Michael Horton is the President of the American group, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.
Can you tell us something about yourself and how you came to be involved with the contemporary call to reformation in the Church?
I started to get really involved in this issue when I began to seek an answer to the question: how can someone as depraved as me find peace with God? That search led me to Paul’s letter to the Romans. That was when I came to see that Romans was the key to understanding all the Scriptures. Then through God’s good providence, I was introduced to a lot of people who were already labouring to spread the message of Reformation theology. With their encouragement, I have, in some small way, been able to help spread this message around too.
The Reformers called themselves ‘evangelicals’. What did they mean by this term? And does our acceptance of the badge ‘evangelical’ bind us to pursue Reformation in our own day?
Well, the Reformers—Luther and Calvin—didn’t want their movements to be known by their names. Luther said, “Whatever you do don’t call people Lutherans”. Likewise, Calvin said, “Don’t call yourselves Calvinists, and don’t let other people call you by that name”. What they both preferred was the term ‘evangelical’ because their movements were not trying to form a distinctive ecclesiastical pressure-group; rather, what they were trying to do was to follow the Gospel. And that’s what the ‘evangel’ is; it’s the Gospel.
So from the time of the Reformation on people wanted to be known as ‘evangelicals’ or ‘gospellers’. A person who is an ‘evangelical’ is really interested in two things 1) getting the Gospel right, and 2) getting the Gospel out. As far as the Reformers were concerned, it wasn’t enough to get the Gospel out if you didn’t have the right Gospel. And I believe that the Reformers were rightly concerned that the content, nature, and definition of that Gospel message is not incidental to the missionary work of the Church.
The problem today, of course, is that the term ‘evangelical’ can now be understood in two senses. One meaning has to do with the distinctive theological movements that arose out of the Reformation—the Lutherans and the Reformed—and the churches that emerge out of those two traditions. However, the term is often used to refer to those belonging to the theological tradition of John Wesley and the Evangelical Awakening. And, then, subsequent to that, Charles Finney and Revivalism—especially in the United States.
So the real question I think we’re facing today is this: can the Reformation stream of evangelicalism and what I call the Counter-Reformation stream of evangelicalism continue to coexist? And I think we are beginning to see that it’s impossible to maintain that coexistence. The simple reality is that in order to be ‘evangelical’ in the earlier sense, it’s increasingly difficult for us to identify being an ‘evangelical’ in the second sense.
What do you mean by the Wesleyan-Finney position being a Counter-Reformation movement at work today?
Well, I think it really begins by recognizing the fact that John Wesley had a different understanding of grace and human nature to the Reformers. Certainly Wesley shared a lot of the same concerns as the Reformers. He certainly wanted to defend the importance of grace and the doctrine of the new birth. But he took a mediating position and followed Arminian theology.
By the time we get to Charles Finney in the early 19th Century, we have someone who is remarkably anti-supernatural in his understanding of salvation. He is what theologians call a ‘Pelagian’. A Pelagian is someone who believes that man has unfettered free-will and the power to save himself. That’s a pretty serious charge to make against Finney, especially when he is regarded by everybody, all the way up to Billy Graham, as the greatest evangelist America’s ever produced.
What people forget, however, is that Charles Finney denied original sin. He also denied the substitutionary atonement — that is, that one person could die for the sins of another. He said that it was legally impossible and absurd. He also claimed that the doctrine of justification by imputed righteousness is not the Gospel. He even denied the necessity for a supernatural rebirth. In fact, he said that even when a person becomes religious, it’s not that they put forth efforts that they didn’t have before; rather, they exercised those efforts which they had always possessed, albeit in a different way. He also said: ‘a revival is not a miracle or dependant upon a miracle in any sense; it’s simply the philosophical result of the right use of means’.
I think that theology in the evangelical movement around the world has now developed to the point where, if you have the right techniques, if you can draw the greatest number of people, and if you can just find the right buttons to push, then you can have all the results you need.
Charles Finney would have loved living in the modern polling era. I think he would have been very happy and satisfied with the Church growth movement, the contemporary Christian music movement, and a lot of other efforts that seem to say: ‘Hey! Salvation really is the work of man; revival is really the result of human effort and the growth of the Kingdom really depends on how cleverly human beings can organize evangelistic crusades’. The only difference today is that Finney’s theology, which was devised around periodic evangelistic crusades, is now applied to the week by week operation of the churches.
