M. Horton on the New Monasticism

Michael Horton has hit another home run in an article in the March/April 2011 issue of Modern Reformation magazine. He takes issue with the new monastatism among evangelicals, pointing out, and rightly so IMO, that it will accomplish exactly the same things as it did during the medieval period. The monastics then, and also today, can be catagorized into two types. One type are the sects that withdraw from the world in contemplation. To describe this he mentions and quotes from the two key leaders in this movement- -- Richard Foster and Dallas Willard. The other type are the more active sects - basically, helping the poor. The first type may change themselves (which I tend to question) but they do no good for anyone else if they don't go and tell them the good news of the substitutionary atonement. The second type lives the gospel and that's nice, but if people don't hear the gospel, what overall good does this eventually accomplish. We end up with poor people who probably will either remain poor or become poor again. We feed the homeless so they can be homeless another day, but don't they deserve better than that?

I could have become a Christian much earlier in my life if I had heard the gospel. But I guess some Christians were so busy "living the gospel" that they "forgot to tell me. My liberal Protestant church, the one in which I grew up, certainly didn't tell me. In fact, they hid it from me and everyone else in the church. Was that fair? No! Of course that wasn't fair. It's only fair when the gospel is preached and each person is dealt with separately by God -- just God and that person. Postmoderns complain about so much manipulation bringing people to Christ and I agree with them. However, they are just as manipulative whenn they hide the gospel of atonement. In doing this, they do not give their members enough information to make a free choice. And isn't that also a type of manipulation? I defintely think it is.