Michael Horton, churchianity's high priest and elitist scold

Your Own Personal Jesus
Michael S. Horton

Citing examples from TV, pop music, and best-selling books, an article in Entertainment Weekly noted that "pop culture is going gaga for spirituality." However,

[S]eekers of the day are apt to peel away the tough theological stuff and pluck out the most dulcet elements of faith, coming up with a soothing sampler of Judeo-Christian imagery, Eastern mediation, self-help lingo, a vaguely conservative craving for 'virtue,' and a loopy New Age pursuit of 'peace.' This happy free-for-all, appealing to Baptists and stargazers alike, comes off more like Forest Gump's ubiquitous 'boxa chocolates' than like any real system of belief. You never know what you're going to get. (1)

The "search for the sacred" has become a recurring cover story for national news magazines for some time now; but is a revival of "spirituality" and interest in the "sacred" really any more encouraging than the extravagant idolatry that Paul witnessed in Athens (Acts 17)?

Horton is doing OK so far. He's shooting some fish in a little barrel, but some priests of churchianity even have trouble doing that.

Not only historians and sociologists but novelists are writing about the "Gnostic" character of the soup that we call spirituality in the United States today. In a recent article in Harper's, Curtis White describes our situation pretty well. When we assert, "This is my belief," says White, we are invoking our right to have our own private conviction, no matter how ridiculous, not only tolerated politically but respected by others. "It says, 'I've invested a lot of emotional energy in this belief, and in a way I've staked the credibility of my life on it. So if you ridicule it, you can expect a fight." In this kind of culture, "Yahweh and Baal-my God and yours-stroll arm-in-arm, as if to do so were the model of virtue itself."

OK, he's launched in this paragraph. First note the use of the term 'gnostic.' When a churchian uses that term it basically means: "self-proclaimed born again (whatever that means) Christians"... This is their real target. Christians who have been regenerated by the Word and the Spirit (the Word and Spirit being the great enemies of clerics and ritual). It is this real target Horton is talking about when he talks of the new agers and the shallow Christians and the people who demand Jehovah -- excuse me, Yahweh, or...Yahu, or whatever, Horton is an Alexandrian regarding Scripture and thinks the God of the Bible is called by the babblish name of a local idol, but I digress -- again the people who demand that God conform to their demands and not assault their sense of right and good and so on. The people who choose to see Jesus as teacher and great yoga master rather than Saviour and Lord and King. Especially Saviour. Anyway, using these easy to make fun of and critique straw men Horton is actually going after Christians who are born again.

What we require of belief is not that it make sense but that it be sincere....Clearly, this is not the spirituality of a centralized orthodoxy. It is a sort of workshop spiritu-ality that you can get with a cereal-box top and five dollars....There is an obvious problem with this form of spirituality: it takes place in isolation. Each of us sits at our computer terminal tapping out our convictions....Consequently, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that our truest belief is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without an orthodoxy. It is heresy as an orthodoxy. (2)

What's the heresy here really according to Horton? "...it takes place in isolation." Ahh. Those scary born again Christians not afraid of being alone with themselves. How weird! They should be arrested. Individuals. Or so they self-proclaim. As if God has anything to do with individuals.

While European nihilism denied only God, "American nihilism is something different. Our nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once. It's all good!" All that's left is for belief to become "a culture-commodity."

This is a sentence he inserts into every one of his essays and books. I swear. Google it.

We shop among competing options for our belief. Once reduced to the status of a commodity, our anything-goes, do-it-yourself spirituality cannot have very much to say about the more directly nihilistic conviction that we should all be free to do whatever we like as well, each of us pursuing our right to our isolated happiness. (3)

Notice as a cultural observer and critic Horton is really high-school level? Dumb atheists in France do much better. If one is interested in such time-wastage. Horton's real target is, again, churchianity's big inner bogeyman: the born again Christian.

Like Nietzsche himself, who said that truth is made rather than discovered and was described by Karl Barth as "the man of azure isolation," Americans just want to be left alone to create their own private Idaho. While evangelicals talk a lot about truth, their witness, worship, and spirituality seem in many ways more like their Mormon, New Age, and liberal nemeses than anything like historical Christianity.

