Outer Rim Territories

White Horse Inn - Shallow Waters

White Horse Inn (Dr. Michael Horton) - Broadcast Archives "Shallow Waters" This week's White Horse Inn radio program is spectacular. I urge you to listen and take to heart. The following is an excerpt of the opening commentary:

If pietism emphasized the importance of deeds over creeds, liberalism dispensed with the latter altogether. J. Gresham Machen, who (like Karl Barth) had been awakened from the spell of their teacher, Wilhelm Herrmann, speaks of a "pragmatist skepticism, this optimistic religion of a self-sufficient humanity," which has taken the place in Protestantism of "the redemptive religion hitherto known as Christianity." He added, "These questions take us into the very heart of the situation; the growth of ignorance in the Church, the growth of indifference with regard to the simple facts recorded in the Bible, all goes back to a great spiritual movement, really skeptical in its tendency, which has been going forward during the last one hundred years-a movement which appears not only in philosophers and theologians such as Kant and Schleiermacher and Ritschl, but also in a widespread attitude of plain men and women throughout the world. The depreciation of the intellect, with the exaltation of the feelings or of the will, is, we think, a basic fact now in modern life, which is rapidly leading to a condition in which people know neither anything nor care anything about the doctrinal content of the Christian religion, and in which there is in general a lamentable intellectual decline." Americans, as we have already seen throughout this series, have a fairly pronounced anti-intellectual streak. We are all doers, more than believers; pragmatists, more than thinkers. Impatient with tedious study and reflection, we would rather be overcoming obstacles, conquering nature and putting it to use more than understanding and enjoying it. But moralism-self-help salvation-is our default setting, we need to be regularly preached and taught out of it. Baptism, Communion, and preaching all call us out of ourselves and our self-trust, to cling to Christ in faith and to serve our neighbors in love. Machen pointed out that "the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based, not on a program of work, but upon an account of facts. In other words, it was based upon doctrine." A lot of people say that is intellectual, but of course faith requires knowledge and ascent as well as trust. How can we trust in something we don't know anything about.