Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
The Reformation, Protestant and Catholic, may have been fueled by pamphlets. But who, beyond a small group of scholars, reads those pamphlets today? To the rest of us they are, at best, the throwaway productions of a bygone age, at worst an example of the way in which human beings can treat each other with pride and venom and no concern for the truth. 

It is in many ways odd that we observe Reformation Day on October 31. Setting aside the somewhat fruitless debates about whether Luther actually posted the Ninety-Five Theses on the Wittenberg castle church door on that day in 1517 (for the record, I believe he did), it is well-known that he had said more radical things about the Church before (for example, in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology in September 1517) and would do so again shortly afterward (at the Heidelberg Disputation in April 1518). Intellectually, either is a better candidate for the dating of the inception of the Reformation than the often obscure theses against indulgences that triggered Luther’s rise to fame.
Still, the very obscurity of many of the individual theses points to an interesting element in the Reformation’s popular success. The Reformation was not a popular success solely—or even primarily—because the populace read and embraced the arguments of the Reformers. As a Protestant, I rejoice that the Reformers carried the day in many places, with their appropriate emphasis on biblical authority, divine grace, and the finished work of Christ. They recovered the gospel and paved the way for many of the freedoms we in the West now take for granted. But I am not naïve enough to believe that they won simply by force of argument. Few people would have had the background to understand the issues, and that would have applied to many subsequent debates, particularly regarding the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Few members of the populace could actually read. So what made the Reformation a popular success in so many places?
There is no simple answer to this, but a key element was the pamphlet war: the production of short, cheap, polemical publications, often illustrated with woodcuts, that served to shape the mind of the populace. Both Protestants and Catholics engaged in this pamphlet war, which was perhaps the first battle for the popular mind in Western history. What is interesting about these pamphlets is that they were not in general designed to seek and establish truth, but rather to discredit the opposition. It takes no advanced degree in theology to understand the intended message of woodcuts depicting the pope being excreted from the backside of a horned and cloven-hoofed devil. And it takes no training in Thomist metaphysics to understand the intended message of sexually explicit pictures of Luther and his wife. It is also rather obvious what kind of publication—major expositions of the faith by Calvin and Bellarmine, or the penny dreadfuls that the presses churned out in vast numbers—had more immediate effect.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Christianity tells the world what it does not wish to hear. We should not expect to be embraced by those whose thoughts and deeds contradict the truths of our faith. Nor should we seek to make our faith more palatable, lest the salt lose its savor.

There are times in history when Christianity feels its place in ­society coming under threat. As it finds itself pushed to the margins, two temptations emerge. The first is an angry sense of entitlement, an impulse to denounce the entire world and withdraw into cultural isolation. In the early twentieth century, American Fundamentalism offered a good example of this tendency, renouncing public engagement and defining itself against alcohol, evolution, the ­movies—characteristic productions of the society by which it felt attacked. Arguably, we see something of the same thing today in evangelical support for Donald Trump, though in this case populist Protestantism is contending for ­America’s future rather than retreating from its present. I dare say readers of The Christian Century wish that truculent evangelicals would take the Benedict ­Option.
The second tendency is more subtle and more seductive. While appearing to be valiant for truth, it conforms Christianity to the spirit of the age. If fundamentalist fist-shaking is the temptation of the ragamuffin masses, accommodation appeals to those who seek a seat at the table among ­society’s elite. And these elite aspirants often blame the masses when their invitation to high table fails to materialize.
Over the last few years, America has witnessed plenty of both tendencies. We’ve seen the anger of the evangelicals who think the country is being stolen from them, and we’ve detected the condescension of those who blame their less urbane coreligionists for the woes of the Church and the nation. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. As often as Christianity has had its cultured despisers, it has had adherents who respond by warring against the age or by making entreaties to the despisers—often reinterpreting the anti-Christian sentiments of the moment as fulfillments of the true faith.
