What Keeps Carl Trueman Awake at Night

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0:00:00 – (Carl Trueman): Bracket out Christianity. Let’s see how you’ve delivered on your own promises. And I argue in the book that in each case, in the case of birth, procreation, in the case of sex, in the case of death, we end up actually making ourselves less than human. It’s not a liberating thing. It’s a matter of bondage and degradation.

0:00:35 – (Collin Hansen): Western culture today largely lacks a sense of consecration, of setting apart the ordinary as holy. Yet somehow we still have a strong impulse toward desecration, of turning the holy into the ordinary. So why have we lost the taste of the good while still developing a taste for the bad? That’s one of the core questions at the heart of Carl Truman’s new book, the Desecration of How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, published by Penguin Random House’s sentinel imprint.

0:01:10 – (Collin Hansen): Carl is a professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He was a guest on gospel bound in 2020 for his highly acclaimed best selling book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Well, in this new book, Carl writes, quote, transgression of the sacred is exhilarating precisely because it makes us feel like go the creators of our own meanings and our own selves.

0:01:34 – (Collin Hansen): All we need to do is cross lines previously enforced by the idea of God, and we thereby assume the role of being gods, end quote. So desecration is how we communicate authenticity, which is perhaps the most important value for the modern self. Well, this entire project has backfired and let’s hear from Carl directly about why. Carl, thank you for joining me again on Gospel Bound.

0:02:00 – (Carl Trueman): It’s great to be back, Colin. Can’t believe it’s been five years.

0:02:04 – (Collin Hansen): I know it, I know it, I know it. I was just thinking of that itself. Few things have changed in those years and thankfully we’re out of 2020. But, you know, rise and Triumph of Modern Self was a phenomenon and I remember reading that for the first time knowing that it would be. You put words to so many different things and connected so many different things that we’d all been feeling and, and seeing. And he drew on many years of study and research and experience.

0:02:30 – (Collin Hansen): So what is left to say that you didn’t say in the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self?

0:02:35 – (Carl Trueman): Well, a few things. There’ve been some interesting developments in the last five or six years, I think. One, we’ve seen a number of high profile intellectuals starting to take, if not the theology of Christianity seriously, at least the concept of the importance of religion for culture. So there’s that going on. Secondly, I think a lot of the talk in Christian and in non Christian circles has tilted towards seeing our world as disenchanted.

0:03:06 – (Carl Trueman): And I think there’s some truth in that. But as I try to argue in the book, I don’t think it goes far enough. And then thirdly, I think a lot of, particularly pastors, elders, ordinary Christians in the pew, I don’t mean that in a sort of patronizing way, but, you know, typical Christians, Christians can feel overwhelmed by so much of what’s going on in society. And what I tried to do in this book was identify a problem that would allow us then to see the solution, and not necessarily that the solution is an easy one. I think it’s a tough and sacrificial one in many ways.

0:03:44 – (Carl Trueman): But for Christians to realize that they don’t have to be intimidated and overwhelmed by what’s going on in the culture, we actually have at our disposal the tools necessary for addressing the fundamental, what I would describe as a fundamental crisis in anthropology or collapse in the understanding of what it means to be human. So all of those things have really come to the fore in the last five or six years, and I think require not Christians to think new thoughts, but to use the resources they have, perhaps in new and different ways.

0:04:22 – (Collin Hansen): You put the sexual revolution at the core of your narrative in the desecration of man. And I guess I’m wondering whether that’s a situational or a normative decision. Is this due to cultures changes and challenges or from the emphasis the Bible puts on sexuality?

0:04:39 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah, I think it’s both, in a way. I mean, clearly, as Christians, we believe human beings have fallen. Our sexual desires have been fallen ever since the fall itself. But we live at a time when the context for acting upon the fallenness of our sexual nature is much more plausible than it was in the past. When I teach this at college, I always say to the students, you know, you can believe that sex is recreation and you can believe that other people are mere sexual objects. You could believe that in the 16th century or the 19th century, but it would be hard to get away with acting on that thinking. It’s not really a very plausible way of thinking because you’re going to get the girl pregnant, you’re going to pick up a nasty, incurable disease.

0:05:30 – (Carl Trueman): There are going to be serious personal and social consequences for behaving that way. We live at a point in time when technology allows us at least to imagine that we can get away with the darkest desires of our fallen sexual nature with acting upon them. So I would say, yes, the importance of sexual desire for what it means to be human is a perennial in human history. We see it throughout literature.

0:06:00 – (Carl Trueman): We see at this particular moment in time a supercharging of our ability to act upon that. So it’s normative, but it’s also contextual.

0:06:11 – (Collin Hansen): You mentioned earlier some of this renewed appreciation for at least the cultural benefits of Christianity, if not the doctrines, the beliefs themselves. But you do make it clear in this book that that is not enough. I think in some ways the answer to that question is obvious of why we can’t be content with these signs of life, however faint they would be. So how do we approach them? What’s the next step when we hear some of these things that would have been so unbelievable to us about Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Christopher Hitchens or people like that?

0:06:46 – (Collin Hansen): Just, I mean, some of the nods that they made at the end of their lives are currently even going as far as complete conversion.

