Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, September 27, 2024
The church must bear witness to a grown-up faith. That means that we need a renewed sense of the holy, the sacred, and the transcendent. And that must start at the top, where it is too often most absent. The X feeds of many of the loudest Christian pastors today indicate little difference from the categories, attitudes, and preoccupations of secular leaders. This is a sad dereliction of duty; of all people, pastors should point heavenward, to where Christ sits and intercedes for his people. 

In Milan Kundera’s 1975 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Czechoslovakian president Gustav Husak—the “President of Forgetting”—declares, “Children! You are the future!” Kundera goes on to say that this is true “not because they will one day be adults but because humanity is becoming more and more a child, because childhood is the image of the future.”
Douglas Murray’s recent Spectator article on the Church of England confirms the Czech writer’s prophetic insight. Canterbury Cathedral’s “silent disco” in February and Peterborough Cathedral’s upcoming November “rave” certainly speak of a childish age. These buildings were built for the serious and sacred purpose of worship; that was why generations invested many decades and resources in their construction. To use them now for events that could easily be held in a makeshift tent says much about the sacred nature of the trivial hedonism of our age.
It also says much about a church that has long since lost any confidence in the gospel codified in her Thirty-Nine Articles, Book of Common Prayer, and Book of Homilies. Recent reports reveal that she is increasingly abandoning the word “church” in favor of other descriptions, such as “community.” And anyone gazing on The Queen’s Window in Westminster Abbey is more likely to recall scenes from SpongeBob than be awed by thoughts of the transcendent creator and redeemer of mankind. Lose the gospel, return to childishness; this seems to be the order of the day.
Indeed, this childishness is the inevitable outcome of the kind of theological liberalism that has dominated so many churches for several generations. Ironically, theological liberalism has often been the product of some of the finest minds. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the notional father of Protestant liberalism, was one of the dazzling intellects of his day. The Tübingen School, which did huge damage to orthodox belief, boasted an array of stellar scholars. And in the Anglophone world, figures such as C. H. Dodd and John A. T. Robinson were men of true academic substance.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
The person thinking about IVF or wrestling with whether to use preferred pronouns as demanded by his or her employer needs to know how to make a decision that could well be costly and painful. We need good Protestant ethicists who are able to come up with solutions to the various challenges that we face, solutions rooted in our Christian understanding of what it means to be human. 

Most Americans are in favor of abortion under certain circumstances. This is not all too surprising when one considers that, for many, the values and practices of the sexual revolution are an intuitive part of daily life. This is due in large part to the common intuition that human beings are autonomous, unencumbered individuals whose primary purpose is the pursuit of personal happiness. The widespread acceptance of no-fault divorce was the harbinger of many great changes, from gay marriage to transgenderism to the shift in abortion rhetoric; what was once a “necessary evil” is now a “reproductive right.”
The immediate question for many is what will happen after the November election. It’s unlikely that the U.S. will have a strong pro-life option at the ballot box, at least one with a credible chance of power. Beyond that, however, lies a real pedagogical challenge for the churches, particularly the Protestant churches. In times past, the moral intuitions of society at large and those of the Protestant churches (at least the orthodox ones) were largely consonant with each other. The churches taught, for example, that homosexual practices were wrong, and that tracked with the general outlook of the culture. The reasoning in each case might well have been very different. The churches no doubt looked to biblical texts; society perhaps operated with the residue of such an approach, a form of “cultural Christianity.” But the result was that the churches never really had to do any significant thinking in this area. The culture carried the issue.
Today the situation is far different. In the space of a few decades, the moral intuitions of society have not simply parted company with those of Christianity—they have come to stand in direct opposition to many of them. That changes the pedagogical dynamics of church life. The churches now need to teach Christian ethics more explicitly and more thoroughly, because that is where the wider culture will challenge Christian discipleship most powerfully. Indeed, it is already doing so, and orthodox Protestantism seems ill-equipped to address this.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, August 30, 2024
When abortion advocates dehumanize the baby in the womb, they dehumanize themselves too. Ours is an age when so much of our culture encourages us to treat others made in God’s image as less than human. This is true, from the comparatively trivial trashing of others that is the favored idiom of those who seem to live online, to those at the DNC in Chicago this week, exulting in the slaughter of innocents.

