We must not be ignorant or naive about the reality of abuse in Christian circles. And we must not turn a blind eye or a deaf ear when we hear about or see abuse cases of any kind. The Lord loves justice and calls us to practice justice while we walk humbly with him (Mic. 6:8). This means listening to cries for help, coming to the side of those treated unjustly, and making sure that unfit, evil shepherds are not allowed to rule (Isa. 1:17; Amos 5:15; Jer. 22:3; Jer. 21:12, etc.). Churches—and church leadership—should promote and seek justice in a biblical way, a way that glorifies the Lord and is good for his people. In a word, Christians should, in a just way, oppose abuse in the church. 

Abuse. It has been a hot topic in our culture for the last fifteen years or more. Various abuse cases have been highlighted by the media more than a few times. To put it in other terms, pointing the spotlight on abuse has been “trending.” Reports of abuse often go viral online. Needless to say, many people in our culture know about abuse.
Typically, in Christian circles, cultural hot topics lead to debates. From climate change to women’s rights, to immigration policies to political movements, Christians debate and disagree upon various trending topics. However, abuse is not something about which Christians should disagree. Abuse is wrong, and it is detestable. Abuse is nothing to joke about. Whether physical, spiritual, sexual, emotional, or verbal, all forms of abuse are contrary to God’s Word (e.g Jer. 22:3, Ps. 10:7, Prov. 24:1–2, etc.). Although it is unfortunate that false accusations of abuse happen, Christians should despise the very thought of abuse. Abuse is an evil and an injustice that originates from the dark corners of a sinful heart and is instigated by Satan himself.
Most people have heard about abuse cases involving CEOs, coaches, politicians, or people in other positions of authority. Even more discouraging and disheartening are the stories about abuse involving pastors and church leaders. It is not a myth. Some leaders in Christian churches—even conservative Christian churches—have abused God’s people. Like the evil, worthless shepherds of God’s people in Ezekiel’s day, some men today in leadership positions have abused God’s people and ruled them with harshness and brutality (Ezek. 34:4). The evil actions of these harsh shepherds cause the sheep to scatter and wander (Ezek. 34:6). The poor sheep are forced to run from the dangerous shepherd into the wilderness where they face dangerous animals. It happened in Ezekiel’s day; it still happens today. Sometimes men in authority simultaneously abuse their authority and the people under their authority, causing unimaginable harm to the flock. No wonder the Lord says woe to such wicked men and vows to hold them accountable for their terrible evil (Ezek. 34:2, 10).
On a positive note, and biblically speaking, pastors and elders are called to rule with Christ-like love, tenderness, and care (1 Pet. 4:1–4). Pastors and elders must not rule with a brawny, heavy-handed, tough demeanor. Instead, they must care for sheep in a loving maternal and paternal way (Ezek. 34:3–4; 1 Thess. 2:7; 1 Tim. 1:2). Paul says that overseers in the church must not be violent, but gentle (1 Tim. 3:3). Shepherds are not to be arguers who like to quarrel (1 Tim. 3:3). They must be self-controlled in all areas of life, avoiding both anger and too much alcohol (1 Tim. 3:2–3). Along with all Christians, pastors and elders must cultivate and live out the fruit of the Spirit, including love, kindness, patience, goodness, and gentleness.
Pastors and elders must also lead the way in the blessed task of peacemaking. They do not take up weapons in personal conflicts, but pastors and elders help people lay down their weapons and seek peace. Shepherds are not fighters; they must not fight with the sheep. Pastors and elders must be kind to everyone, correct opponents with gentleness, and let love cover all offenses (2 Tim. 2:24–26; 1 Pet. 4:8). Shepherds must stand firmly on the truth and boldly teach the truth, but when they interact with opponents or objectors, they are to speak the truth in love and correct others with gentleness (Matt. 5:44; Eph. 4:15).
Again, all these characteristics are Christ-like. He is our Chief Shepherd, the Good Shepherd who cares for his sheep with tender love. Our dear Savior never harms, manipulates, bullies, lies to, or deceives his sheep. Pastors and elders, by God’s grace, are called to be Christ-like in their care for the flock. Thankfully, God is abundantly kind to his people.
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The preaching of the gospel proclaims Christ’s kingdom has come to us, opening the hearts and minds of those who hear it to the glory of Christ and the good news of his salvation. On the other hand, binding something is to close it. In the context of Christ’s kingdom, it is to close the kingdom to unbelievers.

In Matthew 16:19, Jesus makes the following statement to the apostle Peter:
“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
What was Christ Jesus referring to when he told Peter he would give him the “keys of the kingdom”? What is the meaning of this metaphor that our Lord is using in Matthew 16:19?
The Heidelberg Catechism, question and answer 83, states,

What are the keys of the kingdom?
The preaching of the holy gospel and Christian discipline toward repentance. Both of them open the kingdom of heaven to believers and close it to unbelievers.