0:06:52 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah. I think the first temptation to avoid, of course, is I would say, cynically demanding too much, too soon. When an intellectual expresses an interest in Christianity, there can be a very strong temptation, particularly for those of us who identify as Orthodox Christians, of saying, ah, yes, but they’re only into it because it leads to these cultural improvements. I think the first thing to do is to be grateful that we live at a time like this, because I said to somebody recently, I don’t care why somebody comes to church and sits under the word of God, Their reasons can be completely screwy. They may go to church to chat up that girl they saw in the classroom, but if they’re in the church, we need to pray that the word of God they hear has an impact upon them. So the first temptation to avoid, if you like, is the cynical dismissal. And I think there’s a little bit of that. When Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced her conversion, and her first statement about her conversion was very much oriented the cultural.

0:07:51 – (Carl Trueman): And a lot of Christians came out and said, you know, it’s not true. I’m gonna say, hang on a minute. Let’s, let’s, let’s use this as an opportunity for going somewhere better. Secondly, I do think we need to realize that, and this can be a temptation for us all, that the cultural benefits of Christianity arise from the fact that Christianity is true. It isn’t true because it’s culturally beneficial.

0:08:17 – (Carl Trueman): But, and Interestingly enough, the 19th century philosopher Nietzsche is the man who really nails this. If you use the word Nihilism today, we tend to think of it’s the big Lebowski. It’s a bunch of guys who don’t believe in anything. Well, Nietzsche has a more subtle understanding of nihilism. He says nihilism is carrying on as if nothing has changed, when everything has changed. The nihilist, for Nietzsche, would be the person who acts as if God still exists, even though God doesn’t still exist.

0:08:49 – (Carl Trueman): And that’s where I think culture, the sort of cultural Christianity we see emerging, has to take Nietzsche’s criticism into account. And it deeply saddened me in the book to use Roger Scruton, the late Sir Roger Scruton, as my example. I’m a huge fan of Roger Scruton’s writings, but try as I might, I’ve not been able to find anything in his writings where he really robustly affirms orthodox Christianity.

0:09:18 – (Carl Trueman): And I remember hearing him give a lecture in Princeton some years ago when the respondent was John Haldane, the Catholic philosopher. And Sir Roger gave this beautiful account of beauty and truth. And then John Haldane stood up and said, everything you’ve said, Roger, is good and true, but unless you affirm belief in the Christian God, it’s just a castle floating in the air. And I am worried, particularly time of high political polarization, that we can downplay the dogmatic demands of Christianity if we can get the cultural benefits of it.

0:09:59 – (Carl Trueman): The apostle Paul says, if Christ is not raised, we translate that as if the tomb was not empty. We are of all people, to be most pitted. So I think it’s a time of great opportunity. We’re able to have conversations with intellectuals, for example, with we would never have had conversations with a decade ago. On the other hand, we need to make sure that we still press the faith once for all, delivered to the saints, which has that supernatural incarnation right at its very core.

0:10:30 – (Collin Hansen): Speaking of Nietzsche, you talk about how the house of the madman is upon us. Evocative phrase. Tell us more what you mean.

0:10:41 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah, well, Nietzsche tells this. One of the things I love about Nietzsche, by the way, is he’s one of those philosophers who’s just a lot of fun to read. He writes beautifully. It’s one of the things that makes him quite dangerous in some ways. And in his book the Gay Science, he has this parable where a madman holding a lantern runs into a town square in the middle of the day declaring that God is dead.

0:11:03 – (Carl Trueman): And people initially respond by laughing at him. And the interesting thing is Nietzsche makes it very clear that these people laughing at him are actually atheists. They know God does not exist. And the madman says, no, you don’t understand. God is dead. And then to sort of summarize what he says, he says, God is dead, Therefore everything has to change. You have to rise to become gods yourselves. You need to create meaning and truth for yourself.

0:11:30 – (Carl Trueman): And the atheists are all very confused by this. And the madman, he drops his lantern, it breaks, and he says, I’ve come too soon. Thunder takes time after the lightning bolt. Light from far planets takes time to arrive on earth. I’ve come too soon. And what he means by that is his message demanding that people take seriously the practical philosophical implications of their atheism. That’s not plausible yet. And to return to my earlier example of the sexual revolution, you know, the madman could have been proclaiming, hey, we’re all sexually liberated, but that would have sounded ridiculous in the 19th century.

0:12:13 – (Carl Trueman): Now, I think we live at a time when, as I call it book, you know, the hour of the madman. Yes. We live in a world where we are able to create our own values. You know, transhumanism is. Is presenting us with the. The dream, or maybe the nightmare of overcoming all human limitations, of making ourselves gods. So there’s that time lag from the late 19th century when the madman burst into the town square to today.

0:12:41 – (Carl Trueman): You know, the madman predicted that. And one of the cases I try to make in the book is this is the hour of the madman. If you have nothing upon which to build your values other than your own will, then you have to accept the madman’s challenge at this point.

0:12:56 – (Collin Hansen): Well, there’s a quote in here that made me think a lot of that. You write, the anthropology of modern western culture is therefore naturally hostile toward traditional religion and requires either its dramatic revision to accommodate our autonomy or its wholesale rejection. When you say that, Coral, I feel that it feels like we’re walking uphill, that we’re walking into the wind when it comes to traditional religion.

0:13:28 – (Collin Hansen): That’s what I feel. Explain it then to me.

0:13:32 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah, I think that the point I was trying to make there is, you know, if. If the modern cult of the self is the cult of authenticity, how do I know that I’m authentic? Well, I have to break with the past. I have to break with inherited values. I have to break with the herd. And. And what has formed those values? What has formed that herd most in the past? It’s. It’s traditional religion. So the very intuitions we have as modern people are, in a sense, iconoclastic or sacrilegious. Instincts.

