Frame on Horton

I’ve been reading through Dr. John Frame’s rather long review of Michael Horton’s Christless Christianity, the latest in his popular-level critiques of contemporary American evangelicalism. As I’ve said before on this blog and other blogs, Horton is the best of the lot, especially his Covenant series, but his broad generalizations and forced historical narratives are annoying, especially when he gets with his White Horse Inn friends. So, you can imagine how happy I am to read Frame’s thoughtful repudiation of Horton’s interpretation of evangelicalism. There are so many good points, such as:

“To accept conclusions as radical as Horton’s, I need to see at least one careful study by a mature evangelical believer, who is also a careful statistician, and who shows me his/her work. For statistical science is not religiously neutral. When Newsweek, for example, says that Christians are seeking “peace of mind” (35) why should we assume that the reporter is able to distinguish between a mere psychological comfort and the peace that Scripture promises to God’s people (John 14:27, 16:33, Rom. 1:7, Phil. 4:7)? When the reporter notes that Christians seek “personal transformation” (35), why should we assume that he understands the difference between psychological healing on the one hand and biblical regeneration and sanctification on the other? And why should we assume that he understands the relationship between sanctification and psychological healing? A mature evangelical Christian sociologist would at least have these distinctions in mind, and he might understand the ambiguities of the language he cites.”

Also, it seems that Michael Spencer (iMonk) has come around to seeing the same problems with this “White Horse Inn” vision of American evangelicalism. You should read both Frame and Spencer’s reflections.

I think the root problem with Horton and friends is that they have been schooled, theologically and philosophically, with a strict dichotomy between the subjective and the objective. The subjective register is invariably the bad register, and a distinct group of terms (“experience,” “feeling,” “affective,” etc.) have been thus branded. This is why they are incapable of reading neo-orthodoxy without accusing it of subordinating revelation to experience (when this is precisely the opposite of what they were doing!). This is taken for granted by most, and a whole host of Reformed students are currently trained to look at the entire world through this unbalanced dichotomy. Pick a register and move on. This is how they score easy points in discourse and fancy themselves as intelligent.