A Planned Parenthood mobile clinic has been offering free abortions just a few blocks from the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which concludes today. The DNC is not officially involved, but that is a minor detail, given that abortion has the status of a creedal non-negotiable in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. The clinic is simply actualizing the central plank of the Democrats’ election campaign. Its proximity to the convention is entirely appropriate—as is the presence of an eighteen-foot-tall inflatable IUD, named “Freeda Womb,” erected by the group Americans for Contraception. It is a stark reminder, along with the performances of Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention last month, of how unserious today’s American politics has become. Where, one might ask, have all the grown-ups gone?
But there is a deeper issue with the grandstanding of abortion that goes well beyond the problem of showcasing moronic entertainers at a political convention. The move from abortion being sold to the public as “safe, legal, and rare” to being celebrated as a necessary social good is revealing. In part it is a reaction to the overturning of Roe. But it is more than just a reaction; the celebration of abortion as something to be proud of started long before 2022. Something deeper must have taken place within our culture. And this brings me once again to the inadequacy of characterizing our modern world as “disenchanted.”
The glee with which abortion is advocated and the anger that any restrictions upon it provoke indicate that we need a different category to capture our current cultural ethos. In a disenchanted world, one could imagine abortion being seen as a necessary evil. The demands of the workplace, the economy, and society at large might make it so. In a world where rape and incest exist, sometimes the options for addressing such evil might themselves involve a degree of evil. I disagree with that logic, but it seems consistent with the regretful moral resignation that disenchantment might involve.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, August 16, 2024
The account provided on the Church of England’s website indicates that the discussion was infused with the usual pious jargon. The archbishop of Canterbury captures the sentiment nicely: “I cannot imagine the Church of England without any particular group within it, and without her reaching effectively to anyone outside it through inclusion and justice, lived in holy imitation of Christ.” A church without boundaries is, of course, no church at all. So the statement about “any particular group” surely needs qualification. 

It’s that time of year again when the Anglican General Synod makes further moves toward dissolving the difference between Christianity and the acceptable tastes of the surrounding world. This, of course, is always to the detriment of the former. For the Church of England, this is nothing new. Writing for The Spectator, Theo Hobson points out that the church has in practice denied its theology of sex for many years now. That simply indicates how deep the problem is. But rather than take steps to check the problem, the C of E seems set to move to regularize it.
The issues of the moment involve giving more formal status to “Prayers of Love and Faith” that are already in use in some churches for the blessing of same-sex couples and plotting a way forward for the recognition of civil marriage. The prayers themselves are on the whole masterpieces of studied ambiguity, more significant for what they suggest but do not spell out.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, August 6, 2024
If queers mocking the Lord’s Supper and a decapitated singing head are the things that France—or at least her officer class—consider to represent her, then things have surely taken a most dark turn. “This is France,” tweeted President Emmanuel Macron. I hope he was exaggerating. As to the lack of intent to cause offense, it is impossible to read the minds of the organizers, but it is hard to believe this claim. Would they ever have contemplated mocking things considered sacred by Jews or Muslims, one wonders? That seems rather unlikely—unless they really are as insensitive and thick as they claim.