0:14:03 – (Carl Trueman): We need to shatter that past, and the whole culture is predicated on that. If you use the language of traditional religion, by and large, you come across as oppressive. I might use an example of. I hate to keep using sexual examples, but the sexual revolution is the sort of the primary locus of this. Think about how the media reports the sports star who has left his wife and run off with another man.

0:14:32 – (Carl Trueman): Typically, in the past, one might have thought a gasp of horror. Regardless of one’s views of homosexuality, the horror of a wife being abandoned and children losing their father would have been the driving force in how we think about that today. The language used is often that of liberation. This person has been able to find themselves to be true to themselves for the first time. Think about that.

0:14:59 – (Carl Trueman): What lies behind that is the idea that the traditional view of what it means to be a human being, the religious view of what it means to be a human being, to be one that stands in relationship to others, that involves obligations and dependencies, that requires us to fulfill our responsibilities towards others, most of all our children, that’s oppressive. That’s oppressive. And our culture regards that as problematic.

0:15:29 – (Carl Trueman): So that drive against seeing traditional religion and the values that it involves as being sources of truth, but rather sources of falsehood and authenticity lies very, very deep in our culture. And you see that often in. Even in the way that guys like you and I do our evangelism. Colin. The temptation to present Christianity as. As the thing that solves your problems rather than the things that makes demands upon you.

0:16:01 – (Carl Trueman): It’s very powerful and very deep. And I mean, I don’t want listeners to sit and think, Truman saying, I thank you, God. I’m not like other men. Tragically, I’m just like other men. I feel the pull of the culture on that, and that shows just how deep it is.

0:16:17 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, that’s a really good example of the tensions that we face in evangelism. And that’s one thing that we deal with all the time at the Keller center for Cultural Apologetics, because at some level, always teaching and evangelizing into felt needs, yet at the same time, because that’s how you’re heard. It actually reminds me of what Taylor talked about in the Ethics of Authenticity, where he spends the entire time deconstructing the problems with the authentic life, and in the end, comes back and says, that’s the only language anybody knows.

0:16:46 – (Collin Hansen): So that’s what we have to speak. So at some level, that’s what we’re dealing with in evangelism and apologetics today. At the same Time, the temptation to let that dictate the terms and to present the gospel then as an offer that will improve your life as opposed to a demand from the God who created you and judges you is really strong.

0:17:10 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah, yeah, that’s what I found, certainly, working with young people. At college, I teach this course on sort of human personhood. It’s a capstone humanities course at Grove. And I tried teaching it a couple of ways. Ways in the early years to see. To try to locate the language that resonated with young people. And ultimately I found the language of freedom and belonging was that which struck them because everybody wants to belong, everybody wants to be free. Those are, if you like, therapeutic desires we have in order to feel good, then you can move on to the question of, yeah, but to be free risks not belonging, and to belong risks losing your freedom.

0:17:54 – (Carl Trueman): And then to move from there to the gospel, hey, if the sun sets you free, you’ll be free indeed. But you are united to the Son and therefore united to his people. So you lose that libertarian freedom when that happens. And that, for me, has been my experience of wrestling with, as you rightly put it, the only language that young people understand in this therapeutic world. But how do you parlay that into something better, into something truthful?

0:18:23 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, what we try to do is the method of subversive fulfillment, to show that it fails on its own rights and then come in and bring in a different, unexpected solution. Now, here’s another quote from the book that continues on this exact same theme. You write, the autonomous, unencumbered self creator that is modern man can only be so if he repudiates the obligations, limits and ends that find their most influential expression in the West. In Christianity, of course, what’s in the background here? Charles Taylor’s subtraction story of secularism.

0:18:52 – (Collin Hansen): But I’m wondering, Carl, at what. What point does Christianity no longer loom as the foil and the self creator needs to stand on his own and defend the fruit of its flourishing?

0:19:05 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah, that’s very interesting. And again, one of the. I suppose the sort of rhetorical or polemical strategy in the book is I look at a number of the revolutions of modernity and say, okay, let’s judge them by their own standards. So let’s judge the sexual revolution not by whether it conforms with biblical teaching or not, but whether it actually delivers what it promises. Promises it promises to free women in ways that have never been seen before in history to put women on an equal footing with men. Well, what does it do?

0:19:38 – (Carl Trueman): It actually, I think turns women into lumps of meat in a way that they’ve rarely been that in the whole of history. I look at birth and at fertility and think, what do fertility treatments do? And this, I suspect, will be the chapter in the book I get most angry letters about. But I raise the question of, on the one hand, something like ivf. It delivers wonderful happiness for couples that can’t have children.

0:20:08 – (Carl Trueman): But then there’s a deeper question of what does it do to the way that society thinks about children? Not the way the couple think about the child, but the way that society as a whole thinks about children. It leads to children being kind of pieces of property. So. So, you know, one of the ways we can. We can avoid, and I think we have to now in this world where Christianity is no longer really the foil, is we have to do an imminent critique of the revolutions of modernity and say, okay, bracket out Christianity.

0:20:42 – (Carl Trueman): Let’s see how you’ve delivered on your own promises. And I argue in the book that in each case, in the case of birth, procreation, in the case of sex, and in the case of death, we end up actually making ourselves less than human. It’s not a liberating thing. It’s a matter of bondage and degradation.