Jesus Is Referring to the Kingdom of Heaven, His Kingdom That Is Not of This World
First, as the Heidelberg Catechism points out, it is important to note that in this verse Jesus is referring to the kingdom of heaven, his kingdom that is not of this world (John 18:36).
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, January 10, 2022
Thus, here I want to note the thought of three men who, while very different thinkers, helped shape the way we imagine human nature today: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. All three in their different ways provided conceptual justification for rejecting the notion of human nature and thus paved the way for the plausibility of the idea that human beings are plastic creatures with no fixed identity founded on an intrinsic and ineradicable essence. While there are others whose thinking also played a role in this shift, these three are arguably the most influential as fountainheads for later developments up to the present day.

The Plausibility of Self-Creation
The idea that we can be who or whatever we want to be is commonplace today. Consumerism, or late capitalism, fuels this notion with its message of the customer as king and of the goods we consume as being basic to who we are. Commercials communicate this message in the way they present particular products as the key to happiness or life improvement. You have the power to transform yourself by the mere swipe of a credit card. The possession of this thing—that car, that kitchen, that item of clothing—will make you a different, a better, a more fulfilled person. Underwritten by easy credit, consumerist self-creation is the order of the day.
Such self-creation is perhaps more of a myth, or what Freud would have called an illusion, an act of wishful thinking, than a practical reality. Indeed, the underlying dynamic of the consumer marketplace is that desires can never be fully satisfied, at least not in any long-term manner. The consumer may not simply be a hapless dupe of the ruthless capitalist reinventing the market to maintain income streams, as some on the Left would argue, but the negotiation between producer and consumer is ultimately predicated on the fact that the desire for consumption never seems to be met by the act of possession. If the producer creates desires in order to fulfill them, then the consumer seems a willing-enough party in the process. To use Hegelian jargon, the consumer society really does present persons whose being is in their becoming, constantly looking to the next purchase that will bring about that elusive personal wholeness.
This illusion of sovereign self-creation through consumption still has its limitations. All of us are ultimately limited by a variety of factors that are not always susceptible to transubstantiation by credit card. First, there is the range of goods or lifestyles on offer. The marketplace does not have an infinite number of products for sale. The consumer is not an absolute monarch; as noted above, the marketplace involves a negotiation between supplier and consumer.
Second, society is constantly changing its mind about what is and is not fashionable, what is and is not cool, and what is and is not acceptable. We might think that we have the power to create ourselves and our own identities, but we are typically subject to the range of options and the value schemes that society itself sets and over which most individuals, considered as individuals, have very limited power. Consumerism makes us believe we can be whoever we want to be, but the market always places limits on that in reality.
Third, there are always specific individual limitations to our ability to invent ourselves. Physiology, intellectual capacity, income, location in time, and geographical location all play their role. I might truly desire to be Marie Antoinette, queen of France—indeed, I might happily decide to self-identify as such—but my body is male, has a genetic code provided by my English parents, is physically located in Pennsylvania, and exists chronologically in the twenty-first century. Being Marie Antoinette is therefore not a viable option for me. My body, not my psychology, has the last word on whether I am the last queen of France in the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, the idea of self-creation, that we can shape our essences by acts of will, is deeply embedded in the way we now think, to the point that, while I may not be able to overcome the genetic and chronological issues that prevent me from being an eighteenth-century Austrian-born queen of France, I can at least deny the decisive say that my chromosomes might wish to have over my maleness. As Bruce became Caitlyn and was recognized as such by society, so Carl might now become Caroline, if I so wished.
The world in which this way of thinking has become plausible has both intellectual and material roots. Streams of philosophical thought from the nineteenth century have exerted a powerful effect in weakening and even abolishing the idea that human nature is a given, something that has an intrinsic, nonnegotiable authority over who we are. And changes in our material circumstances have enabled the underlying, antiessentialist principles of these philosophies to become plausible and, indeed, perhaps even the default of the way we think about selfhood today; however, I cannot address these material factors but will focus rather on intellectual developments.
Thus, here I want to note the thought of three men who, while very different thinkers, helped shape the way we imagine human nature today: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. All three in their different ways provided conceptual justification for rejecting the notion of human nature and thus paved the way for the plausibility of the idea that human beings are plastic creatures with no fixed identity founded on an intrinsic and ineradicable essence. While there are others whose thinking also played a role in this shift, these three are arguably the most influential as fountainheads for later developments up to the present day.
Charles Darwin
