Listening In preview: Michael Horton

NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: reforming the evangelical church.

Michael Horton is a professor of theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary California. He is widely known for promoting Reformed theology to evangelicals. And he’s not shy about criticizing current trends, especially the rise of the megachurch.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: In this week’s Listening In, host Warren Smith talks to  Horton about that. Let’s listen now to an excerpt of their conversation.

WARREN SMITH, HOST: Is this one of the reasons that we’ve become a mile wide and an inch deep because we don’t have a robust understanding, a biblical understanding of the Holy Spirit and it’s been replaced with all kinds of heterodox understandings of the Holy Spirit?

MICHAEL HORTON: I think so, Warren. You know the last couple of years at this conference, in fact, last year at this very Evangelical Theological Society meeting, big debate over the Trinity. Over the Trinity? Yeah, over the Trinity. Eventually it bubbles up into the academy. Uh, most, most bad teaching in the mainline churches starts from the top, the universities and seminaries and trickles down. I think in evangelicalism, it trickles up. And I think you just have so many years now and people not really understanding why these debates occurred in the first five centuries, how significant, how important it is, how much we are standing on their shoulders. So they keep reinventing the wheel and it’s never round. And it’s time for us just to really humbly recognize that these debates, there’s almost nothing that can be said that wasn’t said in the first five centuries, for either good or bad. Let’s at least go back and find out what they said, not repeat their mistakes, if we can help it. And yeah, I think that the doctrine of the trinity in, in one sense, evangelicals and certainly mainline Protestants and Catholics are interested in the Trinity like never before. And I think that’s just really exciting. On the other hand, you know, what doctrine of the Trinity is it? And that’s going to be a bigger question for decades to come.

(Photo/Westminster Seminary California) 

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