Today, countless apologists insist that a rejection of Christian sexual morality is actually a fulfillment of the Christian imperative of love, which they gloss as the imperative to “include.” But one of the first of these apologists, and arguably the most sophisticated, was Friedrich Schleiermacher. He is credibly called the father of modern theology, which really means modern liberal Protestant theology. Liberal Protestants pioneered the tactic of labeling critics “anti-modern” rather than engaging their arguments. Only in the last few decades, as liberal Protestantism has declined as a cultural force, have historians recognized that theologies framed to reject modern individualism, subjectivism, and historicism are themselves uniquely modern.
When Schleiermacher was a young man, an older, confessional Protestantism still had ownership of institutional culture in his native Germany. But even then society was in transition, and ­Christianity was losing ground among elites. The first generation of historical critics was shaking old Reformation certainties. Theology, once queen of the sciences and the crown of university education, was subject to fundamental challenges from Enlightenment thinking. The empiricism of thinkers such as David Hume called into question the traditional proofs for God’s existence and the credibility of miracles. Influenced by Hume, Immanuel Kant ruled out-of-bounds any possibility of knowing transcendent realities. In effect, Kantian philosophy, which rapidly came to dominate German intellectual life, made it impossible to sustain classical Christian theism. In the world of Kant and his successors, God was perhaps useful as a presupposition by which to anchor moral duty—what Kant called a “postulate” of practical reason—but theological notions served no substantive purpose. At the same time, Romanticism was placing sentiment or feeling at the heart of what it means to be human. This, too, ran counter to inherited forms of Christianity, with their dogmas and systematic theologies full of close arguments and fine ­distinctions. Christianity was being cordoned off from the influential modes of inquiry that inspired excitement and enjoyed the prestige of the new.
It was in this context that Schleiermacher produced his brilliant work On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. He did not dispute Kant’s strictures against metaphysics, which entailed that we cannot know God’s revelation and thereby denied that Christian doctrine has authority. Instead, he attacked Kant’s reliance on argument and analysis. God, Schleiermacher insisted, is not a postulate. He is rather the object of our most intense emotions. Religion is thus a matter of feelings, not of reason. The purpose of doctrine, therefore, is not to convey knowledge but to evoke intense ­feelings that move our souls. We do not “know” God; rather, we commune with God in an “­immediate feeling.”
One rightly marvels at Schleiermacher’s ability to concede all of Kant’s philosophical points while advancing a passionate case for the enduring relevance of pious emotions. At one point, ­Schleiermacher notes that Christianity is heatedly rejected by those influenced by Enlightenment thought—and the passion of unbelief indicates that religion has great power and significance. Yet it is not so much Schleiermacher’s argument as his strategy that is instructive. Rather than defend Christian orthodoxy, he concedes the ground claimed by religion’s cultured despisers. He redefines Christianity to make it accord with the assumptions of its critics. He argues that ­Christianity is not characterized by irrational credulity, because it is not concerned with beliefs at all, but rather with feelings. By Schleiermacher’s way of thinking, Christian beliefs are symbols, cherished because they evoke the “immediate feeling” that links us to the divine.
With this approach, Schleiermacher was free to partake of the rising criticism of theological systems. He need not defend the authority of doctrine or of those who believed that Christian doctrine made objective claims about reality. By turning the dogmatic faith of previous generations into a religion of feelings and intuitions, he construed Christian doctrines as expressions of religious sentiment rather than as statements of objective truth. For example, predestination was not for him a matter of divine action effecting the eternal decision or decree of God, which divided the human race into elect and reprobate. Rather, it was a conceptual-­poetic expression of the feeling of absolute dependence upon God, which Christianity evokes and Christians experience.
Schleiermacher is long dead, as is the Enlightenment audience he sought to address. But the problem of Christianity and its cultured despisers has not disappeared. It has become increasingly evident in recent decades. Powerful forces of secularism, metaphysical materialism, and scientism, among other factors, have driven religion from its former places of influence. One need only note that very nearly all private universities in the United States were founded by religious groups and were for a long time anchored in a religious tradition, only to become secular in the last two generations. In response to this pressure, Christianity has once again put forward those who seek to persuade its despisers that the faith is not inimical to polite society.