The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics will be remembered as an eloquent testimony to the tilt of contemporary Western culture. The drag queen parody of da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the appearance of the severed head of Marie Antoinette performing karaoke said it all: A culture that has given the world the plays of Racine and Molière, the novels of Stendhal and Hugo, the paintings of the Impressionists, and the music of Berlioz and Fauré served the world a dish of blasphemous kitsch and gaudy perversion.
Of course, those responsible denied any intention to offend Christians: “Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief,” organizers said in a statement to The Telegraph. “On the contrary, each of the tableaux in the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony were intended to celebrate community and tolerance.” Organizers further noted that pop culture, from The Simpsons to The Sopranos, has parodied The Last Supper for decades, if not centuries.
Certainly, such parodies are not new is true, confirming the organizers’ intellectual laziness and lack of imagination.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, July 19, 2024
As to the young people, my wife and I had many conversations that indicated a real desire to find roots in the historic Christian faith. Many had backgrounds in Brethren churches, rooted in Anabaptism. They were appropriately grateful for the love of Jesus and the pastoral care that their Brethren churches had shown them, but they were aware that in a world where the broader culture is increasingly indifferent to or even hostile to the faith, they needed more solid food: coherent doctrine expressed in thoughtful, well-structured worship that draws upon the historic, confessional resources of traditional Christianity. 

The news from Europe is dominated by the U.K. and French elections—and the apparent chaos that the latter in particular seems to anticipate. It might be easy to dismiss the continent as being in the death-throes of an old world order. Our world is one where despair is very chic, predictions of apocalyptic doom are effective clickbait, and the very online political classes of both extremes are happy to capitalize on peddling these narratives in which they have a vested interest. But having just returned from nearly three weeks in Europe, I am happy to report that there are other stories worth reflecting upon.
While there, I spoke at four church gatherings, one in Germany and three in the Netherlands. The first, for the organization Evangelium21, was in Hamburg. It was attended by over 1200 people, leaders and lay. The vast majority were under the age of thirty. At fifty-seven, I think I may well have been the oldest person in the building. In the Netherlands, I spoke at a conference of several hundred organized by Tyndale Seminary, then at a larger gathering sponsored by the group Bijbels Beraad. Finally, I agreed to speak at a youth gathering on a Thursday night to give two lectures. Over six hundred young people, aged sixteen–twenty-four, turned up to listen to me speak on the roots of modern anxiety and then on the theology of public worship. That was on a school night.
Everywhere I went, my wife and I had remarkable conversations both with pastors and young people. Pastors feel the same pressure in Europe that many experience here: the need to allow the politicians to determine their priorities, whether the demands of the progressive internationalists or the reactive nationalists. They are aware of this pressure and understand the danger of speaking gospel truth only to one side of the political divide. Short-term strategic truncation of the gospel is too easily a prelude to a long-term Christianity that is no Christianity. Political expediency, like cultural relevance, is a fickle and imperious mistress. Pastors well-grounded in the creedal truths of the faith understand this.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
The psalmist tells us to put not our trust in princes…But the awful events of Saturday remind us that this statement is true, not merely because our leaders are limited and flawed but also because, like the grass and the flowers of the field, they can pass in the twinkling of an eye. Only the Lord and the Word of the Lord remain forever.

Last week, whenever anyone asked me where I live, I typically responded, “45 miles north of Pittsburgh.”
By 8 p.m. on Saturday, I found myself a resident of the most famous county in the world. Ten miles from where I am sitting now, a 20-year-old attempted to take the life of Donald Trump at a rally. For the time being, everybody knows where Butler County, Pa., is.
It is odd to be so close to a moment in history, but it is also important to set that moment in context. Political assassinations are as old as politics itself. The histories of Greece, Rome, and, indeed, even the Old Testament kingdom narratives are not exceptional in this regard. And the modern age has produced enough of them. The Kennedy murders of the 1960s still loom large in the American mind. And if Charles de Gaulle died while watching television, it was not because of the lack of effort by his enemies to have him dispatched somewhat earlier and much more violently. Indeed, the last three decades in the West have arguably been the exception for their lack of assassins. Not yet 60, I can recall the deaths of Aldo Moro and Olaf Palme, the shooting of Ronald Reagan, and the Brighton Hotel bombing of the U.K. Conservative Party Conference in 1984. And it seemed at one point in the 1970s that everyone was trying to assassinate Gerald Ford. One early memory is asking my father if “Squeaky Fromme” was a cartoon character. The comparative lack of assassinations over recent decades could well be the result of better security procedures rather than a sea change in the nature of politics itself.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, June 20, 2024
As the number of detransitioners grows and as the science undergirding the whole trans pharmaceutical racket is exposed as junk, the T is going to be an increasing embarrassment to the LGB. And that raises an important question for Christians: Will we be ready for the conversations that this will possibly open up with others who have been committed to the sexual and gender chaos to which pride witnesses? 

