White Horse Inn Blog

With J. I. Packer, James M. Boice, Richard Halverson, William Pannell and Michael S. Horton

HORTON: Do you think the complaint that evangelicals in this day and age are shallow and superficial is justified?

BOICE: Yes, I would agree with that complaint. For various reasons I think we are contributing to the very thing we ought to be working against. One reason is that we are so preoccupied with numbers. We’re so interested in getting people to make a profession that we often forget to take the time to explain the content of what it is they are about to profess. I notice, by contrast, that our Lord himself never did that. If anything, he seemed to be afraid of numbers. When the numbers got too high, he asked the tough questions, questions that would weed out those who were following only because it was simply the most exciting thing of the hour to do.

PACKER: I think this is right. There is such a thing as cultural Christianity, a Christianity that only goes skin deep and is taken in because it is part of the culture of your home or the group to which you belong. What you receive in this case, you receive by osmosis, rather than by any sort of thinking. When the time comes and the tough questions are asked your mind begins to wake up and you realize that all you’ve got is the veneer of a “Christian lifestyle” without any deeply rooted convictions at all. Culture Christianity is always a problem at this point. Those who have received it think that they are Christians because of the way that they have been conditioned, when in many cases they still have been converted.

PANNELL: What we have failed to do in many of our Christian circles is to present in a stimulating way real biblical questions. Today, people tend to think that you can go to church, be a Christian, and get along best if you leave your mind in the glove compartment.

HORTON: Could it be that we have a cheap and limited view of God and his grace?

HALVERSON: I certainly think we’ve lost that sense of awe when we talk about God in our modern evangelical culture. I don’t sense awe in many of the evangelical gatherings that I have attended. I have a feeling, for example, that if Jesus was to walk into one of our churches or conventions, that we wouldn’t want to stand up and cheer and sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” I think we should fall immediately to our knees in an attitude of worship. However, today I think we tend to equate noise with praise and worship and that troubles me a great deal (see Amos 5:21-24).

PACKER: I think you’ve hit on something fairly basic here. I think of the two pans of an old fashioned pair of scales. If one goes up, the other goes down. Once upon a time folks new that God was great and that man by comparison was small. Each individual carried around a sense of his own smallness in the greatness of God’s world. However, the scale pans are in a different relation today. Man has risen in his own estimation. He thinks of himself as great, grand and marvelously resourceful. This means inevitably that our thoughts about God have shrunk. As God goes down in our estimation, He gets smaller. He also exists now only for our pleasure, our convenience and our health, rather than we existing for His glory.

Now, I’m an old fashioned Christian and I believe that we exist for the glory of God. So the first thing I always want to do in any teaching of Christianity is to attempt to try and get those scale pans reversed. I want to try and show folks that God is the one of central importance. We exist for His praise, to worship Him, and find our joy and fulfillment in Him; therefore He must have all the glory. God is great and He must be acknowledged as great. I think there is a tremendous difference between the view that God saves us and the idea that we save ourselves with God’s help. Formula number two fits the modern idea, while formula number one, as I read my Bible, is scriptural. We do not see salvation straight until we recognize that from first to last it is God’s work. He didn’t need to save us. He owed us nothing but damnation after we sinned. What he does, though, is to move in mercy. He sends us a Savior and His Holy Spirit into our hearts to bring us to faith in that Savior. Then He keeps us in that faith and brings us to His glory. It is His work from beginning to end. God saves sinners. It does, of course, put us down very low. It is that aspect of the gospel that presents the biggest challenge to the modern viewpoint. But we must not forget that it also sets God up very high. It reveals to us a God who is very great, very gracious and very glorious. A God who is certainly worthy of our worship.

PANNELL: I’m always impressed with the conversation that Jesus had with some of his contemporaries when they asked, “What can we do that we might do the works of God?” The assumption being that whatever God laid on them, they could handle. Jesus responded by saying, “This is the work of God, that you believe on Him who He has sent.” They could no more swallow that than they could any of the other teachings of Jesus. This one stuck in their minds and I think the reason for that is because it lays upon God all the burden of being Savior. And that is just un-American. To think that we would need someone outside ourselves to save us is in violation of the spirit of American independence.

HORTON: Could that be why we don’t frequently hear the preaching of the cross in evangelical churches? If we do hear the cross, it’s only in terms of how much God loves us, but we never really hear why the cross was actually necessary.

PACKER: Well, before we ever start talking about the cross showing us the love of God, we ought to take the time to define what took place on the cross so as to explain why the death of Christ shows us God’s love. Surely the first thing to say is that the achievement of the cross was the putting away of our sins. Had that not happened through the wisdom of God who put His Son in our place, we would have had to pay the price for our sins and that would have been eternal spiritual loss. Thus, the meaning of the cross is that a God, who was my stern judge, has become my loving heavenly Father because He has put away my sins. The Father, through the Son, redeemed the world. So our relationship with God becomes the most important issue we can ever face and the cross of Christ becomes the most momentous event in history, because we have a loving heavenly Father and the Judge who fully satisfies the account of us for our guilt. This is the God-centered way of looking at the cross.

BOICE: But that is the question, how are we going to look at the cross, or mankind, or God. For example, if your basic premise is that God exists to serve mankind and you happen to be going through a period of suffering, is God going to have to solve your problems for him to mean anything to you? The health and wealth gospels that we’ve heard so much about are merely outgrowths of this man-centered religion. However, if you take it the other way around, we’re there for God’s benefit and then He has a purpose even in our suffering. Christianity does not involve our solving everybody’s human problem, but instead involves our showing we can go through human problems in a way that honors God. Until Christians in our country understand that, Christianity is not going to have the impact that it once had, either for revival or for cultural change.

HALVERSON: I feel that this is where we are today. Although we say we believe in God, we really believe in man. I’ve lived in Washington D.C. for thirty years and I hear this all the time. They never verbalize it quite this way, but what they’re saying is, “If we just get the right man in the White House, and the right people in the Supreme Court and Congress, we’ve got the kingdom of God.” This concerns me a great deal.