In the mid-1990s, a sustained effort was made to rehabilitate and defend the intellectual and academic integrity of orthodox Christians. The leaders of this movement, the historians Mark Noll and George Marsden, made valiant cases for the Christian mind. In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Noll argued that American evangelicalism was hamstrung by its commitment to indefensible positions that lacked intellectual credibility. It consequently attracted the scorn of educated people outside the Church. Worse still, the lack of intellectual standards made life hard for thoughtful individuals within the Church. Noll focused on dispensationalism and literal six-day creation, arguing that these commitments were not defensible by the canons of reason, nor were they necessary for a rigorously orthodox Christian faith.
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was a bestseller and named Book of the Year by Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical magazine whose purpose was, in part, to articulate a Christianity that avoided the excesses of fundamentalism while defending orthodox Christianity. Shortly afterward, Marsden argued for what he dubbed “the outrageous idea of Christian scholarship” in a monograph of the same name. The historical portion of his case was based on research he had earlier published on the Christian origins of many of America’s most significant institutions of higher education. Marsden concluded that Christianity’s cultured despisers were simply wrong when they claimed that faith set a person at odds with the life of the mind. In the constructive portion of his case, Marsden argued that Christian scholars could cultivate careful respect for the canons of academic discourse and thoughtful, honest engagement with other academics within the guild without compromising their faith.
Unlike Schleiermacher, Noll and Marsden are careful to sustain full-blooded affirmations of orthodox Christian faith. And unlike ­Schleiermacher’s, I find their arguments convincing. There is nothing about belief in the saving death and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ that undermines intellectual rigor or compromises academic standards—­unless, of course, those standards are deemed above criticism from the get-go. But there can be no doubt that the extraordinarily positive reception of Noll’s and Marsden’s ideas came about because university-­educated Evangelicals in the 1990s were anxious to be reassured. The universities they attended increasingly told them that their faith was disqualifying. Noll and ­Marsden argued otherwise, showing that a person of faith who ­engaged in self-criticism and discarded ­untenable beliefs could participate fully in modern ­intellectual life.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, October 25, 2021
“Deathwork” is a term used by sociologist Philip Rieff. It refers to the act of using the sacred symbols of a previous era in order to subvert, and then destroy, their original significance and purpose. Rieff uses Andres Serrano’s notorious 1987 picture Piss Christ to illustrate this. The work is a photograph of something considered sacred—in this case a crucifix—submerged in the artist’s own urine. As Rieff puts it, in Serrano’s photo the sacramental has been made excremental. Or, to borrow a phrase from Marx— that which was holy has been profaned.

In his fascinating new book, Hegel’s Century, intellectual historian Jon Stewart comments that Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion ends on an uncharacteristically dour note: Hegel writes that the 1820s witnessed a rise in anxiety and despair because cultural symbols and institutions began to lose their meaning, plunging the world into a state of random flux. Of course, this is all the more true of our own world, where old symbols—national flags, national anthems, national narratives—have lost their shared meaning, and have thus also lost their authority. Which flag to fly—Stars and Stripes or Pride? Which anthem to sing—“Star Spangled Banner” or “Lift Every Voice and Sing”? Where to date America’s founding—1776 or 1619? These are now serious questions.
For Christians, this flux is not too surprising. Here we have no lasting city, as the New Testament tells us. Earthly cities come and go; the city of God remains. But what happens when the earthly presence of the city of God—the church—loses confidence in her sacred symbols?
Stewart’s book arrived on the same day I noticed a courageous article by Mary Frances Myler, an undergraduate at Notre Dame, on her university’s approach to LGBTQ activism. The article’s existence should be a rebuke to the officer class of American Christianity, so many members of which remain silent on such issues. As Rod Dreher observed, the article highlights the pitiful leadership of the church, one incapable of withstanding what is to come. Yet here is a young woman potentially risking her career and more in order to stand for truth and state the obvious: Christianity and Pride activism cannot be reconciled.
