White Horse Inn Blog

Our good friend Todd Wilkin from Issues, Etc. called Dr. Horton on Tuesday to talk about his recentblog post on Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian “fundamentalist” and cultural crusader who murdered eighty people at an Oslo camp. Listen to the audio below for Dr. Horton’s take on Breivik’s “mission” and why the confusion of culture and Christendom can lead to violence.

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Mike Horton was recently a guest on Issues, Etc. to discuss his recent Modern Reformation article “Trees or Tumbleweeds” which stresses the need for churches to recover the neglected practice of catechesis.

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There are few evangelical churches that practice formal church membership anymore. Our friends at IX Marks (associated with Mark Dever and Capitol Hill Baptist Church) recently posted a new eJournal on the topic of church membership. Matt Chandler’s lead article, Is Church Membership Biblical?, is especially good and worth your time to read. Here’s the intro:

I was 28 when I became the pastor of Highland Village First Baptist Church (now known as The Village Church). I had had a rough go early on in my church experience, and at that time I was not fully out of my “disenchanted with the local church” phase.

In all honesty, I wasn’t sure at the time that church membership was biblical. Despite that, the Spirit had made it all too clear that I was going to be pastoring this small church in the suburbs of Dallas. That was one of the many ironies of my life in those days.

Highland Village First Baptist Church was a “seeker-sensitive” church in the Willow Creek mold and had no formal membership process, although they were actively working on one and wanted the new pastor’s input. I had a strong understanding of the church universal but wasn’t well versed—and, as I said, somewhat skeptical—about the church local. We started growing quickly with young and oftentimes disenchanted 20-somethings who usually had no church background, or bad church backgrounds. They liked The Village because we were “different.” This always struck me as strange because we weren’t doing anything but preaching and singing.

In conversations with these men and women I began to hear things like “The church is corrupt; it’s just about money and a pastor’s ego,” or “I love Jesus, it’s the church I have a problem with.” My favorite one was, “When you organize the church it loses its power.” Although something occasionally resonated in me with these comments (I, along with most of my generation, have authority and commitment issues), I found them confusing since they were being made to me by people who were attending the church where I was the pastor.

Read the whole thing here.

Mike Horton’s new book, The Gospel Commission, which rounds out his three book series that started with Christless Christianity, is now available. Last week Tullian Tchividjian pointed out one of the important points Mike makes in the book:

Mike’s excellent point is one that I’ve made time and time again. Namely, that imperatives – indicatives = impossibilities! Whenever we see an imperative in the Bible (what we must do) we need to look for the indicative that grounds it (what Jesus has done). Because, no matter how hard you try or how radical you get, any engine smaller than the gospel that you depend on for power to do what God has called you to do will conk out…most importantly, the Great Commission!

Read the whole thing.

You can now purchase The Gospel Commission directly from White Horse Inn through our new online store. We’re slowly adding resources to the store and the prices are hard to beat. Right now, you can get all three books in this trilogy for less than Amazon sells them.

The good folks over at The Resurgence asked Mike Horton to write up a short piece on biblical theology. Here’s his conclusion:

Biblical theology is essential if we’re going to feel the Bible’s own pulse and follow its unfolding plot. Without it, systematic theology can easily succumb to a deductivist scheme. Going back to the street-map analogy, it’s easy to deduce where roads must go because of the map even if they don’t! Yet it can never be used as a rival of systematic theology. Christ was not only crucified and raised; he was “crucified for our sins and was raised for our justification.” Doctrine arises from the drama, indicating the significance of God’s acts in creation, redemption, and consummation.

Read the whole thing.

Friend of the Inn Uwe Siemon-Netto is an award-winning journalist and confessional Lutheran. His most recent column for the website Freepressers.com takes up the many disasters (natural and otherwise) that are dominating the news. How have apocalyptic-minded people thought about the end of the world in previous periods of church history? How should we think bout it when our own newspapers are filled with “it’s the end of the world as we know it” language?

The Bible cautions believers against speculating about the date and time of the Apocalypse, although current world events and calamities seem to invite such conjecture. There are the uprisings in the Middle East. In Japan, the tsunami and earthquake disasters are fueling  nuclear fears. And then the nuttiness of clergymen fitting Luther’s definition of “false clerics and schismatic spirits” reminds us that Christ listed some signs of the looming end of times, for example the appearance of many bogus prophets.

Read the rest of the article here.

Our friend, Tullian Tchividjian, has a follow-up post to his great article last week, “Why I Hate Accountability Groups.” In it he quotes Mike Horton’s article, “Does Justification Still Matter?” (Modern Reformation Sep/Oct 2007). As you read both Tullian’s post and Mike’s article, ask yourself when was the last time that “doctrine” played a significant role in understanding your life in Christ? When was the last time your sanctification was grounded in the work of Christ for you rather than your work for Jesus? People often ask me exactly how Reformational theology is different from what they might hear in a run of the mill evangelical church. The difference is clearly displayed whenever we consider who we are in Christ as the foundation for what we do, how we behave, and how we deal with the sin that still remains within us.

Tullian Tchividjian, the pastor of Coral Ridge PCA and a good friend to White Horse Inn posted a great piece about accountability groups yesterday on his blog. Here’s the teaser, but be sure to click through and read the entire thing!

Reminders Are More Effective Than Rebukes

Are you tired of being told that if you’re really serious about God, you must be in an “accountability group?” You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones where you and a small group of “friends” arrange for a time each week to get together and pick each other apart–uncovering layer after layer after layer of sin? The ones where all parties involved believe that the guiltier we feel the more holy we are? The ones where you confess your sin to your friends but it’s never enough? No matter what you unveil, they’re always looking for you to uncover something deeper, darker, and more embarrassing than what you’ve fessed up to. It’s usually done with such persistent invasion that you get the feeling they’re desperately looking for something in you that will make them feel better about themselves.

Well, I hate those groups!

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A great find from our friends at Mockingbird: from this week’s Economist, a story about the relationship between guilt and pain.

Friend of the Inn and Modern Reformation contributor Doug Powell has a new CD out titled, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer. Doug’s music was last heard on the White Horse Inn on October 3. Listen here to get a taste and then go here to pick up his new CD.

After getting his new CD, read Doug’s article from our November/December 2009 issue, “Illusion, Confusion, and Solution: Apologetics in a Postmodern World.”