PANNELL: I think there is a consensus in the world today as never before that the human race needs to be saved. I think that’s what communism and other isms are about. This leads inevitably to a contemporary idolatry called nationalism. To the degree that the church is seduced to these ideologies, it is to that degree also that the church loses confidence in the power of the gospel. And the cross just becomes something you wear around your neck.

HALVERSON: Years ago we had a breakfast in Washington for Malcolm Muggeridge, who as some of you may know is very pessimistic. After giving his speech, one gentleman, who happened to be constitutionally incapable of hearing anything pessimistic, approached him and said, “Brother Muggeridge, you’ve been very pessimistic, can’t you say anything optimistic?” He responded, “Why my friend, I’m very optimistic because my hope is only in Jesus Christ.” He let that response settle for a moment. Then he said this, “Just suppose the apostolic church had pinned its hopes on the Roman empire?” I’ve never been able to forget that. In a day when we are pinning our hope on the good old U.S.A. There’s a little text that came to mean a great deal to me a few years ago when I was preparing to preach an ordination sermon. Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” I can’t believe he has ever failed, or ever will fail in doing that. So I have to believe he is building his church. The problem is the church we’re building.

From Modern Reformation (May/June 1993): “Beyond Culture Wars”

William Cwirla (LCMS): There is sufficient evidence from the field of archaeology to show that the Bible is historically quite accurate. Even skeptical archaeologists have learned to take the biblical narrative at face value. Of course, this doesn’t prove the Bible to be “true,” only accurate in historic details. But that’s a good place to begin.

The New Testament documents are reliable, first-source historic documents written by eyewitnesses to a unique event history-the incarnation of the Son of God culminating in his death and resurrection. The manuscript evidence gives us a reliable text, far more reliable than any other text from antiquity.

The Gospels are a form of historical narrative. Luke mentions the fact that he did historical research prior to writing his account (Luke 1:1-4). The claim of all these writers is that Jesus died on a cross and rose bodily from the dead three days later. Paul mentions that Jesus was seen risen from the dead by more than five hundred eyewitnesses (1 Cor. 15:6) in addition to the apostles, many of whom went to their death insisting they had seen Jesus risen from the dead. These eyewitnesses had everything to lose and nothing to gain for claiming Jesus was risen. In fact, the religious and political authorities had a vested interest in the contrary, so their testimony was given in view of hostile cross-examination.

This same dead and risen Jesus predicted his own death and resurrection three times before it happened. As baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean once said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.” Jesus did it. For that reason, we need to take seriously what Jesus says. He says that the Old Testament Scriptures speak of him and teach the way of eternal life (John 5:39). He says that the Scriptures teach his death and resurrection and of repentance and forgiveness in his name (Luke 24:45-47). He promised that his apostles would receive the Holy Spirit who would bring to mind all that he had taught and would guide them into all truth (John 14:26; 16;13). The Apostle Paul writes that the Old Testament Scriptures are the very “breath of God” (2 Tim. 3:16), and Peter similarly writes that the prophets spoke not on their own initiative but as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:21).

The lynchpin for the veracity of the Scriptures is the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is not only the central teaching, it is also the foundation to the truth claims of the Scriptures. If Christ is not raised, then everything that is written in the Bible is suspect. But Jesus Christ, the Word Incarnate who died and rose from the dead, points us to the Scriptures which he claims reliably speak concerning himself.

Jason Stellman (PCA): The Westminster Confession of Faith I.4 states that the authority of Scripture does not depend on the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God. In both the Old and New Testaments the Bible declares itself to be the very Word of God: “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes; the rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether” (Ps. 19:7-9); “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16).

But accepting Scripture’s self-testimony is not simply random, circular reasoning; it’s not something we do in spite of manifold evidence to the contrary (like believing that the Book of Mormon is true because we get a “burning in our bosom” when we read it). Rather, the Bible’s own internal evidence-such as “the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof” (WCF I.5)-bears witness to its truthfulness and authority.

But as with the existence of God, believing the Bible’s message is not something we can do without the work of the Holy Spirit within us. We are not passive, neutral observers who weigh the evidence in some objective, disinterested way. Rather, we are, by nature, inclined to evil and hostile to divine things. That’s why all the rational arguments in the world will not convince us to bow before our Creator and submit to his message. Only the power of the Spirit working through the Word can accomplish that.

Next in the series: How can God exist when there is so much evil and pain in the world?

From Modern Reformation (March/April 2006): Does God Believe in Atheists?

Word and Sacrament: Making Disciples of All Nations
July/August 2011

What is the secret key for growth in the Christian life? It is the gospel of the died and risen Savior that gives life, delivered by means of the preached Word, and then signed, sealed, and confirmed by “visible word” in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Teaching and discipline come to bear immediately in a well-ordered church that is growing and maturing. In this issue in our continuing series on “The Great Commission,” we want to help realign the church’s mission to these specific means that Christ ordained for the expansion of his kingdom. Toward this end, Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton sets out our need for catechesis in discipleship-a theme running throughout this issue. Lutheran pastor John Bombaro argues against a “Facebook” Christianity, showing that discipleship necessarily involves a communal setting, including personal representation as being of the essence of Christian disciple-making; and Rick Ritchie helps us think about our choices of media in the church. Pastor Andrea Ferrari and Professor Alex Chediak also discuss churches and children who are coming of age in a Facebook age, while Pastor Nam-Joon Kim relates the extensive discipleship and teaching ministry at Yullin Presbyterian Church in Korea. An interview with J. I. Packer and Gary Parrett further reiterates the importance of catechism, and Presbyterian minister and seminary professor J. V. Fesko persuades us that baptism is a strong link to a lifetime of discipleship.

In the book of Acts, the Great Commission unfolds as the church was born by Word and Spirit and then “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). Word and Sacrament ministry, in other words, is the full mission of the church. This is how God directs our hearts and minds to Christ. It is his rescue mission for the nations. Join us in this July/August timely and vital issue of Modern Reformation!