So you’re referring to a Counter-Reformation in terms of a man-centred religion as opposed to a God-centred one?
Exactly!
There are some evangelical leaders, today, who are critical of the Reformation; some, like Tom Wright, have even gone as far as to suggest that it’s an aberration. How do you respond to those claims when there’s difference in the ranks of leading evangelicals?
Well, you’re absolutely right! Everywhere I look I see people, including those in Reformed circles, talking about the Reformation as a tragedy. And I think that’s quite remarkable because even some Roman Catholic theologians are now saying that the Reformation wasn’t a tragedy; instead, they say that the real tragedy was that the Reformers were silenced even though there were some leading Roman Catholic theologians, including cardinals, who were sympathetic to them. The real tragedy was that in 1564 the Roman Catholic Church officially condemned the Gospel—that had never been done before! It was an official condemnation of the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone.
So the Reformation wasn’t the tragedy; the tragedy was Rome’s condemnation of the Gospel and the subsequent expulsion of those who held the Gospel from their churches and from the ministry.
I guess it all depends on whether you believe the Reformers really did recover the biblical emphasis on salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone. If you don’t consider this the Gospel, of course you’ll see the Reformation as a tragedy. If you think that a paper unity is the only thing that matters, then naturally the Reformation is a disaster. But if you think the Gospel’s the most important thing; if you believe it’s the pearl of great price that you have to protect at all costs, then you’re going to see the Reformation as one of the greatest recoveries of biblical Christianity in the history of the Church.
Over the last decade, you’ve played a significant role in alerting the evangelical movement to heresy in its ranks. Why? And what’s the movement in danger of losing?
I guess heresy-hunter is not the greatest title of distinction. I don’t think I’d be thrilled to have someone write on my tombstone, ‘Michael Horton—A Great Heresy Hunter’. However, having grown up in evangelicalism and having been convinced of the reformed faith, I am increasingly concerned that my brothers and sisters don’t enjoy the freedom—the wonderful liberation that there is—in gospel truth. People tend to get the impression from us sometimes that truth is a drudgery; it’s some legalistic, narrow-minded ‘i’-dotting and ‘t’-crossing operation. But it’s really a liberating thing when we find out that our salvation is completely achieved by someone else outside of us—Jesus Christ. That’s a liberating truth.
To know that I am a new person in Christ and to realize that this isn’t something I’m aiming for, striving for, hoping for one day to achieve by my own sheer determination is a wonderful truth. When I understand that I have been baptized into Christ by the Spirit and that I am a new creature in Him, it’s marvellously liberating. It thrills my soul to know that the Lord perseveres with Michael Horton, the sinner, even when my faith and obedience seem practically non-existent.
But tragically, these truths are in question today even in evangelical circles. In fact, we’re not even sure in the evangelical movement today whether God knows the future in a comprehensive way.
Are you referring to the openness of God controversy?
Exactly! One of the great issues evangelicals are struggling with at the moment is the question: Is God changing? Is He in some sense a ‘victim’ along with the us? Evangelicals are shying away from the sovereign, transcendent God of the Bible. Instead, God now seems like one of us. He’s no threat. The ‘I-feel-your-pain’ theology is very prominent in evangelicalism.
I don’t know whether you saw the movie in the ’70s, Oh, God!, with George Burns. It may not have been released in Australia, but it was popular in the USA. The movie portrayed God as a kind of old man who walked around trying to correct people. God took Himself seriously, but no one else did. And that really is the god of most Americans. Indeed, and I am sad to say this, it’s become the god of most evangelicals. Many evangelicals would prefer to have a god who feels their pain to a God who does something about it because He is sovereign.
These are some of the challenges to the Gospel of free justification and of a sovereign God who is also good. Evangelicals have difficulty believing in an all-knowing God who is benevolent. Further, evangelical practice has been undermined by a moralism that supplants Christ-centred preaching and also by an obsession with entertainment in our churches. All these things are serving to undermine the Christian faith in our time.
Some people in main-stream evangelicalism look on you as a ‘wise-guy’. You keep throwing stones at colleagues who are actively preaching the gospel to thousands of unchurched people. How do you respond to that charge?
