of church life from being very much minister centered, parish centered, to increasingly being lay centered. And there's a very good book on the Great Awakening called the Triumph of the Laity. And that one of the messages that came through was, you should go church shopping. You ought to find out where the spiritual power is. This had been something almost unknown in Christendom up until this point. You went to your neighborhood parish church,

and was that because of a separate tendency to separate the Word and the Spirit, so that there was this belief that excitement is what you're looking for, not necessarily just the sound proclamation of the Word?

Well, I think in the Great Awakening, they would still have said that what you're really looking for is a lively and faithful proclamation of the Word. But once you have taken that dramatic step of saying it's up to the laity to determine who's the faithful preacher, I mean, before that, it had been largely assumed that the preachers knew who were the faithful preachers and that this was a responsibility to the officers of the church. But once you say to all the laity, no, it's really up to you, then you run that risk of saying to people you have within you all that you need to be discerning and

Kim Riddlebarger

aware, you know, where you're fed and where you're not.

Michael Horton

Right, right.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

And go there and leave where you are if you're not.

Michael Horton

What is an evangelical? And why is it that this movement that has so powerfully shaped this continent in the last two centuries has now is now for the first time losing converts to Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and now to, ironically, the churches and the heritage that gave birth really to evangelicalism in the first place. Evangelical comes right out of the Reformation. Luther and the Lutherans call themselves evangelicals. Reformed Christians call themselves evangelicals. The question is, at what point does evangelicalism become something else? And at what point does it broaden to the point where it no longer means anything? You know, that issue of how broad can that term become before it is meaningless is something a lot of people are asking today. But wasn't that a question that people were asking a long time ago, especially with the involvement of Wesleyans and later Pentecostals?

Sure.

How broad can this thing get?

Kim Riddlebarger

Well, in the original days of Christianity Today, from volume one, number one, that was a question you would read a major article by Geoffrey Bromilly, Reformed Anglican at Fuller and Co, translator of Barth's Church Dogmatics. You'd read a major article by Bromley. Two pages later there would be a major book review by a professor at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky. And so from the very beginning the question was just how broad is this thing? And the answer that was given was on purpose, sort of a non answer. We are cooperating. We are coming out of a deep anti intellectualism. We are going to get out of it. We're going to have professors for the first time with real degrees that we didn't give from our little institutions. Fuller Seminary is proof of that. But don't ask too many questions.

Michael Horton

And there's an irony about that, because the explosion in the 1920s of American Protestantism into liberal and fundamentalist wings occurred because both parties had called themselves evangelical.

Kim Riddlebarger

Oh really?

Michael Horton

So that in the 20s, when Dr. Machen wrote his book on Christianity and liberalism, the liberals howled because they insisted they were evangelical Christians every bit as much as the fundamentalists were. And that's why the new terminology had to be used. So already in the late 19th century, the issue was beginning to be put how wide can this term evangelical be stretched? How liberal in quotes can you become and still be counted an evangelical?

Okay, we have that question raised in connection with Wesley, who compromises both the material and formal principles of the Reformation by confusion. By confusion. But also explicitly, for instance, in sola scriptura quadrilateral. Quadrilateral, that got rid of sola scriptura scripture alone. And then there's confusion on justification.

And so you see, I think already in 19th century evangelicalism, something of a minimalist mindset setting in exactly what's the least that you have to believe.

Exactly. A born again experience.

And a born again experience, some recognition of biblical authority, some general sense of being a Protestant in terms of talking about faith and grace without a whole lot of specificity. Often that becomes kind of the rock core linked to a very strong activism. Evangelicals have always been very activistic and

Dr. Robert Godfrey

a suspicion of the older confessions and catechisms because they're too confining and too restrictive.

Michael Horton

Okay, so we move through Wesley and through the Great Awakening to the second Great Awakening, and especially to an individual who eventually will become prominent out of that Charles Grandison Finney. Now why is he important in this whole story?