Darwin is likely the most influential. Setting aside the question whether evolution—or, to be more precise, one of the numerous forms of evolutionary theory that looks back to Darwin’s work as an initial inspiration—is true, there is no doubt that vast numbers of people in the West simply assume that it is so.
Whether evolution can be argued from the evidence is actually irrelevant to the reason most people believe it. Few of us are qualified to opine on the science. But evolution draws on the authority that science possesses in modern society. Like priests of old who were trusted by the community at large and therefore had significant social authority, so scientists today often carry similar weight. And when the idea being taught has an intuitive plausibility, it is persuasive.
The obvious implications of this situation are, first, that the sacred account of human origins given in Genesis is undermined and, second, that human beings are therefore relativized in relation to other creatures. Descent from a prior species excludes special creation of man and woman, and natural selection renders teleology unnecessary as a hypothesis. In short, human nature as a significant foundational category for understanding human purpose is annihilated. And in a world in which belief in evolution is the default position, the implications for how people imagine that world, and their place within it, are dramatic.
Friedrich Nietzshe
The influence of Nietzsche is perhaps less obvious in terms of it being a source—I suspect many more have heard of Darwin—but no less pervasive. As we noted, he, too, attacks the idea of human nature, though from the perspective of his assault on metaphysics. Nevertheless, the result is much the same: neither human nature nor human destiny any longer have any transcendent or objective foundation; in fact, they were never anything more than manipulative concepts developed by one group, most notoriously the Christian church, to subjugate another.
This points to two further pathologies of this present age that can be seen as finding some inspiration in the work of Nietzsche. First, his genealogical approach to morals carries with it a basic historicist relativism and a deep suspicion of any claims to traditional authority. Both of these are now basic to our contemporary world. From the casual iconoclasm of pop culture to the dethroning of traditional historical narratives, from the distrust of traditional institutions such as the church to iconoclastic attitudes to sex and gender, we can see the anarchic outworking of the challenge posed by Nietzsche’s madman and the ruthless critical spirit of On the Genealogy of Morals. The average twelve-year-old girl attending an Ariana Grande concert may never even have heard of Nietzsche, but the amoral sexuality of the lyrics she hears preach a form of (albeit unwitting) Nietzscheanism.
And that leads to the second area where Nietzsche’s thinking is reflected in current social attitudes: living for the present. When teleology is dead and self-creation is the name of the game, then the present moment and the pleasure it can contain become the keys to eternal life. While Nietzsche himself may have had a view of hedonism that was different from that which grips the popular imagination today (he understood the pleasure to be gained from struggle and from triumphing over adversity), the idea that personal satisfaction is to be the hallmark of the life—or perhaps better, moment—well lived is basic to our present age. Again, Nietzsche’s books may not be widely read, but his central priorities have become common currency.
Karl Marx
That brings us to Marx. As with Darwin and Nietzsche, he assaults the metaphysics on which traditional religions and philosophies have built their views of the moral universe. Again, as with Nietzsche, he not only relativizes ethics via a form of historicism, he also presents moral codes as manipulative, as reflecting the economic and political status quo and therefore designed to justify and maintain the same. Modern suspicion of traditional authority owes a debt to Marx, as to Nietzsche, for its theoretical foundations.
Marx also makes another major contribution that is now basic to how we think about society: he abolishes the prepolitical, that notion that there can be forms of social organization that stand apart from, and prior to, the political nature of society. For Marx—and even more for later Marxists—all forms of social organization are political because all of them connect to the economic structure of society. By Marx’s account, the family and the church exist to cultivate, reinforce, and perpetuate bourgeois values. In today’s world, this thinking helps explain why everything—from the Boy Scouts to Hollywood movies to cake baking—has become politicized. And one does not need to be an ideological Marxist to be pulled into this tussle, for once one side gives a particular issue or organization political significance, then all sides, left, right, and center, have to do the same.
Iconoclastic Influence
Finally, the cultural iconoclasm of all three thinkers is notable. Darwin is perhaps the least culpable in this regard: his thought relativizes culture but is not directly iconoclastic. For Nietzsche and for Marx, however, history and culture are tales of oppression that need to be overthrown and overcome. If ever the Rieffian deathworker of today needed a philosophical rationale, then the thought of Marx and Nietzsche and the traditions of cultural and political reflection they helped birth certainly provide it. These men shattered the metaphysics for the sacred order that underlay the Rieffian second world of nineteenth-century Europe and thus challenged the culture to maintain itself purely on the basis of an immanent frame of reference—something that Rieff declares to be impossible. In light of this, the words that Nietzsche applied to himself in his autobiography, Ecce Homo, might easily be applied to all three:
I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.1
Notes:

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 326.

This article is adapted from The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl R. Trueman. This article is used with permission.