Click here to see the Table of Contents

William Cwirla (LCMS): We know things in a variety of ways. We know things empirically, the way we know a scientific fact. For instance, we know that water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen because we can analyze water and literally take it apart. Since God can’t be measured or tested scientifically, we can’t know of God’s existence that way.

I’ve never been terribly impressed by the various “proofs” for the existence of God. All of them seem to lead to so much logical or philosophical arm wrestling, the God of logical necessities. I think these arguments are much more meaningful to believers than they are to skeptics.

We also know things inductively and retroductively, the way we know facts of history or the way a jury is convinced of a crime “beyond a reasonable doubt” by the evidence. The Apostle Paul writes that the pagans, who do not have the revealed Word, can still know something about God. “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:19-20). The Divine Suspect left his fingerprints.

Here, science has unwittingly done a decent job dusting for divine fingerprints. The finely-tuned order of the universe in a delicate balance of universal physical constants, the apparent rarity of Earth as a life-sustaining planet, the wonderful complexity of biological systems, and the intricacies of the genetic code all make a strong case for the existence of God. Like any circumstantial evidence case, there are always alternative explanations, so one can never be absolutely certain in knowing God this way, only reasonably certain.

This sort of natural knowledge of God is also quite limited. We can know of his eternal power and deity, namely that God transcends time and space and that he is omnipotent and omniscient and whatever other “omni” you can think of, but we can’t know anything about his character or person. That must ultimately be revealed to us.

To know Jesus Christ is to know God. He is the fullness of the Deity dwelling among us bodily. This kind of knowing is different from knowing facts about God or studying God the way one studies biology or chemistry. This is knowing in the biblical use of that word, as in entering into a relationship with someone. “This is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).

The Incarnation is the grand revelation of God who’s been at work in, with, and under the created order from the beginning. He shows his face in the face of the Son of the Virgin, the Man of the Cross. If you want to know God, you need to learn from Jesus, the Son of God, the Word made flesh. You can be as certain of the existence of God as you are certain of the existence of the historic figure named Jesus, who claimed to be the Son of God, and offered a variety of signs, culminating in his own predicted death and resurrection.

Michael Brown (URC): We know that God exists because he has revealed himself to us. He has done this in two ways: through creation (which we call his general revelation) and Scripture (which we call his special revelation). Many people try to avoid the latter, but no one can escape the former. General revelation is something that all people experience. It is, as Article 2 of The Belgic Confession puts it, “before our eyes as a most beautiful book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many letters leading us to perceive clearly the invisible things of God.” Like a book that tells a story, nature communicates a message-one that is understood by all people irrespective of their location, language, or education. This is precisely what David says in Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their measuring line goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Ps. 19:1-4a).

Every day, nature reveals to the world the existence of its Creator. The rising of the sun and the shining of the stars say unequivocally to mankind: You are a creature living in the Creator’s universe. This, as Paul says in Romans 1:19-20, leaves people without excuse: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

Man cannot accuse God of not revealing himself. No one will ever be able to say, You didn’t give me enough evidence, God; I didn’t know that you existed! The fact is that every person knows God exists. Every human being knows something about God’s eternal power and deity by what is clearly perceived in nature. Moreover, as Paul points out in Romans 2:14-15, God has planted in the soul of every human being a basic awareness of God and his law. Calvin called this the sensus divinitatis-an elementary, intuitive perception of God’s existence.

Consequently, before a Christian even opens her mouth to give an argument for the existence of God, the unbeliever already knows that God exists. The unbeliever’s problem is not that he doesn’t know this, but that he hates and suppresses what he already knows to be true. This, according to Paul, is the indictment that God gives to the entire human race when he says: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:18). Thus, “How can I know God exists?” is the wrong question. The question that the unbeliever needs to ask is, “How can I be saved from the wrath of God?”

Jason Stellman (PCA): This is such a profound question, but what makes it especially interesting is the fact that the Bible (which is the primary source of our knowledge about God) never actually argues for his existence. Instead,it presupposes it with the opening words of its first book, Genesis: “In the beginning, God… ” To those who doubt his existence, Psalm 14 just responds, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”

But when you think about it, it shouldn’t be that surprising that the existence of God is considered to be as central and basic as the Bible implies. After all, we all hold beliefs for which we have no proof and for which we never think to argue (such as the belief that truthfulness is better than lying, or that it is wrong to torture children for fun). Now I’m not saying that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated, it certainly can, but our belief in him is only strengthened by such evidence, it is not founded on it.

Though Scripture, as I said, doesn’t furnish us with arguments for God’s existence, it does appeal to his handiwork as a demonstration of his power and wisdom. Speaking of pagan idolaters, Paul insisted that they “knew God” and had witnessed “his eternal power and divine nature” by observing the wonders of creation. Yet because of the darkness of their hearts men refuse to glorify him, and choose rather to serve creatures instead of the Creator. Man’s “atheism,” therefore, is a farce. His “intellectual doubt” is often a moral refusal to admit what his eyes and heart plainly testify-that there is a God to whom he is accountable.

When you look at it this way, I guess you could turn the issue on its head and argue that God doesn’t believe in atheists.

A. Craig Troxel (OPC): Many people in the West respond to the reality of religious pluralism by affirming that all religions are really the same. But one problem with such a viewpoint is that it seeks to domesticate religions by stripping them of all that is unique about them. Certain beliefs must be sacrificed in order to amalgamate religions into parallel or analogous ways to God. The distinctive elements of the various religions are pured into one flavor-and by an “outsider”-who is an expert and, of course, has our best interest in mind. As Steve Turner puts it tongue-in-cheek, “We believe that religions are basically the same. …They only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.”

The religion that is least conducive to such reductionism is Christianity, because the person who is least tamable is Christ. You cannot begin to treat Christ as merely a prophet or wise teacher (like Moses, Mohammed, Confucius, or Buddha). Yet in order to assert that the Christian faith is just another brand or label of one all-purpose universal religion, you must essentially gut the Christian faith of all its content, much in the same way that a modern taxidermist removes all of a fish so that hardly anything remains when it is mounted on the wall.