Actually they sound like you. Shallow scolds who are ultimately angry that no one is buying your shallow ritual and 'sermonizing.'

We would prefer to be left alone, warmed by our beliefs-that-make-no-sense, whether they are the quotidian platitudes of ordinary Americans, the magical thinking of evangelicals, the mystical thinking of New Age Gnostics, the teary-eyed patriotism of social conservatives, or the perfervid loyalty of the rich to their free-market Mammon. We are thus the congregation of the Church of the Infinitely Fractured, splendidly alone together. And apparently that's how we like it. Our pluralism of belief says both to ourselves and to others, 'Keep your distance.' And yet isn't this all strangely familiar? Aren't these all the false gods that Isaiah and Jeremiah confronted, the cults of the 'hot air gods'? The gods that couldn't scare birds from a cucumber patch? Belief of every kind and cult, self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement of every degree, all flourish. And yet God is abandoned. (4)

Wow, he's really fair in his descriptions, isn't he? And isn't it cute how he is impressed with himself for knowing phrases like 'magical thinking'? And then he states ALL evangelicals engage in magical thinking. ALL. That guy's got a Ph.D. Anyway, also note the Obama-level elitism in the beginning of the above paragraph as well.

As far back as the early eighteenth century, the French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville observed the distinctly American craving "to escape from imposed systems" and "to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things, looking to results without getting entangled in the means toward them." He concluded, "So each man is narrowly shut up in himself and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world." Americans do not need books or any other external authorities in order to find the truth, "having found it in themselves." (5) American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) announced that "whatever hold the public worship held on us is gone or going," prophesying the day when Americans would recognize that they are "part and parcel of God," requiring no mediator or ecclesiastical means of grace. Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" captured the unabashed narcissism of American romanticism that plagues our culture from talk shows to the church.

Shallow doesn't describe this paragraph. This is like monster truck shallow. This is the writing of a guy who has thrown off all the constraints of academic standard and shame. Someone who has declared a private declaration of independence against the world. "I don't need to conform to anybody's idea of 'making sense'! What I write makes sense if I determine it does! I don't have to take any more tests! I've got all my degrees, see! Nobody can tell ME I'm not writing the 'right' way anymore!"

During this same period, the message and methods of American churches also felt the impact of this romantic narcissism.

Yes because in good philosopher fashion people in the past were total slaves to modern philosophical historical labels like "romantic narcissism." See yon 18th century woman washing clothes and making dinner for her family there in Pennsylvania? Now, look closely. See that "romantic narcissism" driving her every thought and move? Yes, there, now you see what Horton is getting at.

It can be recognized in a host of sermons and hymns from the period, such as C. Austin Miles' hymn, "In the Garden":

I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And he walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

That actually was America's national anthem for about twelve years in the mid 19th century. Horton has a point here.

The focus of such piety is on a personal relationship with Jesus that is individualistic, inward, and immediate.

Quick, hide the third book of Calvin's Institutes. That Chitty Chitty Bang Bang child snatcher-like guy is sniffing around, and he's going to confiscate the third book of our Institutes...

One comes alone and experiences a joy that "none other has ever known." How can any external orthodoxy tell me I'm wrong? My personal relationship with Jesus is mine. I do not share it with the church. Creeds, confessions, pastors, and teachers-not even the Bible-can shake my confidence in the unique experiences that I have alone with Jesus.

Note that he doesn't allow the possibility that one can be biblical doctrinally *and* have the Holy Spirit - the Spirit of Christ - in them, no man-mediators in sight.

For the rest of Horton's wisdom go here. (He just goes on about 'gnostics' and how they are everything he doesn't like, like born again Christians. He also uses Luther to state that anybody who 'thinks' they have the Spirit in them are engaging in vain self-glorifying behaviour that puts them in bondage to the devil instead of being in bondage to Michael Horton and his ordained colleagues in his little ritual-loving, flesh-celebrating ("Flesh is cool!") denomination where I begin to suspect they actually smear their excrement on each other to show 'yahweh' or 'yahu' or whatever they are calling their god currently that they will have nothing to do with anything they can't see or feel or eat or...

And, by the way: an ordained minister has to make a living afterall...)