Dr. Robert Godfrey

Well, that's why I wanted to mention that Wesley was confused because Finney is outright hostile. Hostile to the Gospel. You have to look at Finney as someone who is self consciously rejecting the orthodoxy of the Reformation, self consciously attacking the idea of a justification by an imputation of Christ's righteousness. My first real encounter with Finney came in Dr. Godfrey's church history class where he made us read sections of revival lectures. And you made the point and we've repeated it numerous times. You will not believe how bad Finney is. If I tell you you have to read it for yourself. And you made us do that and it was shocking how bad it was.

Michael Horton

He denies original sin, he denies the substitutionary atonement.

He says, denies the imputation of Christ's righteousness.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

Calls it another gospel.

Michael Horton

Yeah, it's remarkable. Says that religion is the work of man. Just amazing. Bald faced sorts of quotes. You don't have to read anything between the lines with Finney. And that's the sad part. He's so tragically clear.

But he also reflects that problem in America of a somewhat anti intellectual bent. I mean Finney was not educated in theology. He did not have and gloried in it and gloried in it and didn't have a strong background then in historic reflection on the faith. And while some theological seminaries have made shipwreck of the faith for people, do it yourself. Education is not always the good alternative to that.

That's an important point for people to hear out there because a lot of folks will, you know, with this anti intellectual bias that many fundamentalists and evangelicals have toward education, you know, look at what it has actually done for a lot of people who had no education. I think in our recent history. It's the televangelists.

Exactly. The self appointed ministers who. Yeah. Who claim just by the power of personal unction, a right to lead in Christ's church, even if they are woefully ignorant of the scriptures and of historic Christian reflection on the meaning of the Scriptures.

Now Charles Finney said that a revival or conversion, it's not the work of God. It's not a miracle or dependent on a miracle in any sense. It's simply the philosophical result of the right use of techniques. And so what you have to do is get in there with techniques. You have to have 12 verses of just as I am. For instance. How does Finney's emphasis on new measures and on constant innovation in a circus like atmosphere to try to drum up support for the cause. How does this relate to two trends, the church growth movement and evangelical social activism?

Well, when you read Finney's revival lectures, the word that leaps out at you right from the beginning of that work is the word excitement sufficient excitement? Because Finney says since man has absolutely free will what is necessary is that you create an adequately exciting environment to stir the free will to action.

In fact, Warfield says that in Finney's system, the evangelist becomes the sacrament.

Yes.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

And that God's incidental to the whole thing. It's ethics. You could take God out of it and still have the system.

Michael Horton

Right.

How does that affect a lot of what we see today?

Well, it makes religion fundamentally man centered and technique centered and result oriented. So that the successful revivalist is not the one who has faithfully preached the gospel. The successful revivalist is the one who has gathered huge numbers.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

Is it fair to say that Promise Keepers represents the legacy of Charles Finney? The sufficient enticements, the music, the gathering of people together, all the great promoters, the social activism, the social activism, the slick logos, everybody wearing the right color mauve polo shirt or whatever, all gathering together. Isn't that the legacy of Charles Finney?

Michael Horton

Right. And a determined avoidance of any very hard theological questions.

Yeah. In fact, one of the speakers at Promise Keepers got up and said in a promo video, I saw that his mother was a Methodist, his father was a Roman.

Kim Riddlebarger

Taking down the world, breaking down.

Michael Horton

And really isn't that simple. And really isn't that simp. Really isn't that simp? Really isn't that simp? Really isn't that simple. Really isn't that simple. Really isn't that. Really isn't that. If Luther and Calvin, or, let's go back further, Athanasius and Augustine, or back further than that, the apostles and our Lord Jesus were present, looking at that sort of thing, would they say, well, it's a good thing that you're breaking down walls between people who believe in the gospel and people who do not believe in the gospel?

That's exactly the problem. It's like saying, is it a good thing to break down a clear distinction between justification and sanctification? Why don't we bring those two things together? Well, when you bring the two things together, you end up with moralism. If you bring Calvinism and Arminianism together, you end up with Arminianism. When you claim to compromise, when you claim to combine, you don't actually combine. You destroy one and are left only with the other. And that's, I think, one of the great dangers out of the finite kind of revivalism.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

Well, James McCosh, great line. He who says he serves neither God nor Mammon serves mammon.