For example, in order to make his point, John Hicks argued in God Has Many Names that Jesus never designated himself as Messiah, never thought of himself as divine, and that the incarnation is a mythical idea applied to Jesus. Jesus gets reduced to being our “saving point of contact” with God. This is a huge distortion of Jesus’ declaration to be “the way, the truth and the life” and that people should honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Emphasizing this truth, and the truth of his substitutionary death, resurrection from the dead, and future return is not a static or freeze-dried view of truth. It is the truth that set us free.

Next in the series: How can I know that the Bible is true?

From Modern Reformation (March/April 2006): “Does God Believe in Atheists?”

At the end of 2010 we began launching digital versions of Modern Reformation issues. This allows subscribers (both our print and on-line subscribers) the option of reading the magazine in its fully formatted form across a number of devices. However, we had heard from many subscribers that would like the option of downloading the issues in PDF form so they can read the digital issues of MR when they were not connected to the internet or on other e-reading devices (i.e. Kindle, Nook, etc. that can read imported PDFs). Now that option is available! In the menu bar of the digital issue there is a PDF icon that allows you to download select pages or the entire issue of Modern Reformation.

In order to access all of our digital issues (and now download PDFs), as well as access our entire on-line archive, you must be a current subscriber (print or on-line) to Modern Reformation or a partner of White Horse Inn. (If you currently are a subscriber or partner, but don’t think you have access to our MR site please contact the webmaster.)

Subscribe to Modern Reformation

Become a partner of White Horse Inn.

For a free digital preview edition of our current May/June 2011 issue click on the “mini-flip” version below (or click here if Flash is not enabled)

Please note: These PDFs are not to be made publicly available and to do so violates our Terms of Use.

We often tell subscribers that the price of their subscription helps us to circulate nearly twice as many magazines as we have subscribers. Many of the magazines that we give away go to prisoners across the US. Today, we received a letter (and a money order to pay for his own subscription) from a prisoner in the West. I wanted to share just a brief segment of the letter with you for your encouragement:

I am a prisoner in _______ with a life sentence and I can’t tell you how much of an impact your unashamed proclamation of the sovereign grace of our God has had on my theological understanding and consequently my everyday life. Thank you for your stand on the solas and the Reformed tradition as well. I am 28 years old and grew up in the _______ ______ church family. As well intentioned as most mainline Christianity is, young men like myself need guys like you to be the unpopular voice from the past that calls the church back to the doctrines of St. Paul, the apostle of Christ.

This prisoner was introduced to Modern Reformation through the back issues that another prisoner had kept and passed along. Your gifts to Modern Reformation and White Horse Inn do more than just keep the lights on, they help change people’s lives…sometimes in the most unexpected places.

We’re in the final stretch of our mid-year appeal and your gifts make a significant difference. If you haven’t already, would you please call us at 800-890-7556 and make a donation over the phone or you can give online or by mail (White Horse Inn, 1725 Bear Valley Pkwy., Escondido CA 92027). Thank you for your support of Modern Reformation, White Horse Inn, and prisoners like this young man.

SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World
by Douglas Estes
Zondervan, 2009
256 pages (paperback), $16.99

In his book SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World, Douglas Estes gets defensive about an accusation that no one seems to be leveling. I, for one, was only peripherally aware of the “virtual world” before picking up Estes’ book. As a member of the clergy, I didn’t really know that there were virtual churches in virtual worlds, much less was I aware of some movement to classify such churches as “not real,” the movement against which Estes writes. Rather than writing an introduction or an ode to virtual churches, his defense of the same comes off as, well, defensive. He rarely quotes specific arguments against the validity of virtual churches (pulling most of the critique from only two sources outside of general anecdotal “evidence”) and puts his reader in mind of Queen Gertrude’s observation: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” SimChurch, though, provides an introduction to the virtual church despite itself.

The first point that Estes is at pains to make is an important one and well made: Virtual churches are not the same as church websites. My brick and mortar church has a website, on which we publish sermons, prayer lists, sign-up sheets, schedules, and so forth. This does not make us a virtual church. To borrow Estes’ vernacular, it simply makes us a real-world church with a website. A virtual church proper is a church that exists in the virtual world. That is, a church that exists in a world that exists exclusively online, such as Second Life or even World of Warcraft. This distinction is important to Estes, as it should be. It is the first place virtual churches apparently come against resistance. Everyone knows real-world churches should have websites, and isn’t that enough of an Internet presence? Estes argues that it isn’t, and to illustrate he makes a comparison with which real-world evangelists are sure to take issue.

Estes likens the virtual world to a new landmass discovered off the coast of Africa. “Wouldn’t we plant churches there?” he asks. By ignoring (at best) or shunning (at worst) the virtual world, Estes claims we are making no attempt to reach this new continent full of souls in need of the good news of Jesus Christ. A large fallacy exists in this argument, of course:  The citizens of this newly discovered land (the virtual world) are also citizens of a known territory (the real world). The implication that we (the apparently anti-virtual church crowd) are dropping the ball on the Great Commission is a little underhanded and ultimately specious. It would serve Estes’ argument better to simply suggest that it’s possible some people might be better reached in a virtual church than in a real-world church. He does make this argument later in the book, but he doesn’t do himself any favors with what he must hope is his audience: real world Christians wondering about virtual world ministry.

One of the first protestations that critics of virtual churches are alleged to bring up is the necessary use of avatars. For the uninitiated (a group that has shrunk considerably in the wake of James Cameron’s blockbuster film), an avatar is an online “you” that you control in the virtual world. Estes admits up front that most people create avatars that are little like themselves. The first-blush reaction to widespread avatar use is that it is too easy for congregants of a virtual church to hide their “real” selves behind their avatars. Indeed, how is a pastor to minister to a congregant who presents as half-man, half-bull? As Estes is quick (and correct) to point out, though, we all use avatars in our real lives—the “us” we create for the world to see. This practice could be said to be especially prevalent in churches. Virtual churches simply admit that a ubiquitous real-world practice occurs while real-world churches pretend it doesn’t.