Well, first of all, it wouldn’t be the first time that somebody called me a wise-guy; my own family have done it a few times. I acknowledge that Christians have to be careful about the way they interact with their brothers and sisters. There are a lot of people watching and a lot of Christians who can be easily confused. So we do have to be concerned about the way we talk about our fellow Christians. I accept that.
At the same time, when someone puts a book into print publicly, anyone should be able to critique it openly. Most people who write books at a sophisticated level are used to that. The problem is that we have a lot of evangelical celebrities who don’t like other people reviewing their work. What they want are people who will surround and flatter them and tell them that they’re the greatest people who ever lived. And these are the people who have been particularly upset with any kind of public criticism. But Christians have a duty to be self-critical because none of us has a handle on everything that the Bible teaches. We have to listen to each other—and I include myself in that. I have to be willing to listen to the criticism of other people as well.
The problem is that too much is at stake to remain silent. We’re talking about millions of people who are hearing a false gospel. The idea that it doesn’t matter what you say about Christ, as long as you say a lot of things that other people are saying, has really got to be contested. I would rather have fewer people talking about Jesus Christ than a lot of people misrepresenting Christ.
The problem today is that modernity has had a tremendously corrosive effect on the Church. Marketing, consumerism, pragmatism all treat God as though He is a kind of therapy. Many of the emphases which have contributed to the man-centred aspect of contemporary evangelicalism are getting a lot of short-term results, but what will be the long-term fruit?
I think we are already beginning to see that: statistics show us that the big mega-churches aren’t actually bringing unbelievers to church. The mega-churches mainly consist of people, who for one reason or another, dropped out of church for a while, or have been pulled out of some smaller churches where they grew up. People go to them because they find them more fun, more exciting, and more entertaining. There’s more for the kids to do and so forth. However, these mega-churches aren’t, for the most part, bringing great numbers of people to Christ. They are collecting people who are not very rooted (because we live in a rootless society anyway), and giving them a church that lets them be rootless; a church to which they are not accountable. This means that they can fly in and out of church in exactly the same way as they do in business meetings. Obviously, there’s a very low level of commitment here.
Sadly, that’s what a lot of people are looking for in America in every relationship. So it’s not surprising that those churches are full. What is surprising is that they think that this is evangelism. My great fear today is not that we’re losing the lost or failing to reach the unreached; our problem is that we are not reaching the reached. We’re going to have a generation that doesn’t know what it believes, why it believes it and has come back to church with the tantalizing offer that they can believe whatever they believe, act however they want to act, regardless of the consequences.
Many of the movements and ministries that you have criticized have large numbers of people and enormous influence—some of them big publishing operations. How can so many sincere and generous people be wrong?
The fastest growing organized religious movement today is, of course, Islam. So I guess that answers the question. Mormonism is also growing rapidly. I’m not at all surprised! If you believe that the human mind is an idol factory, and we are constantly trying to create religious view-points that justify our own unbelieving assumptions, it doesn’t surprise me at all that what we have now in the evangelical world is attracting large numbers of people.
What do you see as the price that the evangelical Church has paid for its tolerance of ignorance and shallowness?
Well, one of the consequences is that we now have a generation in the leadership of many of our churches that is remarkably illiterate in Scriptural knowledge and doctrine. Many evangelicals have a poor knowledge of church history—even the basic knowledge of where we came from and who we are and what we believe. The average lay-person without a college degree who was properly catechized in our churches—while our churches still taught from a catechism—knew the Bible better than most pastors today in the United States. Unfortunately, that kind of catechesis is an endangered species in churches today. Even in our own Reformed churches I think that’s one price we’re paying. What is interesting is that the so-called ‘boomer generation’, which has been identified by all kinds of studies as a selfish generation, is now being followed by a very different generation, the ‘Generation X’, which is more cynical and less interested in being told everything is going to be OK. Perhaps the message of the Reformation will resonate more with ‘Generation X’ who is less inclined to believe that everything is alright. They are more likely to accept the message “You’re not OK! I’m not OK!”
The fact is that a lot of younger people today are looking for truth and wanting answers. They are tired of being told, “Don’t worry! Be happy!” Many have grown up in homes where they’ve had to worry and weren’t happy because their parents were off playing while they were busy raising themselves. And all kinds of surveys are telling us that the rising generation is more ready then ever for being taught. Let’s hope that we’re able to be there for them before the cults or others who are able to provide some sense of community and direction get to them.