0:21:04 – (Collin Hansen): All right, you’re going to prompt me then with that answer, to jump straight to the question that I’ve been building the whole interview toward really wanting to ask. So back in 2016, I had a long sit down with Ross Douthat of the New York Times, and we talked about the Catholic Church and Pope Francis. We talked about Donald Trump, who was not yet elected president. And in the end, he just said, I’m not the least bit too worried.

0:21:30 – (Collin Hansen): I’m not the least bit worried about either of those things. I’ll tell you what keeps me up at night. My girls and smartphones. And of course, he turned out to be correct in terms of what was happening. Now, that’s common knowledge later, with the word of work of Gene Twenge and Jonathan Haidt and others. But I’ll tell you then what I’m most worried about, Carl, that you talk about in this book, that is genetic selection and artificial wombs.

0:21:58 – (Collin Hansen): You write about this in chapter five. This is an arguable point that we could survive this dramatic global fertility decline, barely, at least in some parts of the world. But this is what keeps me up at night. If we sever the givenness of children, the attachment and obligation from the parents who receive them, I don’t know, Carl, if we can imagine the resulting devastation from that. I’m going to go further than that to say I don’t know how, apart from God’s miraculous intervention, we could even survive as a species.

0:22:35 – (Collin Hansen): Go ahead, tell me I’m overreacting here. Where am I wrong?

0:22:38 – (Carl Trueman): No, I mean, I would not want to be deterministic about it and say, say that we, we’re definitely going to be crushed by this. But I do think it’s one of those areas where we need to think very, very carefully. I, I, I’m a fan of the, of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels and a couple of those have these sort of dystopian visions of human beings, you know, substandard human beings, which is an interesting concept in itself becoming little more than organ suppliers for, for, for the elites. It’s very dystopian view, but could become a real vision for society.

0:23:19 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah, I think the thing that keeps me awake at night, Colin, is related to that. And that’s the absolute detachment that I think seems to have occurred between what I would describe as, use the broad term, moral philosophers and tech bros. And by moral philosopher, I mean obviously religious leaders, but also moral philosophers who may not have any religious commitment. There does seem to me to be a cultural disconnect between those who wish to think about human beings in terms of a given moral structure and the tech bros for whom, if we can do it, we might as well do it.

0:24:02 – (Carl Trueman): That’s the worrying thing. I’ve used this example a couple of times, but I was talking, it was actually to a Muslim, Muslim leader, an American Muslim leader I happened to be having a conversation with a few years ago. And he told me that he’d been invited to the Vatican as part of a delegation of secular moral philosophers, Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders to meet with the tech bros at a gathering that Pope Francis had organized. He said the fascinating thing was on, on day one, all the tech bros gave their presentations and day two was devoted to the, you know, the moral philosophers.

0:24:38 – (Carl Trueman): He said on, on day two, all the tech bros had gone home. Yeah, they had no interest whatsoever in hearing about any moral limits that might be put upon their work. So yeah, I think that’s what keeps me awake at night. And it’s connected to, I say we, we can develop these technologies, but if we develop them in a moral vacuum, then we are the slaves of wherever the technology takes us. And that’s a very worrying thing.

0:25:11 – (Collin Hansen): And I want to press on a point that you made there, Carl. I don’t think it’s Just the possibility. We might as well actually think it switches into the categorical imperative. We must.

0:25:22 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah.

0:25:23 – (Collin Hansen): If we can, we must.

0:25:25 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah. I think there’s something to be said for that. And it leads to this strange. A strange concept. Gunter Anders in the. In the 1950s coined this term. I think he coined the term Promethean shame. And he said, you know, that well actually had two terms, Promethean gradient and Promethean shame. A Promethean gradient says, was our technological abilities far outstrip our, you know, our moral imagination.

0:25:56 – (Carl Trueman): And he uses the nuclear bomb as an example. He says, you know, we can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to vaporize half a million people at the press of a button, but we can develop the technology to do that. He says that the other side of it is that the more technically brilliant things we come up with, the more likely we are to start thinking of ourselves as mediocre. And you see this a lot now in the rhetoric surrounding artificial intelligence.

0:26:27 – (Carl Trueman): Artificial intelligence is going to be better than us. I was on a plane recently and watched this documentary on robotics. It kind of fun because you see what all these robots can do. But then there was this underlying philosophical discussion about, are they going to replace us? Are human beings necessary anymore? So I think that’s another. Another aspect to this, that, yes, we can do this, we must do this. And in doing it, we must make ourselves redundant.

0:26:53 – (Collin Hansen): Going back again to Ross Douth at his podcast, talking with Pete Teal. Oh, yes, pregnant paws. Should humanity continue.

0:27:01 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah.

0:27:02 – (Collin Hansen): And doesn’t have an answer.

0:27:04 – (Carl Trueman): No. It was a disturbingly long pause.

0:27:07 – (Collin Hansen): I felt that was definitely. Didn’t let it go too long. I’m still like, wait, that is way too long. You should not be reflecting on that. What is the point? What does the tell us? What is the aim for any of this?

0:27:22 – (Carl Trueman): You captured me in my late 50s. I don’t have to worry about this for too much longer.

0:27:27 – (Collin Hansen): Don’t worry about it.

0:27:28 – (Carl Trueman): Good luck, kids.

0:27:29 – (Collin Hansen): Good luck, grandkids. Oh, man. Well, but let’s talk about that, because one of the challenges that comes with aging, we all experience it, we never think we’ll experience it, and somehow we all do is feeling like life has left us behind, and you just cannot keep up. You give the example in the book about a time traveler who jumps between 1200 and 1300 in England 100 years. Lo and behold, nothing’s changed.