The article features a striking picture of a Catholic priest wearing a rainbow stole at a Coming Out Day Celebration on Notre Dame’s campus. Myler quotes the priest: “My presence at this event was simply to affirm, support, and celebrate the dignity of every human person as a child of God. We prayed in gratitude for the unique gift that every person is [and] for an end to discrimination.”
The priest was no doubt sincere in this. But his personal motives are of little significance compared to the rainbow-colored stole that he wore: It is a deathwork. And deathworks are just as lethal to the faith as any explicit denial of Christian teaching.
“Deathwork” is a term used by sociologist Philip Rieff. It refers to the act of using the sacred symbols of a previous era in order to subvert, and then destroy, their original significance and purpose.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, October 1, 2021
The battle over pronouns on social media and in public spaces, as trivial as it seems, is actually of great importance. The abandonment of reality that queer ideology demands may be marketed as nothing more than sensitivity toward the feelings of others, but in fact it is imposing a view of the relationship between language and reality that makes the latter nothing more than a function of the former. 

In times past, progressive politicians described those they despised as clinging to “God and guns.” I suspect that we are not too far from a time when they will insult those they deplore for clinging to God and grammar. That might sound an odd claim, but the days are coming rapidly to an end when it was morally acceptable to think that language, among its many functions, had a positive relation to reality. Today, dictionaries and grammars look set to become relics of a bygone age of evil oppression.
Take, for example, the trend of specifying preferred pronouns on everything from Twitter to business cards—a fascinating sign of our times. Even some Christians are participating. Whether people do it out of genuine confusion, positive commitment to queer theory, or in pre-emptive anticipation of it becoming the equivalent of Havel’s greengrocer shop sign in our brave new world, it is an action that most would have regarded as absurd even five years ago. Most (probably) still regard it as absurd today. But that old consensus is crumbling, just like every other once-unquestionable Western cultural belief. Queerness is moving rapidly from arcane, implausible theory to practical, everyday reality.
While many on the right default to accusations of cultural Marxism when confronted with such iconoclasm, I would argue that this latest trend is reminiscent of nothing so much as Friedrich Nietzsche’s haunting statement in Twilight of the Idols: “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.” This sounds odd but in the context of his argument, it makes sense. What Nietzsche is saying here is that language tricks us into thinking that it expresses reality but it does not do so; rather, it constructs concepts that it presents as real and seductively traps us into thinking of the world in particular ways.
If ever there was a philosophical position that placed the individual and his (or her or zir) will at the center of the universe, then this is it. Such radical nominalism may be nonsense but, like sex, it sells, appealing as it does to our intuitive sense of freedom and desire for autonomy. And rather like current attitudes toward sex, it makes the world’s purpose making us feel good about ourselves.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
The slavery of colonial and antebellum America was tragic but there is nothing we can do to change that history. The present is a different matter. That is our responsibility. No amount of indignant finger-pointing at the world of three hundred years ago will cleanse us of our present-day complicity.

Winston Churchill famously quipped that history would be kind to him, for he intended to write it. That line came to mind last week when I saw a tweet about America’s slave-owning past. It pointed out the rather obvious fact that Jonathan Edwards was only able to study as long and hard each day as he did because he had slaves to do the drudge work necessary for the material maintenance of his household. Whether this comment was intended to prove that Edwards’s theology was fundamentally unsound, or to demonstrate that Edwards (like me and, presumably, the author of the tweet) was morally flawed, or merely to point out that Edwards lived in the eighteenth century rather than the twenty-first was unclear.
The transatlantic slave trade was an evil. And it did enable men like Edwards to enjoy the leisure from physical work that then allowed them to study. But it was—and is—not the only evil that enables one class of people to enjoy life at the expense of another. Early critical theorist Walter Benjamin, using the idea of the spoils of war to reflect upon history, memorably commented:
[Cultural treasures] owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Benjamin’s point is simple: The things we admire in culture are often built on the back of exploitation. And one does not need to be a Marxist to see that there is much truth in this claim.