Some of your critics say: “The problem with the Church is not that we have the right doctrine, but that we’re not living it.” How do you respond to that claim?
I think the problem is precisely the opposite. I think we are living out our beliefs! I think that’s what we see all around us. Evangelicalism is living out exactly what it holds to be true.
Evangelicalism, for the most part, at least in the United States, believes that man is basically good by nature. According to a recent survey, 77% of American evangelicals said that man by nature is basically good; 86% said that God helps those who help themselves; and over half of the evangelicals surveyed said that that was a biblical quotation. So this is our theology, this is the operating theology of the evangelical world today. Man is basically good and God is there to make us happy.
Well, what kind of lives will that generate? What kind of effect will that have in our behaviour and culture? Exactly the kind of culture I think we have in the United States at the beginning of the 21st Century: a narcissistic, hedonistic culture in which people just care about themselves. They don’t look to the long-term. We don’t care very much about our descendants or our ancestors. What we really care about is ourselves.
What I think is really quite remarkable is that some of the most vocal, right-wing, Christian political organisations in America today are headed by people who hold, on the theological side of things, a number of basic ideas about life that are not too different from the flower people of the 60s. They have a very conservative view of how the country should look ethically, but paradoxically they promote a theology that continues to be very self-indulgent—and in many respects grows out of the very ethical world that they’re trying to outlaw.
Who are some of these prominent leaders?
I think of people like James Dobson. I guess I can’t mention Bill Hybels anymore, because Bill Hybels has become a buddy of ex-President Bill Clinton! But there are others like Robert Schuller.
Actually, Robert Schuller is a great example of somebody who doesn’t believe in a radical human fall, nor sees our desperate need for divine grace and forgiveness. Schuller believes that people are basically good by nature. And yet he calls himself an evangelical, is politically conservative, and wants to stem the tide of immorality in our country.
The Bible talks about false prophets. How do we distinguish them? And how great is their threat today?
That’s a good question. Someone once said that the best way to tell a counterfeit is to know the real thing. And the best way, I think, for us to discern between true and false prophets is for us to know the word of God so well that when something just doesn’t ring true, a bell goes off. The problem today is that the bells aren’t going off because we don’t really know the Bible. I’m not talking here about Bible trivia; I’m concerned with the question: do we really know what the message of Scripture is?
For instance, if we are talking about a particular view of human nature, can we critique it against the whole biblical witness in order to explain what we believe human nature to be? I think that’s how we’ll be best prepared to spot false preaching.
Here’s another thing to think about in relation to false prophets: if the preaching that you’re listening to flatters the congregation, then get nervous. People today like to call flattery encouragement, but it amounts to the same thing. Of course, I’m not suggesting that there is no place for comforting people. God tells Isaiah, the true prophet, to “comfort my people” after they have been levelled by the law. A true prophet knows that people need to be encouraged by the Gospel. But that’s quite different from flattery. There are hordes of pastors today—false shepherds—who think that one doesn’t need to be humbled by the law because things aren’t that bad.
So I think people should suspect any preacher who has a confused message about law and gospel. If anyone comes and suggests to you that things aren’t as bad as the Bible portrays, or the Gospel isn’t as wonderful as the Scripture says, he should be viewed with suspicion. He’s probably a false teacher.
Remember the false prophets in Jeremiah’s day who were always claiming visions from God: “The Lord told me this …! The Lord told me that …!” So God tells Jeremiah that every man’s word has become the Word of God. And that devaluing of the Word of God has happened in our churches today, just as surely as it happened during the liberal era in the last century.
Again, I think we have to beware of false prophets who draw people after them instead of bringing them into the Church where they themselves are under authority. Preachers should be glad to be directed by the creeds and confessions of the Church. They should also be willing to be subject to its discipline. At the end of the day, we can’t all be shepherds. We have to commit ourselves to shepherds but we should only commit ourselves to people who are reliably sent by God through his Church.
You’ve charged many of the televangelists with serious distortions of the Gospels. Which of the televangelists, in your opinion, constitute the most threat to the Church?
I don’t know who you have on television in Australia. You probably have a lot of the same ones we have over here. Let me think … I’m trying to remember the ones who haven’t gone to jail. They seem to change so often. They’re in and out of prison all the time!