0:27:59 – (Collin Hansen): And I’m struck by Hartmut Rose’s concept of social acceleration. Thinking about within inventions like AI. I’m not sure, Carl. I know much about what life could look like in five years, let alone 100, let alone 500, five years. What does that uncertainty mean then for our humanity?

0:28:21 – (Carl Trueman): Well, I think it could have catastrophic implications for humanity, of course, because it leads, I mean, just on a sort of phenomenological, personal level, it can lead to these tremendous feelings of anxiety that the world is constantly running away from us and we’re running not just to stand still, but not to fall behind as quickly as we might. So there’s definitely an existential angst that derives from this. And I think for Christians in particular, of course, it presses on us. So where do we stand?

0:28:57 – (Carl Trueman): Where do we look for the way forward on this? And again, one of the things I try to do in the book is say, okay, these are the problems. It’s absolutely catastrophic. But Christianity does have an answer. And again, I think it could be a tremendous opportunity because in a world where we have increasingly unstable notion of what it means to be a human being, an increasingly rootless world, Christianity is a faith that can provide both roots and stability for people.

0:29:33 – (Carl Trueman): So one of the things I want to press on Christians through this book is say, don’t panic, it’s bad, but we merely have to face the challenges presented by our day and we have the resources to do that. We just need to calm down and do what we need to do in the places where the Lord has. Has put us. I don’t want to quote Gandalf on that point because everybody does that. It would make me a cliche, but Gandalf nailed it in the Lord of the Rings.

0:30:05 – (Collin Hansen): Just assume Gospel bound listeners and viewers, they know what you’re referring to there. It’s that kind of crowd. There is a lot of hope in this book and I want to get to that hope. But we gotta go a little bit through the minds.

0:30:20 – (Carl Trueman): I was trying to steer you in a more positive direction.

0:30:23 – (Collin Hansen): We gotta go through the minds a little bit longer here. Yeah. So one thing I try to do in my own teaching and it’s why I love this. I love this book. I mean, a lot of it is discouraging, but there is so much hope in it. Again, we’re talking about the desecration of man, how the rejection of God degrades our humanity. What I love about this book is you talk about a lot of specific things that are happening, but you get at the underlying philosophies, the underlying assumptions, you excavate those, you display them so we can actually reflect on them.

0:31:00 – (Collin Hansen): And so many times I say this all the Time, wherever I’m going, teaching the cultural currents that affect us the most are the ones that we’re not paying any attention to. They’re the ones that we take for granted. And so one of the things you write here, technology encourages us to think of the world as a set of challenges to be overcome or limits to be transcended. Now, we know in a lot of examples, not all of them, but a lot of examples with medicine, we’re very grateful for that.

0:31:29 – (Collin Hansen): We look at the general prosperity and wealth that have lifted the poor around the world. These are positive developments that are reflections of exactly that. The really technological explosion following the Industrial Revolution in England. But I bet American Christians, and certainly Christians in other Western countries do not know how much this view about technology and about this sense that it is our obligation as humans to overcome all challenges and limits pervades their orientation toward life.

0:32:01 – (Collin Hansen): Because I’m wondering, Carl, what is the alternative? What’s the response from Christianity to this cultural narrative?

0:32:08 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah, I think I’m going to put it in a very straightforward and simple way, but not denying that it would actually be very difficult to hash out exactly what this would mean. But I said what we really need is a normative notion of what it means to be a human being. Now, it’s not easy to do that, particularly in a technological world. And as you’ve rightly said, technology has given us some great benefits.

0:32:36 – (Carl Trueman): If I go to have a filling, boy, I’m glad to live in an era where we have local anesthetics. You know, it would be terrible not to do that. I think the question, though, is when we face technology, does this technology restore what it means to be human, enhance what it means to be human, or transcend or contradict what it means to be human? So I would say local anesthetic, for example. There’s nothing that contradicts what it means to be human to have a local anesthetic for a dental field healing.

0:33:12 – (Carl Trueman): If a child is born with one arm, for example, and we develop a technology that allows us to grow another arm, I would say that’s a restorative process. We know that normatively human beings have two arms. If a child is born with two arms and we develop a technique for giving the child three arms, when I say no, at that point, we’re crossing a line. Now, exactly where that line can be drawn, that’s a difficult one. That’s why I began what I said by saying, I’m going to make some fairly simple statements here, but there are some gray areas and Some difficulties in knowing what’s being transcended.

0:33:50 – (Carl Trueman): But I’m quite taken by a distinction that Hans Jonas makes. He’s not a Christian. He was, I think, a secular Jewish philosopher. But he makes a distinction in technological revolutions between technological revolutions that respect the human body, for example. So we say the. The invention of the automobile does not fundamentally affect the. The substance of the human body. It allows the human body to move faster between A and B.

0:34:21 – (Carl Trueman): But when you get out of the car, you’re still recognizably a human being. And technology that gets to the core of what it means to be, technology that can mess around with our genetics, technology that goes into the biological substance of what it means to be a human. And that’s where I think we have to realize that at this point, technology is beginning to reshape us. Now, again, Where does CRISPR technology.

0:34:55 – (Carl Trueman): Where is it good? Where is it bad? I have very good friends who have a granddaughter with a genetic syndrome. And he has said to me a number of times, you know, if we’d known and there was a technology that allowed us just to tweak the genes of the baby in the womb and solve the problem, he said, I’d go for it. And it’s hard to argue with that. On the other hand, we know that CRISPR technology opens up a whole host of other possibilities as well. So kind of takes me back to my earlier answer on the moral philosophers, the theologians.