Michael Horton

So if people say, look, the important thing is the gospel, that's what unites us. And their definition of the gospel is, I've had a religious conversion experience. We say, well, really, we're not united by the gospel then.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

And they go so far at Promise Keepers to equate denominationalism, which can be. Which can be translated as holiness, to these confessions of the historic Protestant Reformation, with sin on an equal footing to racism. Yeah, that racism and denominationalism are equated as the great evils of the age.

Michael Horton

Now, that's remarkable. The fact that we have different traditions represented on the White Horse Inn. You have a Baptist really arguing for Baptist positions, a Lutheran really arguing for Lutheran positions, and a Reformed person really arguing for Reformed positions is taken by a lot of people out there as perpetuating denominationalism, when in actual fact, it allows us to sit around a table together and talk about also what we have in common. Why do you think a lot of evangelicals raised in Bible churches, in sort of mainstream evangelical churches, have found the Reformation to be something that's significant?

Dr. Robert Godfrey

There are a lot of reasons, and we ought to enumerate them. But first and foremost, having talked to people on the phone every day, answer the mail, it boils down to the questions of sin and guilt. You sit in evangelicalism, you take the Scripture seriously. The law is doing its work. You are under condemnation for the guilt of your sins, and you are not hearing the gospel clearly. When people hear Reformation theology, they believe the Scriptures. They are God's people. And when the promises are articulated in Scripture that Christ died for the sins of Christians and he removes their guilt once and for all by his death on the cross, that they're covered by his perfect righteousness, they believe the Scriptures. They know that's true, but they've never heard it articulated. And when they do, they believe it. And once they believe it, they can't stay where they are. They're not satisfied to hear their preacher tell them it depends on something they have to do. When they know the Scriptures, teach it is Christ for us.

Michael Horton

And one of the letters we get again and again and again is from people who say that, look, I talked to my pastor. My pastor believes everything that you guys believe. We talked about it, but he never preaches it. What we hear on Sunday morning is something completely different. Why is that? Why do people believe in theory, in justification by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone, and the importance of God's law and the importance of the gospel and the importance of justification and sanctification and all of these things, and yet what they end up talking about on Sunday morning isn't driven by that.

Kim Riddlebarger

Many times, I think a Visit to an evangelical seminary would provide a lot of the answer for that. You do not find that theme that you and I have in our Reformed and Lutheran traditions of preaching the Gospel to God's converted people every single Sunday morning. It doesn't make any sense in a non Reformation context. I used to tell my students at Westmount that they had never heard preaching of the gospel except at an evangelistic crusade. And they objected strenuously. And I said, all right, then tell me your pulpit diet at your local church. And of course, what it was was admonitions to a deeper walk with Christ, instructions for doing it, the preaching of the law in the many aspects leading people, they hope, to this deeper walk with Christ. And the answer is that isn't the preaching of the gospel. So every single Sunday they were sitting under the preaching of the law, either techniquey or not techniquey.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

Exactly.

Kim Riddlebarger

And it does its work.

Michael Horton

And don't you think in that kind of a context, what's really remarkable here is people for years sit under a diet in which the law isn't actually preached in all of its terror, and the Gospel therefore isn't preached in all of its sweetness. So what you end up with is a combination of the two. Glospel, we call it a law that isn't really enough to drive you to the end of your rope, and a gospel that's not really enough to give you another rope.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

And let's let the evangelicals off the hook here, at least in certain regards. There are probably a lot of good independent Bible church guys out there preaching the law and the gospel. There are a lot of men sincerely opening the word of God and rightly dividing the word of truth on that particular point. And there are a lot of churches with the word Reformed and Lutheran in their titles that are not.

Kim Riddlebarger

Yeah, I hear stories all the time of people in our churches who are subjected to a formula of three jokes, two stories, one poem, or something else. And the relationship to any given Bible text is so oblique and so tangential that you couldn't tell what the text was.

Michael Horton

It is really sad to see this in sort of mainstream evangelical churches where creeds and confessions aren't taken that seriously. Certain, you know, minimalist commitments to doctrine reign, but there's not a great commitment to doctrine. Excitement is the concern some kind of visible sense of being alive. A church that's alive is really what drives it, rather than the truth and so forth, that's sad enough. But to walk into our own churches, churches where there is a great commitment historically to the Scriptures as they are expounded by our creeds and confessions. To walk into those circles that have such a great tradition of preaching and find that they're taken up with these secondary pursuits is really to sell our birthright for a mess of pottage.