When Estes’ discussion turns to the administration of the sacraments and church discipline, though, he paints himself into a bit of a corner. By making the administration of each a constitutive part of what makes a church legitimate, he forces himself to find ways in which virtual churches can administer the sacraments, for one, in a “real” way (mostly involving pilgrimages to real-world churches). It would seem to be a better route, however, to attempt to argue for a redefinition of church: that where the preaching of the gospel is, there the church is. By holding to a historical definition of “church” in a decidedly nonhistorical context, Estes makes the sacraments into a ponderous chore rather than the glorious grace they are meant to be. With regard to discipline, Estes finds himself in a similar place. My own tradition, Anglicanism, does not consider discipline a necessary mark of the church, but many other traditions do. Once again, by insisting on a measure of church discipline, Estes (whose church is loosely connected to the Baptist tradition) makes his argument harder to win.

Confronted with such issues, Estes seems to cheat. He offers alternatives of varying worth, but doesn’t argue for one over another. He asks lots of rhetorical questions, often ending sections with several in a row, without ever answering any of them. Beyond being a tiresome technique, it’s only a surface profundity without any substance underneath.

I never would have thought that virtual churches were “real” or “legitimate” churches, although any opportunity for people to hear the gospel is some small victory. The preaching of the gospel is rare enough in real-world churches that its presentation anywhere should be celebrated. By writing his book in defensive response to a perceived critique, Estes has weakened what could have been a powerful story of gospel witness in a new environment, and he could have interacted with old definitions of church for a new world, rather than allowing the virtual church to simply “be” church in a new way.

—
Reviewed by Nick Lannon. The Rev. Lannon is curate of Grace Church Van Vorst in Jersey City, New Jersey.

This review was originally published in Modern Reformation magazine (May/June 2011) Vol 20, No 3, pages: 50, 63.

Our friends over at Get Religion posted an interesting news story about church architecture: small, rural churches whose buildings are in  need of repair, what their choice of architecture indicates about their place in the community, and how new churches are making different choices when it comes to the buildings in which they worship.

After you read the short news piece, take a look at this article from Mike Horton, “Why Does Sacred Space Matter?” (from the May/June 1998 issue of Modern Reformation):

Theology is practical, and there is no better testing ground than in the so-called “worship wars.” But, with few exceptions, such debates rarely address one of the most important questions: If matter matters, why don’t our church buildings?

“It’s just a building,” we say of the church-and so it is. “The church is the people, not the brick and mortar.” Right again. According to Scripture, worship is no longer bound to the ceremonies of Mosaic covenant, types and shadows of the reality to come; namely, Christ. He is, after all, the true Sanctuary and Temple of God’s dwelling among his people, and we worship “neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, for the time is coming and now is when people will worship in Spirit and in truth” (John 4:21-24). God commanded the old covenant worship, with its elaborate regulations governing liturgical, ceremonial, and sacrificial rites, but when the “temple greater than Solomon’s” (Matt. 12:42) arrived and, after being reduced to rubble was rebuilt after three days (John 2:19-21), the Holy of Holies could not be located in any particular earthly structure. Instead, as Jesus promised the Samaritan woman, new covenant worship is eschatological-that is, it takes place in the heavenly sanctuary in which believers are already “seated with Christ” (Eph. 2:6).

Calvin’s impatience with liturgical extravagance and novelty focused on just this concern. Like the covenant people gathered at the foot of Mount Sinai around the golden calf, we are all inveterate idolaters. We want to worship “our way,” and our minds are “idol factories,” so “our way” always ends up at odds with God sooner or later. The greatest tragedy in all of this is that, in our impatience with God’s redemptive time-table (like Israel at Mount Sinai), we create our own “image of the invisible God” instead of waiting for the advent of the only legitimate incarnation of God (Col. 1:15).

Read the entire article.

We’re also making a special article from Dr. Donald Bruggink available. Dr. Bruggink’s article traces the meaning and loss of many of the visual elements of church architecture. His article first appeared in our May/June 2007 issue.

The May/June issue of Modern Reformation is almost here! This new issue, entitled “Embassy of Grace,” is packed with thought-provoking articles, Bible studies, and book reviews. Here’s a glimpse at what’s coming up:

Features

The Ministry of Reconciliation: Embassy of Grace: Like an embassy in a foreign country, the church is a safe haven for its citizens. From its many locations, the policies of the Great King, Jesus Christ, are announced to the world. As Christ’s ambassadors, aren’t we still called to herald this good news to the world in a ministry of reconciliation?
By Michael Horton

“And He Gave Gifts to Men”: What was once regarded as a high calling is now trivialized by the every-member-a-minister movement. When Luther and the Reformers proclaimed that the pastoral office was a necessity and of divine origin, could anyone infer from the Lutheran church’s contemporary practice that we still hold to this? If not, is there a remedy?
By Brent McGuire

Missionalism, Church Style:  If God has elected a small and elite few to be saved, what’s the point of sharing the gospel with anyone? Is being “missional” an answer? Can churches Reformed by definition be truly missional in their ministry?
By Jason J. Stellman

Missions and the Work of the Church: In 1932, Harvard professor Ernest Hocking published Re-Thinking Missions, a stunning rejection of Protestant missions as it had been conducted for almost two centuries. What was the church’s reaction then and what does it mean for us today? The author looks at various responses, notably by Pearl Buck and J. Gresham Machen.
By D. G. Hart

What Do We Do About Sunday School?: Is Sunday school primarily a moral training ground for children, from which adults eventually graduate and mature to making autonomous and acceptable moral choices based on feelings? Or is it still about the gospel and seeing Christ in all the Scriptures?
By Susan E. Erikson