Take, for example, companies currently involved with China—companies whose products we all use and that make our hi-tech lives, including those of the tweeting class, possible. In 2020 the Australian Strategic Policy Institute produced a report on the forced labor of Uighurs under the Chinese government and identified 82 companies that potentially benefit, directly or indirectly, from this. That list included Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung. Apple was among the companies that did not respond to the report. Last year, the New York Times reported on the efforts of American companies, including Apple and Nike, to weaken the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would ban imported goods made with forced labor from the Xinjiang region of China. In May of this year, Business Insider reported that seven Apple suppliers had links to forced labor programs in China, including those that abused Uighur Muslims. In short, if you walk to work in Nike trainers or use a smartphone or computer, you can probably only do so because somebody in China has been enslaved and exploited. And that is before any consideration of how buying Chinese products in general supports a nation engaged in genocide and racially profiled forced sterilization, all enabled via a system of government concentration camps.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, September 10, 2021
Being overwhelmed by a vision of a great God at the center of all things is ultimately the only antidote to confusing the needs of ourselves as creatures with the meaning of life. While the pathologies of our culture—from materialism to sexual confusion—each have their own distinctives, the solution is ultimately the same: a vision of God that makes every problem, challenge, or question seem like a passing momentary affliction compared to the eternal weight of glory that is to come.

There can be little doubt that we live in an age where the individual is sovereign. Whether it is commercials selling products on the basis of how they will make us feel or parents suing schools for refusing to allow their children to attend class dressed in any way they choose, ours is a world where individual rights and demands carry a peculiar weight. And the result is that our institutions, particularly our voluntary institutions, are more like boutiques competing for customers in the marketplace of self-fulfillment. Colleges sell themselves on the basis of allowing students to find themselves and reach their potential. And churches promote their programs as sources of personal happiness and well-being. Religious and irreligious, we are all expressive individuals now, seeing the purpose of life as feeling good and anything that hinders that as being evil.
The question of how to counter this and to recapture the New Testament’s vision of the Church as a body of believers who find their identity not in themselves but in love of God and of each other is a pressing but difficult one, made more so by the fact that our problem is in part the result of something we all consider good. Freedom of religion is a wonderful thing. Who wants to live under a regime where simply gathering together in the Lord’s name might merit prosecution, incarceration, or even death? It is good to worship without fear of reprisals.
Yet, when there is religious freedom, there is religious choice; and where there is religious choice, congregants are always in danger of tilting towards being customers, and churches towards being spiritual boutiques, presenting themselves as the answer to particular needs or desires. Add to that mix a normative notion of selfhood that places the individual and his or her needs—”felt” needs, to use the modern phrase—at the center of life, and the stage is set for precisely the kind of religion we have today.
A Vision of God in His Glory
If the problems of consumerist Christianity are so deeply entwined with the pathologies of the wider culture, from its cult of the independent self to its imperious belief that personal happiness is the great criterion of truth, then it is easy to despair. How, as Christians, do we break from this seductive cage in which we find ourselves and in which too often we enjoy being confined? And how do we persuade the rising generation that Christianity is not simply one possible option available for finding happiness and satisfaction in this life but rather is the very meaning of life itself?
I would like to suggest that one vital part of the answer is to be found in that most difficult and yet glorious of Christian teachings, the doctrine of God, particularly the doctrine of God as he is in himself. If patriotism leads individuals to see themselves (and if necessary, sacrifice themselves) in light of a larger, greater reality, that of the nation, so Christians stand or fall by whether they see the God they worship as truly greater than themselves. A God who is simply man writ large is no more worthy of devotion, and no more captivating to the imagination, than a sports hero or a movie star. Only as our imaginations are taken captive by a vision of God in his glory will we see any change in the wider malaise of modernity which afflicts our religious institutions.
I have some personal grounds for believing this can be done. Each year I teach an undergraduate course on the doctrine of God, and each year I am delightfully surprised by the effect it has on many students.
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