And the irony is that these people aren't actually listening to Finney. They should have listened more closely to Finney, because Finney, right against at the beginning of his lectures on revival, said excitement long continued leads to the breakdown of the nervous system, really. And Finney thought excitement was legitimate in his day because he was a post millennialist and thought the golden age was just about to arrive in which excitement wouldn't be necessary any long. But I think we're wearing people out, trying to constantly hype them up. It's like being addicted to a drug. Eventually the drug doesn't do its job anymore. You take more and more and eventually it'll kill you. And I think there's some of that. People are bottoming out on the shallowness of the evangelical tradition and finding excitement only goes just so far.

And a lot of our churches try to imitate that style. What's remarkable to me is that, you know, I do most of my work related to cure with evangelicals, not with Reformed people. And so I'm out on the road, out on the trail a lot of times in large evangelical gatherings. And one thing I notice again and again in these settings is they're wanting historic classical Reformed worship and Reformed liturgies. Just at the time when our Reformed churches think that they can become seeker by imitating the style of the evangelicals. And I'm pulling hair out of my head.

Kim Riddlebarger

You have much more than Kim.

Michael Horton

Kim's been pulling his hair out of his head 10 years longer than you have. We pull our hair out of our heads because we see these people squandering the churches that we would like to share with these wonderful people.

And don't you think a lot of this change in worship is justified in the name of evangelism? This is what's necessary to draw people in. And that becomes such a snowballing conviction that it carries everything before it. And in fact, I don't think it's true. I don't think it can be substantiated numerically, and it certainly can't be substantiated theologically.

Well, the Atlantic Monthly. We were just looking at the article a little while ago. The Atlantic Monthly had a cover story recently on the seeker movement, and they referred to a number of prominent churches, especially here in Southern California, the Evangelical Seeker movement. And it's fascinating that this cover story ended with the writer saying, look, I go to a very traditional Episcopal Church because I want transcendence in my life. I can get the practical by turning on the tv. I can get tips for living by watching Good Morning America. But when I come to church, I want to meet with God. I thought this was fascinating. We have to read this in the Atlantic Monthly instead of Christianity Today.

Kim Riddlebarger

The aching need for transcendence. There's a linkage between that and what you brought up with regard to liturgical or classical worship.

Michael Horton

A longing for God and a longing to worship God in community with people who have lived across the ages.

Kim Riddlebarger

Yeah. And where your language reflects that. I'm not even sure that I wouldn't like to go back to Shakespearean King James English just to hear a thee or a Thou, to place God above me, which is where he belongs. You might be a little too familiar.

Michael Horton

But the problem with that is it is easy then to allow an overreaction to the sort of pedestrian character of evangelicalism to. To drive us to a kind of aesthetic view of religion and elitism and an elitism. And I think that is part of what has driven evangelicals towards Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

It's pretty.

It's pretty. It's kind of aesthetically and emotionally satisfying on a higher plane than a lot of the evangelical experience. And I think what we have to say from the Reformation tradition is that what we really seek in worship is God, and we seek God through His Word. What we need is the Word. It's not liturgies per se. It's not stained glass windows per se. What we need is God's presence through His Word. And that's what's tragically missing in so many evangelical arenas, where the Word is little read and little preached and little reflected on in times that are supposed to be worship.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

You don't hear the Scriptures read publicly anymore as a central part of worship, where that was really an important part of the public worship. God is going to speak now. Someone is going to read the Scriptures with care and with seriousness.

Michael Horton

And the importance of these historical liturgies in relation to the comment about the Scriptures too. This is an important point that Professor Godfrey just made. We really forget, don't we, that the worship services, as they were guided, at least our Reformed service, I assume your Lutheran service, the Anglican Service, was about 85% Scripture. Of course, in a lot of these settings, you can even have a liberal pastor and you find people who really are Christians in Those churches because they've gotten the word in the service. Whereas in evangelical services, if you have a pastor who's gone completely over to raising the dead by having a circus, you get no word because he controls the entire hour of the show.