The Church in a Pluralist Society: After Lesslie Newbigin returned from the mission field to his “home” in the West, what did he begin to realize about a theology of mission in an increasingly diverse and pluralistic culture?
By Shane Lems

Ad Extra: Articles Aside

Studies in Acts
Acts 3: The Ambassadors of the Kingdom By Dennis E. Johnson

Focus on Missions
A Servant’s Enduring Faith By Marie Notcheva

From the Hallway: Perspectives on Evangelical Theology
Defending Nothing, Evangelizing No One: “Oh Apologetics, Where Art Thou?” By Craig A. Parton

For a Modern Reformation
Missional & Vocational By Michael Horton

The Latest Ideas Sweeping the Land…

SimChurch:  Being the Church in the Virtual World, By Douglas Estes
Reviewed by Nick Lannon

A Dialogue: In and Out of Our Circles
Defining the Church, White Horse Inn Interview with Edmund Clowney

Lutheranism 101, Edited by Scot A. Kinnaman
Reviewed by John J. Bombaro

Welcome to a Reformed Church: A Guide for Pilgrims, By Daniel R. Hyde
Reviewed by Ryan Kron

Christianity at the Religious Roundtable: Evangelicalism in Conversation with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, By Timothy C. Tennent
Reviewed by John D. “Jady” Koch, Jr.

Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God, By John Piper
Reviewed by Beryl Clemens Smith

Point of Contact: Books Your Neighbors Are Reading
The Finkler Question, By Howard Jacobson
Reviewed by W. Robert Godfrey

Is the Christ in which the church has put its faith the same person as the Jesus who really lived? Some theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have said “No.” They claim that the real “Jesus of History” differs greatly from the church’s “Christ of Faith.” Some make this pronouncement with glee. So much the worse for Jesus. Free of the Galilean, the theologian is at liberty to spin a religion out of his own spiritual consciousness. Others who doubt the authenticity of the church’s Christ of Faith embark on a quest for the historical Jesus. So much the worse for the church. She will have to bow to new scholarly findings if researchers discover a “new Jesus.”

Some of my readers have probably seen books on these new Jesuses. In our day, he is always said to be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls or gnostic writings. The endorsements on the dustjackets of these books always claim that the new findings will “undermine the foundations of the church.” Such a claim might well unsettle the stomach of an unwary book-browser. When you see books like this, don’t fear them. Pick them up and scan their contents. You will rarely find in these books a scholarly presentation of newly-discovered material. Instead, most are filled with crackpot interpretations of familiar texts which were discovered long ago.

Publishers of such books laud their authors for being “bold and innovative.” Actually, there is nothing particularly bold about these men. Their books are certain to succeed in our sensationalist culture. The truly bold scholars are those who write on such matters without making earth-shattering claims. They enter into a far more risky publishing venture.

The Mediator is the Message
The theologian who accepts a dichotomy between the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith will always favor one over the other. The most famous example of opting for a Christ of Faith over the Jesus of History is found in the writings of Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann’s Christ of Faith could be believed in even by those who doubted the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.

To some of us, this sounds like a good solution to our plight. Many of us are not confident in our ability to evaluate the historical evidence for Jesus. But Bultmann’s Christ is impervious to being disproved. If we find that Jesus never lived, so what? The Christ presented by the gospel writers is still a compelling figure-so compelling that we ought to follow him anyway. Besides, who wants to disband their home Bible study just because the Jesus Seminar cannot agree on what Jesus said or did?

The problem with such reasoning is that the New Testament does not speak of Christ in such terms. Bultmann’s Christ is safe because his message is more important than his person. The New Testament Christ is risky because everything depends upon his Person and work. As St. Paul says, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). No historical Jesus, no salvation. What really happened in history matters to us. The Mediator is the message.

Who’s Mything?
The position of a writer like Bultmann is much more dangerous than that of other contemporary liberal theologians for two reasons. First, his writing is much clearer. More people can be led astray by him because more can understand him. Second, his claim that jettisoning the supernatural side of Christianity will not leave us without something to believe in is attractive to many. Most people would like to feel as if they were both up-to-date and spiritual. Bultmann says they succeed at both if they follow his advice. The problem is that this cannot be done. While Bultmann’s method is understandable, its ramifications are difficult for many to see, and they spell disaster.

In the space of just a few pages of his book Jesus Christ and Mythology, Bultmann charts a new method of Biblical interpretation. He calls us to question the old understanding of those passages of Scripture where God’s action was local or concrete (which Bultmann termed mythological) or where Jesus spoke of a literal end of the world and coming judgement (which Bultmann termed eschatological). He says:

We must ask whether the eschatological preaching and the mythological sayings as a whole contain a still deeper meaning which is concealed under the cover of mythology. If that is so, let us abandon the mythological conceptions precisely because we want to retain their deeper meaning. This method of interpretation of the New Testament which tries to recover the deeper meaning behind the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing. (1)

Bultmann is aware that asking people to give up even portions of scripture would be scandalous, so he claims that even these passages are not eliminated: “[My] aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them.” (2)

The Bible contains a vital message under the cover of mythology. At this point Bultmann’s program is still an abstract theory. We will need to see its application before we know what it will mean for theology.

Bultmann does not hesitate to offer a test case. He offers the example of those passages in Scripture which seem to teach a localized heaven. He says that these passages employ mythology because their writers were not capable of abstraction. An ancient author’s only way to express transcendence was to portray it spatially:

According to mythological thinking, God has his domicile in heaven. What is the meaning of this statement? The meaning is quite clear. In a crude manner it expresses the idea that God is beyond the world, that He is transcendent. (3)

Ancient man thought, but he thought crudely. This understanding of the ancient mind is common. I have seen a similar example in a recent article on ancient representations of cherubim (those six-winged creatures of Old Testament visions). The author says that

Although ancient man understood concepts like omnipotence and omniscience, he did not express them in philosophical terms. Instead, he did so concretely. Man’s earliest attempts to express abstract, metaphysical concepts took a physical form. (4)

While both the author of the article and Bultmann believed that ancient man had some grasp of transcendental concepts, both believed ancient man to be a thrall to concrete expression. Bultmann saw this as a drawback for modern man who had progressed beyond this point.