Well, I’m sorry to say that Jimmy Swaggart is back on cable in the States. Then there’s Benny Hinn, Kenneth Hagan and Kenneth Copeland. My own personal view is that Kenneth Copeland and the ‘faith teachers’ (as they’re called) are the most dangerous because they have the appearance of preaching the Word. Everything they do is Word-centred, at least in name. Their teaching is called ‘Word of faith’ or the ‘Word-faith teaching’. They come on television and say: “You have to believe the Word”. But they’re not interested in what the Word actually teaches; they just want you to believe promises that have been wrenched out of their context and that can be mouthed as an ‘Abracadabra’ to get the genie to do whatever you want. I think their health and wealth gospels are a very dangerous message in our day.
I don’t think Robert Schuller is quite as dangerous because he doesn’t say anything. He just repeats the sort of sentimental stuff that you find in Hallmark cards …
But doesn’t he soothe and flatter?
Oh, yes! He’s a master at it. He certainly soothes and flatters! But I wonder, at the end of the day, how much damage Robert Schuller really does. I guess I’m gradually coming to believe, more and more, that people like Schuller are not really the problem.
The real problem is that our churches are not faithfully preaching Christ week after week. If the churches that these people were coming from were doing their job effectively, then we wouldn’t have the problem. If pastors were engaged in faithful preaching and teaching and were grounding people in a Word and Sacrament ministry along with effective discipline, then there wouldn’t be a market for Robert Schuller and Kenneth Copeland. The problem is that there’s a huge market today because the Church has been so irresponsible in the past. This is the result of the Church getting off-track and doing its own thing instead of what Christ commissioned it to do.
You’re on record as saying: “… the Gospel as heralded by some of the TV-preachers is even more perverted than that proclaimed by Tetzel when he was selling his indulgences at the time of Luther. It is overtly blasphemous and anti-Christian!” What do you mean by that?
Did I really say that? Goodnight! This is why you should never write anything when you’re still young. However, I still agree with it. At least Tetzel really did seem to be doing what he was doing out of a concern for the people to whom he was selling the indulgences. And, yes, it was for the building of the world’s largest cathedral. I think he was genuinely concerned to give people an opportunity to get their friends and loved ones out of purgatory for rather a small charge. Today, I think it’s more insidious because the profiteering is more shameless. It has now reached the point where it is creating quite a cynical, unchurched audience.
Personally, I believe that if all these evangelistic ministries collapsed, there would probably be more long-term effective evangelism going on. At least that would be true, I think, in the United States. Here people have become quite hardened against Christianity, not because they’ve run into actual Christians, but because the only contact they have with Christianity anymore are these crazy public manifestations.
The early Church was torn apart by the heresy of Gnosticism. What was it and how has it reappeared in modern dress amongst modern evangelicals?
Gnosticism, as you know, was a complex heretical movement that was marked by a number of tendencies. I see some of them in evangelical Christianity, particularly where the work of God through physical means is disparaged.
For instance, you can go through every area of theology and see this—for example, in creation. Evangelicals, by and large, in the last part of the 20th Century have had very little interest in creation. Sometimes evangelicals even speak of salvation of the individual soul in the terms of escape from the body and escape from this world. Again, evangelicals have focussed on the hope of the rapture instead of a resurrection, particularly in dispensational circles.
There’s also a Gnostic tendency amongst evangelicals when they view the world as inherently evil. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not denying that the world is subject to sin and is in rebellion against God. I just don’t think that the Bible teaches that this world is intrinsically evil.
We also see Gnostic tendencies quite clearly in the way a lot of Christians approach the whole question of how God works. Does He use means? For instance, does the new birth come as I’m sitting by myself and having my own personal moment with God or does it come through the ordinary means of grace? Does it come through the Word as it is preached by a person up-front? You see, preaching is often disparaged these days as a means of grace. Again, does it come by water? Yes, water can be a means of grace! Joined to the Word, we believe that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper along with the preaching of the Word are means of grace.
I think that the low doctrine of the Church, the low doctrine of the Word in preaching, the low doctrine of the sacraments, and the low view of discipline in the evangelical movement reflects a Gnostic antipathy toward God’s decision to create, sustain, redeem and use the things He has created.