0:35:30 – (Carl Trueman): Technology needs to be somehow accountable to those kind of thinkers because we need to be operating with a normative view of what it means to be human in order to know what constitutes a responsible and what constitutes an irresponsible use of these things.

0:35:47 – (Collin Hansen): Just two more of the negative, and then we’ll close on the positive.

0:35:52 – (Carl Trueman): I’m beginning to feel on the edge here. You know, you have to pull me back soon.

0:35:58 – (Collin Hansen): Well, I don’t think people are paying attention unless they live on the edge. A little bit of where a lot of these things are going. There is. Social acceleration is a real thing. And these are hard questions. And what we’re trying to provide here is a little bit of balance, because most certainly American Christians, I think foremost, and other Western countries have a baseline assumption that technology is always good. It might be hard to adapt to, but generally, there’s a strong sense, a strong Whiggish notion here that history is going in good places and that’s being guided by technology.

0:36:37 – (Collin Hansen): There’s a manifest destiny underneath this, especially in the west, in the United States in particular. So just asking a lot of questions about the downside is bringing a little bit more balance and helping people to understand. These are not easy questions to answer. Now on this question, I do think a lot of Christians have an instinctive aversion, but I’m not sure they know why and I’m not sure the cultural logic is going to be enough to help us.

0:37:06 – (Collin Hansen): And that’s assisted suicide. I’m wondering, is there any salient cultural logic that would militate against assisted suicide? Because generally speaking, for the reasons we already laid out, our culture is not worried about the afterlife or, or judgment. Healthcare is expensive and becoming more so precisely because of end of life interventions or late in life interventions. We’ve been discussing already the focus on autonomy and authenticity at the core of what it means to be a human in the West.

0:37:42 – (Collin Hansen): So people should be in charge of their own fate. I suppose there is the residual Christianity about concern for the weak and the vulnerable being forced into death. Anything else that would help us to push back against this? Because it sure seems like both the philosophical and financial incentives are pushing us straight toward assisted suicide.

0:38:03 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah, I think on one level, I mean, that is a very bleak assessment, but I find it hard to disagree with the overall trend. There are some interesting signs of hope. Listeners may not know the name Diane Abbott. She was a Labor MP in the uk. Very left wing labor mp. And you know, I’ve generally, I’ve been watching Diane Abbott for over 40 years now and generally regard her as an absolute left wing crazy person.

0:38:32 – (Carl Trueman): She made a very powerful speech in the UK House of Commons relative to the assisted dying bill where she really laid into the fact that, that it denies the agency of human beings. That it does, as you alluded to, Colin, it does make the weakest very, very vulnerable. So I think there are some potential interesting allies on this question. I don’t know. Certainly Diane Abbott would not say that she was a conservative Christian. I don’t know if she professes any religion at all. But on that issue she was quite magnificent, I think.

0:39:14 – (Carl Trueman): And I think the other side of it is we need to, as Christians think about, we need to look at the broader things in society that have led to assisted suicide becoming desirable. How does this connect to our notions of family? How does it connect to our notions of obligations towards others? Is it not tragic that somebody is so old and alone and desperate that death would be preferable? Again, as we’ve alluded to, as you’ve alluded to a few times in this podcast, this goes absolutely against the powerful cultural gravity of autonomy.

0:39:55 – (Carl Trueman): But the Other side of it is, I think from a strategic point of view, is get the stories out there. So many moral questions operate at the level of abstractions. A person dying by assisted suicide is an abstraction. My grandmother dying by assisted suicide, she’s not an abstraction. I have a history with her. I always think of that interview that Peter. Oh, Peter Singer gave. Great advocate for euthanasia, infanticide, et cetera, et cetera.

0:40:35 – (Carl Trueman): Cared for his mother when she had dementia. And an interviewer asks him, was it not somewhat inconsistent or hypocritical of you to care for your mother when she’d ceased to be a person by your account? And his answer, I quote this verbatim in class every year, is, yes, but I guess it’s different when it’s your own mother. Well, the answer is, why is it different? Your own mother’s not an abstraction.

0:41:01 – (Carl Trueman): So I think from a Christian apologetic or polemical point of view, it’s is. We need to get the stories out there. We need to put faces to these things. And then I think we can expect to appeal to some non Christians, because you don’t have to be a Christian to love your mother. You don’t have to be a Christian to realize that the concrete human being is not an abstraction.

0:41:27 – (Collin Hansen): We did tell the story anonymously of an actual assisted suicide in California, because I don’t think, Carl, a lot of people understand what happens that somebody you love needs to administer to you a drug overdose. That’s it. Yeah. There you go.

0:41:48 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah.

0:41:48 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, there’s no good way to die of a drug overdose.

0:41:52 – (Carl Trueman): No.

0:41:53 – (Collin Hansen): So I still don’t think a lot of people had even thought about the mechanics. And in that regard, fairly similar to the abortion debate. Not a lot of people know exactly what happens in an abortion, and when they do, it’s. That’s pretty legitimately horrifying. Carl. I actually had not thought to answer this question. This is a positive, and it builds on that previous question. Did you know, in writing your previous book, did you anticipate the radical shift that we would see on transgender issues?