If Bultmann was right, then a sensitive modern interpreter is needed to understand what the ancients were trying to convey. In the case of heaven and hell, without a Bultmannian guide, moderns might even give up on the Bible, its timeless message having been lost in mythological language:

These mythological conceptions of heaven and hell are no longer acceptable for modern men since for scientific thinking to speak of “above” and “below” in the universe has lost all meaning, but the idea of the transcendence of God and evil is still significant. (5)

The problem with the ancients is that they weren’t scientific. If they had a telescope or a space shuttle, they would have known that their conceptions were flawed. After the heavens have been trespassed by astronauts, who can believe in a celestial cloudland?

Such thinking reminds me of the Russian cosmonaut who said upon his arrival in space that he did not see God. Even as a child I remember thinking how disappointed I would have been if he had. My feeling was not rooted in a deep-seated need to believe without evidence, but in an inkling of the grandeur of the divine. Has it not occurred to Bultmann that his own conceptions might be analogies?

Perhaps the word “transcendence” is mythological in the same sense as the words “above” and “below.” God’s relationship to the universe is unique. Theologians have chosen to give the abstract word “transcendence” a peculiar meaning when it is used theologically to speak of Gods relationship to the universe. Perhaps the ancients knew how to use the language of “above” and “below” in the same unique sense. Their use would have the added advantage of being recognized by most people as non-literal or analogical. Today’s reader might be fooled by the word “transcendent.”

I have a high opinion of the ancient mind. So do many who are familiar with it. One writer who was well-trained in the reading of ancient documents (he had been reading Homer in Greek since the age of 16) was C. S. Lewis. Professor Lewis faced claims like that of Bultmann in the Church of England of his day. Responding to the writing of one clergyman who said that we moderns had to overhaul our image of God, Lewis wrote:

The Bishop of Woolwhich will disturb most of us Christian laymen less than he anticipates. We have long abandoned belief in a God who sits on a throne in a localized heaven. We call that belief anthropomorphism, and it was officially condemned before our time. There is something about this in Gibbon. (6)

Edward Gibbon was the famous author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The condemnation of anthropomorphism of which Gibbon spoke took place in the early centuries of Christianity. Lewis argues that even in the ancient church, people could read the scriptures without being led astray by concrete imagery. I propose to show that even in Old Testament times men could do this. God himself taught them how in the Old Testament writings. God “demythologized” himself without the help of a twentieth century theologian.

Today You Will Be With Me in Paradigm
Our tendency to believe that we can look down on the religious expressions of ancient man from a higher summit of understanding is rooted in our modern theology. Were the ancients here with us, they would not bow to us as to superiors. They would lament our corrupted understanding and attribute it to the fall of man. For theological superiors they would have looked back to Adam and Eve before the fall, or perhaps ahead to the glorified state, where they would learn pure theology in the “heavenly school.” They would have rejected the idea that mankind is embarked on a progressive quest for God. They believed in a divine quest where God has sought to bring natural idolaters from all generations to a truer knowledge of himself.

I would like to offer a test case to show how God’s progressive revelation of himself in Scripture demonstrates the ability of the Bible to transcend the timebound categories of its ancient authors. I owe this example to Stephen Prickett, whose book Words and the Word offers an unusually broad base of observations showing the foibles of both conservatives and liberals when it comes to Biblical interpretation.

Prickett finds in the story of Elijah an example of God’s progressive revelation of himself. God had begun this revelation by showing himself a superior force to the pagan gods. The pagan prophets had laid out their sacrifice before Baal, but he did not show up, even after much shouting and self-mutilation on the part of his prophets. Then Elijah set forth his sacrifice. Elijah doused water on the sacrifice to ensure that what was to happen would be a display of great power. Before the prophets of Baal, “the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the sacrifice….” (1 Kgs 18:38). Even before this demonstration, Elijah was aware that God had a history of revealing himself through the forces of nature. But God knew that if he had terminated his self-revelation at this point in the story, even his trusted servant Elijah might think him a nature-god-certainly the most powerful of nature-gods, perhaps the only nature god-but a mere nature-god just the same. To counter this, God revealed his transcendence by repeating his demonstration of his command over nature, and then dissociated himself from the phenomena he had caused. God finally revealed his presence in a “still, thin voice.” (7) Prickett explains it thus:

Elijah had come to Horeb with certain expectations precisely because of that sense of history that was already, in Israel, distinctively the mark of men of God. Before the assembled prophets of Baal he had already vindicated Yahweh in pyrotechnics-proving once again the power of the God who had traditionally manifested himself by fire. Now he had come to receive the divine revelation for which he believed he had been preparing himself. What followed was the more unexpected. Paradoxically, his notion of Yahweh was disconfirmed by a greater display of natural violence than any yet. But Yahweh is not a fire God. His presence, when at last it is revealed, is experienced as something mysteriously apart from the world of natural phenomena that had been in such spectacular convulsions. Elijah’s own categories are overthrown. (8)

Prickett’s talk of categories being overthrown shows that a Kuhnian scientific revolution was possible even to ancient man. Isn’t this method curiously like the one the de-mythologizer is supposed to follow? God recognizes that the conception of him held by an ancient (in this case Elijah) contained some truth. But Elijah’s conception of God’s majesty was still crude. So God revealed himself in a new way to alter the old conception to a superior and more refined conception of transcendence-all without the help of Rudolf Bultmann!

The Jesus of History Future
The overall clarity of Bultmann’s language obscures the difficulty of some of his concepts. When he claims that modern man ought to be able to retain some kind of Christian faith but without mythology, this is a complex claim. It involves the idea that Christianity contains myth, and the idea that myth is a bad thing, at least for modern man. Both of these ideas are further complicated by the fact that Bultmann offers no precise definition of myth. His examples are understandable enough by themselves, but how is a reader to know what is and isn’t mythical in a given passage? Without a definition, the reader is left to decide for himself. If it is difficult to believe, it must be myth.

