Nathan Pitchford has reviewed Michael Horton’s latest work The Gospel-Driven Life:

What exactly is Christianity, and what are its proper and necessary effects on our daily lives? According to Horton, Christianity is not pietism, social activism, personal transformation, or religious experience, it is first and fundamentally gospel – “good news”. And really grasping that dramatically changes how we pursue the life of a Christian. What do people do when confronted with real news, that is really good? When the front page headlines announced “Victory in Europe” on May 8, 1945, people forgot themselves, embraced strangers for sheer joy, danced in the streets. They had been confronted by objectively true and external good news, and the effects were immediate and obvious. But Christianity, bringing the objectively true announcement of a historically-verifiable triumph over sin and Satan, is usually met with no such response. Why is this?

Horton’s response to this dilemma is sagacious, clear-sighted, and foundationally remedial. The basic problem of contemporary Christianity is that it is no longer defined by the objective gospel, which turns us away from ourselves to the Christ who really saves, but instead, in a myriad of ways, facilitates our natural bent to be “curved in on ourselves”. While touching upon the problems, which he has already diagnosed in more detail in his earlier book, Christless Christianity, he goes far beyond mere fault-finding, and serves up a well-thought-out and gospel-saturated cure.

Continue reading Nathan Pitchford’s review at Reformed Books.