0:42:22 – (Carl Trueman): No. For the first couple of years, when I was asked to sort of do lectures and Sunday school talks, et cetera, on that, I always made the point. I would often be asked, do you think it’ll come to an end? And my answer was always, yeah, I think it’ll collapse under its own weight in the end. But not in my lifetime, in my granddaughter’s lifetime. The last few years, we’ve seen some spectacular successes. Now, I want to, one, affirm those and say that we’ve seen some great stuff happening, but the trans lobby is still out there and it’s very well funded. I did a piece just last week for the Washington Post on Talarico and the trans issue.

0:43:01 – (Carl Trueman): I could tell you that the people who corresponded with me after I’d published that piece. Yeah, they’re, they’re all in with the transit. They’re still, these people are still there. It’s still a big.

0:43:12 – (Collin Hansen): The parents who have transitioned their own children, they’re not exactly going to give up here.

0:43:16 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah. So one qualification would be let’s not do a victory lap. Let’s keep the pressure on. I mean, there are some good legal action lawsuits making the way through the courts that I think will be very helpful. I do think it will collapse, but it’s not over yet. And the second thing I would add, and this I’ve become more aware of since publishing the book, is transgenderism. In the book, I treated it as part of the LGBTQ political lobby.

0:43:46 – (Carl Trueman): In actual fact, I think philosophically it’s part of transhumanism. And, you know, praise God that Elon Musk was key in the current administration making some very sensible moves on the trans issue issue. But make no mistake, Elon Musk is, is part of the larger problem. He’s not part of the solution because he’s a transhumanist. He’s one of those tech guys who would love to see human beings transcended.

0:44:15 – (Carl Trueman): So I think Christians need to be grateful, but also be discerning in, in, in how they think about this. And let’s not take the foot off the gas yet. Let’s, let’s be very vigilant on this one. But to go back to your question, no, I did not anticipate the great stuff we’ve seen. And it’s always struck me as rather ironic that women’s sports proved the Achilles heel. Some ways that was the thing I was least.

0:44:44 – (Carl Trueman): You know, I’m a hard bitten male sports guy. It was the thing that least worried me. But I rejoice that that was the thing that grabbed the imagination and I think made the world safer for children and particularly for women. Women. In the last few years, I explain

0:45:00 – (Collin Hansen): it often using Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory and the concept of fairness. Homosexuality. The entire argument made was that this is fair.

0:45:09 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah.

0:45:10 – (Collin Hansen): And fairness, it cuts both ways. Yeah. Against transgender as much as it does, in the same way as it does with homosexuality. You know, fairness is letting people do what they want. Doesn’t work in sports. Not fair.

0:45:22 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah, the picture of, I can’t remember his name but the picture of the trans swimmer standing on the podium next to those, you comparatively tiny women swimmers. I think that, yeah, that was our equivalent in the trans issue of the sonogram for the abortion debate. That brought it home without any abstractions or arguments that made the point.

0:45:44 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. Leah. Leah Thomas. Leah Thomas, yes. Okay, so I am getting going to ask you about to explain the creed, the cult and the code to be able to talk about a plan of consecration. But I’m pretty sure you know that I have to ask the question about Christian nationalists because that part in the book is so vivid and so strong and I’ve said the same thing. I was doing an NPR interview with a very hostile live audience in Birmingham, Alabama and boy, they were just going after me about Christian nationalism. And I said this is a fantasy.

0:46:17 – (Collin Hansen): I don’t understand. Like the less realistic it is, the more likely its proponents will be to be outspoken and that you’ll be outraged by them. But it’s make no mistake, it’s popular because it’s not plausible. Now you point out many of the reasons of why it’s not. But not just plausible, not desirable for Christians and this is what you, this is what you say, quote, one cannot transform the social imaginary by fear God.

0:46:44 – (Collin Hansen): One can only do it by starting with the consecration of ordinary people doing ordinary things in their local communities. And boy, I can’t give enough amens to that. Carl, how do we get the young men from sitting around doom scrolling edgelords to getting engaged in this, in this battle, in this challenge? Ordinary people doing ordinary things in their local communities? How do we do that, Carl?

0:47:14 – (Carl Trueman): It’s hard of course, it’s a low energy solution. One of the things of modernity is we all want everything done by a week on Wednesday. The problem is very deep seated. The cultural problems, very deep seated will take a long time to transform them. But as you were asking me the question, that verse came to mind, this kind come out only with prayer and fasting. I was thinking this is a spiritual problem and ultimately there is only a spiritual solution to it.

0:47:42 – (Carl Trueman): Having said that, I think there are signs of hope on this front. Yes, I think Christian nationalism is by and large an online doom scrolling phenomenon. But we’re seeing significant move particularly of young men towards traditional religions, particularly I think Catholicism and Orthodoxy. But I don’t see why good traditional Protestantism shouldn’t sort of get in on the act, so to speak. So there is a sign that a section of young Men are fed up of the, you know, the, the, the Christian nationalist video gaming, for want of a better word, and want to be involved in, in real life. And I think that the, the key there is to, to try to persuade them that the church and the local Christian community is a far more, you know, to go back to. I had you pull in people using therapeutic language.

0:48:38 – (Carl Trueman): Far more satisfying from a human perspective than scrolling. Um, and I’m, I, I think we’re seeing elements of, of that and then I think if you, if you, if you can talk one on one to, to these young men, young women as well and make the point that if you’re looking to influence people, you know, just tweeting to the home crowd isn’t going to influence anybody or just, you know, trashing the people you disagree with on Twitter is unlikely to persuade them to join your party.