It really becomes a personality driven event rather than a word centered event.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

Well, that's Warfield's comment that the minister replaces the sacrament.

Kim Riddlebarger

I want to throw in assurance. One of the things you don't get out of a human centered, experiential, centered religious framework is assurance that your sins are forgiven. Where am I with regard to the Holy God as I go to sleep tonight and could have a cardiac in the middle of the night? And the Reformation answered that question.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

That was my point early on, that that was the question that came in repeatedly one way, shape, form or another. How can I know that the anger God has toward my sin has been dealt with? How can I know that?

Michael Horton

But I'm afraid that in too many evangelical churches today, the notion that the root question is how can a sinner be related to a righteous God is shoved aside. Yeah, it is. And there's a kind of assurance that's offered that says in effect, God doesn't really care that much about sin.

That's what I mean about the law not really being the law and the gospel not really being the gospel. It's not because they're hearing too much of justification. They're not hearing about justification at all. It's that they're not hearing anything about judgment. They're not really hearing that they are sinners under the wrath of God. They're hearing that they're not all that

they could be, and therefore Christ again becomes not substitute but example, so that

they can become all that they can be. And really, doesn't that mean that evangelicalism in practice, if not in theory, in practice becomes exactly the same as Protestant liberalism?

Well, and not greatly different from medieval Romanism. So that it's a very man centered, accomplishment oriented, activist kind of religion.

So would we say that when a person goes over to Rome or a person goes over to Eastern Orthodoxy, or a person really stays in evangelicalism in all three of those traditions, they're going to get a lot of man centered, works, centered, subjectively oriented religion rather than something focused on Christ and his Word?

Kim Riddlebarger

Absolutely. And, and it's basically contractual. You're going to have a contract drawn up and God is going to be related to you through contract, but it's a contract that you actually can fulfill enough that his horrible anger, if there is any such Thing could be at least blunted, but it's going to be like that. It's predictable in all three of those communities.

Michael Horton

What do we say then to people who are listening right now and saying, you guys are the most arrogant people I've ever heard in my life? You're saying that Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and now evangelical Protestantism are all bad roads, basically. So your churches, your Lutheran and Reformed churches are the only churches and we need to abandon our churches. Have they heard us correctly? If that's the conclusion?

Kim Riddlebarger

If you can find a clear proclamation of law and gospel in the first fire baptized Total Immersionist Baptist Church of God of Seguin, Texas, go there. If Christ is billboarded or placarded in his saving office before your eyes as the sufficient substitute for your sin, do it. But you have no confession in that church that guarantees that that pastor will do that. But it's not worth arguing about names. You were arguing about substance.

Dr. Robert Godfrey

Exactly.

Kim Riddlebarger

If you can find that substance and it's got the weirdest name in the world over the door, go there.

Michael Horton

What we're trying to do with all of our limitations and sins is to proclaim the gospel in the same way that Paul proclaimed it in his letter to the Galatians. And I think what evangelicals need to do is sit down, read through the book of Galatians and then ask themselves, is this what I'm hearing in my Bible?

Dr. Robert Godfrey

Exactly.

Michael Horton

It's a great note to end on. Folks. We've been talking about a very important subject. What does it mean to believe the gospel and then to find a church where you hear it preached? We cannot emphasize enough that it isn't enough to hear the message on the White Horse Inn. The White Horse Inn is not a church. You have to become constructive churchmen and women in your own parishes. This is not a mob rule sort of thing. The last thing we want to do is to sort of encourage that. But on the White Horse Inn you will find the kinds of truths mentioned, emphasized and proclaimed and championed that have actually been at the heart of the teaching of many churches that once claimed the name Evangelical. Many of those churches have abandoned their evangelical heritage. They're called mainline liberal Protestant churches. And unfortunately now many modern day evangelicals by label are following in the same tragic footsteps. The White Horse Inn is a listener supported broadcast. For more information about supporting our efforts, give us a call at 1-800-890-7556. That's 1-800-890- 7556. You can also visit us online at WhiteHorsein.org that's WhiteHorsein.org thanks for listening to

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this classic episode of Whitehorse Inn. Make sure to head to solarmedia.org newspaper to get your free subscription to the solar newspaper.