In Bultmann’s theory the concrete side of a myth is the flawed attempt of an ancient mind to express a deep truth. This concrete side is rejected by Bultmann. It is untrue. To be sure, the word “myth” can be used in a pejorative sense to mean something untrue. To a theologian, this is the most prominent characteristic of a myth. It is a wrong account of the world. St. Paul himself uses the word in this manner (e.g. 1 Tim 4:7, 2 Tim 4:4, Titus 1:14). But for St. Paul, there is no underlying truth to a myth. There is no kernel of truth to be found in a myth. That is the biblical sense of the term.

If Bultmann is using the term myth in another sense, then it would be nice to know what that sense is. For a man like Bultmann, who claimed to be able to distinguish different kinds of narrative in the Bible, the obvious sense would be the word’s literary sense. But was he in a position to judge this? C. S. Lewis claimed Bible critics wrote nonsense about the Bible and myth because they had never read myths. Not lack of faith, but lack of good training led to this:

…whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading…If (a critic) tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he had read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour… (9)

Whatever the value of Bultmann’s judgments on a given text, his construction of an overall theory of demythologizing was flawed by his unfamiliarity with myth.

Professor Lewis had read and loved both Greek and Norse mythology his whole life. His book Till We Have Faces is a reworking of the Cupid and Psyche myth. In Lewis’s writing we find an awareness of the complex nature of myth. In our century, we are long past the time when the Greek myths could lead people astray. We can appreciate the power of myth to integrate experience in a way that the early Christians were not free to. In a myth we see an expression of something that happens in nature enacted by great beings or gods. A myth draws together many experiences which were seen as separate.

Bultmann sees the mythical elements of a narrative as being of secondary importance to a message which the narrative was written to convey. Jesus had a message and his disciples valued that message so much that they invested his person with mythical qualities in order to draw attention to his message. Perhaps we moderns can value the message without the myth.

C. S. Lewis shows us another way to view Jesus. Not what he said, but his person and work was the message. His teaching was secondary to who he was and what he did. Better a silent Jesus who paid for our sins than a teaching Jesus who aborted his mission. Lewis is clear that Christianity is only viable if Christ is truly God. Christianity is worthless if Christ’s deity and atonement were myths-falsehoods.

But if we accept the truth of Christianity, and look at myth from another angle, as something other than falsehood, then Christianity can be said to be mythic. Something of true cosmic importance is enacted. All of our moral experiences are explained in one event. But that is not all. Nature is involved. There is some connection between the Resurrection and the coming of spring-a connection not lost on hymn-writers or greeting card manufacturers. But in the Resurrection, the normal relation of mythic event to nature is reversed. Usually, the myth serves to explain the general principle. But the Resurrection was clearly not intended as explanation of a more general Resurrection principle we see happening every spring. Spring is rather a foreshadowing of the Resurrection. Christianity is the true myth that makes everyday reality seem thin by comparison.

What kind of message are we really left with if we break the connection between who Jesus was and what he did? Some might say that Jesus did not have to rise from the dead for his teachings to be of value. He taught us to suffer under persecution in hope. But what is that hope? Perhaps that our values will live beyond us. Jesus died, but the church survived and flourished. But if Christ is not risen, how could that principle apply to our lives? If Christ is not risen, the success of the church was a grand mistake. The only principle we could draw is that if we were to suffer persecution and someone got confused enough, he or she might create a myth about us, and our values would be promoted by unearned fame. And that’s if we’re lucky! Some hope.

True hope looks to the future. Faith is trust that in Christ we have a good future. We have a good future because as the Jesus of History past, he overcame death and sin and wrath. As the Jesus of History future, we expect him to be as successful in overcoming our enemies. He has shown himself worthy of that trust. Instead of a dreary modern attempt to adjust Jesus to a so-called scientific view of the world, let us allow God to adjust us to a better view of things. A real Jesus came into the real world and gave it a real plot. We are living in a better crafted story than any storyteller, ancient or modern could have dreamed. We live in a world where accountants and astronauts are ransomed with the blood of God; where rockets travel through an outer space transcended by a real heaven; and where small-minded people, ancient, modern, or even postmodern, can experience a great paradigm shift when confronted with a word from God.

The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith are not to be separated. The ancients were aware of this when they wrote that “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ…begotten of his Father before all worlds…who was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” Our future depends on holding fast to these ancient words.

—
About the author: Rick Ritchie resides in Southern California and is a long-time contributor to Modern Reformation. He is a graduate of Christ College Irvine and Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.

Endnotes
1 Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribner’s 1958), p. 18.

2 Bultmann, p. 18.

3 Bultmann, p. 20.

4 Elie Borowski, “Cherubim: God’s Throne?” in Biblical Archaeology Review (July/August 1995: vol. 21, number 4), p. 36.

5 Bultmann, p. 20.

6 C. S. Lewis, “Must our Image of God Go?” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s 1970), p. 118.

7 See 1 Kings chapter 19 for the story. Prickett says that difficult passages such as the “still thin voice” of 1 Kings 19:12 have suffered at the hands of rationalistic interpreters, even when those interpreters were conservative evangelicals. The King James translators rendered it better, but the English language has changed leaving us without a good translation of this passage.

8 Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 11.

9 C. S. Lewis, Fern-Seed and Elephants, and other essays on Christianity, ed. Walter Hooper, Collins (Fontana), 1975, pp. 107-108; quoted by Prickett in Words and the Word, p. 81.

This article originally appeared in the November/December 1995 issue: “O Come Let Us Adore Him: The Person and Work of Christ” (Vol. 4 No. 6). Pages 33-36

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, you do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you do not make more than 500 physical copies. For web posting, a link to this document on our website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be explicitly approved by Modern Reformation.

Copyright © 2011 White Horse Inn