0:49:12 – (Carl Trueman): The real way to have an influence is to be involved in real embo bodied communities. Where can you have an influence? You can have an influence in your church, in your neighborhood, in your town. There are ways and means of doing that and trying to capture the imagination with that. But as I said at the start, ultimately this is a spiritual problem. We have to pray that the Lord will change hearts and draw people into the church so that this can happen.

0:49:40 – (Collin Hansen): Well, as we conclude mood, let’s talk about this plan for consecration in a desecrated culture. Just briefly walk us through creed, cult, code and by the way, all in on your recommendation for congregational singing. Love that especially. Go ahead.

0:49:57 – (Carl Trueman): Yeah. Well, one of the great things it seems to me about seeing our problem as desecration is one, well, one, I want to argue it’s true, but two, it also sets up the obvious answer. If the problem with humanity is we’re desecrated, the solution is we need to be consecrated. And Christianity has an answer to that. It’s called the church. Where is humanity consecrated? It’s consecrated in the church.

0:50:22 – (Carl Trueman): Now there can be a tendency there that depending on the Christian tradition you come from, you can zero in on one aspect of church or the other. The kind of tradition that I belong to and I think you belong to too, Colin. We tend to emphasize what I call the creed. It tends to be a doctrinally very self conscious and often fairly precise form of Christianity. So we do the teach well, but we need more than good teaching to be truly consecrated. There’s also what I call the cult, the worship of the church.

0:50:55 – (Carl Trueman): When we gather together and worship God, we’re not simply going to a lecture, we’re not simply going to have good teaching presented to us. We’re going to be embodied in gospel life. So I focus in the book, I talk about the importance of liturgical liturgy. And what I mean by liturgy is not the Book of Common Prayer necessarily, but the fact that our worship services need to have a logic to them that reinforces the teaching.

0:51:24 – (Carl Trueman): Have a confession of sin, have a declaration of forgiveness. I also point out, and you hinted at this in the question, the beauty of congregational singing. There are secular studies done that show that if you sing communally, you intuitively develop a view of what it means to be human that makes you realize that you’re not an island, that you stand in relations of responsibility and dependency upon others.

0:51:51 – (Carl Trueman): If you’re singing words of truth, how much more powerful is that effect going to be? So we not only need good teaching, we need to be involved in a local church. I think that’s the New Testament vision. Paul has no vision of any Christian standing in isolation. We are all involved in the local body. And then I talk about the code. And often, certainly in my Christian background, the code has been, you know, do this, don’t do that. Particularly on the sexual front. There’s a whole heap of things that you can and cannot do.

0:52:24 – (Carl Trueman): I want a richer understanding of code to cover the whole of Christian life. And if you’re. One of the underlying themes in the book is if our tendency in desecration is to treat other people as objects, to not recognize them as persons made in the image of God. How do we combat that? Well, by treating them as persons made in the image of God. And what is the simplest way we can do that in our churches?

0:52:52 – (Carl Trueman): Hospitality. I don’t know about you, Colin, but I can still remember the names of the people who gave me hospitality when I was a student. Student. I’m hard pressed to remember some of the professors names. Don’t remember any lectures I ever attended at college. But I do remember the houses that I visited on a Sunday for lunch where people I hardly knew opened their most intimate space, their home, for me, and gave me food.

0:53:17 – (Carl Trueman): They treated me like a real human person. And I think one of the beauties of that is of all this is, you know, as a Christian, we can be overwhelmed by the problems of the culture. Not everybody can be a teacher. Not everybody could be involved at the Keller center and, you know, develop these great apologetic strategies for addressing the world around us. Not everybody has the skills to be a worship leader, but everybody has the ability to look into the eyes of another person and treat them as a human being being.

0:53:52 – (Carl Trueman): Everybody can be hospitable at some level. So what I wanted to do in that final chapter is really present an answer that I think correlates with New Testament teaching but also eases the burden. Okay, I can’t go toe to toe with a Hegelian Marxist and bring them to Christ, but I can open my home to them. I’ll give them food. You know Rosaria Butterfield’s testimony of how she moved from being being a professor of queer theory to be the wife of a Reformed Presbyterian pastor?

0:54:24 – (Carl Trueman): It wasn’t that the pastor she came across was a brilliant apologist.

0:54:29 – (Collin Hansen): Right.

0:54:29 – (Carl Trueman): He was just a kind man who opened his home to her and I. And I think we need to realize that hospitality, too, is a spiritual thing and has tremendous spiritual impact upon those who are its recipients.

0:54:43 – (Collin Hansen): I love that, love that We’ve been talking with Carl Truman, but his new book, the Desecration of Man how the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. And Carl, I just wanted to end on a beautiful quote that continues right along the lines of what you’ve been sharing here. You write, the church is the place where humanity as made in the image of God can be truly realized, not simply because her liturgy is beautiful, but because she is the place where the creedal truth expressed in the liturgy confronts our impulse to make ourselves gods and thereby leads to a transformation of each individual there to use the popular truth triplet in the church’s worship. The true is manifested in the beautiful and thereby leads us to the good.

0:55:28 – (Collin Hansen): Wonderful book. Thanks, Carl. Engaging interview. Just as I hoped and just as expected, encourage people to go out there and take a look at the book. And then more importantly, from there, get out there and make an ordinary difference with your ordinary life and your ordinary community and your ordinary church. Thanks, Carl.

0:55:44 – (Carl Trueman): Thanks, Colin.

0:55:53 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound rate and review gospel Bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time. Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.