We can still remember when June was remarkable for nothing more than the arrival of summer. In recent years, however, it has become synonymous with Pride. Christians the world over have grown accustomed to enduring over four long weeks of the ostentatious celebration of the transgression of any and every standard of sexual responsibility, modesty, and self-control. While veterans and presidents have a day dedicated in their honor, the hedonists of our day have an entire month, lest we forget who really made modern America what it has become.
And yet last year there was something of a change. In the wake of the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, the promotion by Target of the commodities of teenage transgenderism, and the obvious double standards when compared to Covid of advice given by public health officials regarding monkey pox, Pride seemed somewhat less ostentatious and confidently in-your-face than previous years. Whether that was an aberrant blip or the beginning of a hopeful trend, only time will tell. It will be worth watching this year’s events to see if there is evidence of the latter.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, June 3, 2024
Can any other creature on the face of the planet be grateful? When I express gratitude to God, I acknowledge my personal dependency upon him, I also act as a person myself, and I am inclined to acknowledge his image as found in those around me. Gratitude is both profoundly theological and personally transformative. It is part of consecration. 

Last fall I argued that our current cultural moment is characterized by desecration. And at the heart of desecration lies the repudiation of the notion that human beings are made in God’s image. To destroy the human in reality is thus to destroy the divine by proxy. Trans ideology and pro-abortion politics are exhilarating because they make their proponents feel like God. That’s why so many seem to take such delight in the acts of cultural demolition that mark the radical ends of the political spectrum. But there are subtler ways of desecration to which we are all potentially vulnerable. Lack of gratitude is one. And this needs to be a foundational part of any discussion as to how we can move from the desecration of man to his reconsecration. 
Gratitude is an interesting, potent thing. My mother taught me always to say “thank you” whenever I was given anything, even by somebody paid to do so, such as a waiter in a restaurant. And when your mother tells you something, it tends to be inscribed on your character forever. To this day I immediately look with some contempt upon those who do not express thanks for even the smallest services provided by others. But the example of a waiter raises the fascinating question: Why should I express gratitude to someone who is merely doing something for which he is paid? I feel no such need to thank the ATM that delivers cash on demand or the website that issues my theater tickets. The answer is that in expressing gratitude even to someone who is required to act toward me in a certain way, I acknowledge that person as a person, a fellow human being. That is why I thank the cashier in the booth who issues my rail ticket but do not thank the machine in the wall that does the same. The former is a person. By expressing gratitude to someone even if it is simply for the work they are paid to do, I acknowledge them as a person, not merely a thing or an instrument or an automaton. And in acknowledging them as person I act as a person too. 
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, May 30, 2024
For what do all these people have in common? A basic failure to realize two things. First, the gospel relativizes and ultimately demolishes all human categories of division in light of Christ. To quote Paul, in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free. Any attempt to interfere with these by building divisive categories, past or present, is a contradiction of the work of Christ. Second, such categories are only plausible in a community that has already abandoned the idea that the most basic categories of our existence are our shared humanity and our shared need for redemption. 

Headlines surrounding the United Methodist Church over recent weeks have focused on the denomination’s dramatic changes with regard to homosexuality and gay clergy. For many evangelical Protestants, this is clear evidence of a basic failure to acknowledge the authority of scripture. The basic idea is that once God’s Word no longer holds final authority, traditional sexual codes become hard to justify in an area of rampant moral individualism and eventually fall victim to whatever contemporary social taste dictates.
That narrative contains a lot of truth. But it also fails to see that what happened at the UMC conference was not simply a collapse in sexual morality. That in itself would be bad enough, but it was really only symptomatic of a much deeper theological problem: The UMC has not merely lost sight of what sex is meant to be. It has lost sight of what it means to be human.
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