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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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, May 27, 2024
Perhaps Crenshaw thinks Biden’s America is more of a “negative world” than Nero’s Rome and that the New Testament’s normative expectations of Christian behavior therefore do not apply. Or perhaps he thinks New Testament ethical teaching represents a kind of slave morality in our current political moment. If so, QED. The conclusion of Crenshaw’s article is, however, admirably clear as it really does put on display the kind of “Christianity” being espoused. 

In reading Ben Crenshaw’s response to my opinion piece at First Things, several points came to mind. Much could be said but here are two brief thoughts.
It is indeed possible that I have misunderstood the “negative world” idea, but perhaps not in quite the way Crenshaw claims. When I encountered it in Aaron Renn’s First Things essay, it struck me as providing a potentially useful taxonomy for highlighting some of the dramatic changes of the last twenty years in America with regard to the cultural climate and religion. But as Crenshaw deploys it, it seems less a modest heuristic tool and more part of a grand theory of culture. This can then apparently function as a Procrustean bed for categorizing and dismissing other arguments a priori. Now, Crenshaw’s reading of the idea may well be correct, in which case I find it considerably less helpful than I first did. In retrospect, therefore, I would not have bothered referencing it. The problem with grand theories is that they risk simplifying the complexities of real life as it is lived at ground level.
More worrying than its capacity for over-simplification, however, is that the “negative world” now appears to have become a justification (excuse?) for ignoring basic New Testament teaching on Christian behavior—whether one is politically active or not. Crenshaw’s lack of serious engagement with the Bible is surprising, given the issue is that of the nature of Christianity and Christian political ethics. True, he does point to Rahab and gestures toward the New Testament by citing Hebrews 11:31. But to make her behavior normative for Christians today in our current circumstances is not a straightforward move. This is not to say there are no situations where Christians may be called on to act similarly, but it is quite simply no easy task to reach such a judgment.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, May 20, 2024
The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity. It’s understandable why such a thing has emerged. Many Christians think America has been stolen from them. And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. 

Some years ago I wrote a piece for First Things entitled “The Calvary Option.” It took its cue from the 2014 movie Calvary, which followed the last seven days in the life of a priest who knew that someone was planning to kill him. The killer wanted to do so as revenge for sexual abuse he had suffered as a child at the hands of the clergy. The twist was that he chose his victim because he was a good priest. He had not abused anybody. Once the priest knew he was the target, he faced a choice: flee, or stay and be a good pastor to his parishioners, many of whom despised him. He chose to stay and fulfill his obligations, and in the end he was killed for it. I commented at the time that one might also call this “the traditional pastoral work in an ordinary congregation option.” 
I wrote the piece when Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option was the talk of the town. At that time, the big threat to the faith was the emerging pressure on religious freedom, focused then on the issue of gay marriage. The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity. It’s understandable why such a thing has emerged. Many Christians think America has been stolen from them. And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. While the left may pose an obvious threat, there is also a more subtle danger in succumbing to the rules of the political game as currently played by both sides. And the internet doesn’t help. All ideas—however silly, insane, or plain evil—can seem rational and workable in the frictionless kindergartens of social media bubbles. In the real world, things can be just a bit more complicated. 
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Thursday, May 16, 2024
Hope is a person—Christ crucified and risen—and he is actualized in the life of the church through the Holy Spirit as she goes about her daily, routine business of preaching the gospel, baptizing, and serving communion. There we encounter life in the Christ who defeated death not be escaping from it but by coming through it in resurrection triumph. Only in that context—in the life of the church—can hope be found.

Over the last twelve months I have seen death touch the lives of too many friends. Not the expected kind of death—that of the elderly person full of years—but the hard, dirty deaths of those who should have lived for decades more. Of course, to the Christian no death is ‘natural’ in the strict sense of the word. But there is something deeply unnatural about a husband losing his wife before she is 60, still more about parents standing by the graveside of their teenage child. Though we have been as yet untouched by such tragedy, my wife and I find our devotional times preoccupied now with asking the Lord to comfort our numerous devastated friends.
These sad events put in perspective our current cultural moment. The temptation at a time of extreme polarization in the realm of earthly politics is to set aside the eternal for the temporal or, to put it more bluntly, to set aside hope for hopelessness. Whoever wins in November can at best only help to save the body.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
One cannot join the “silence is violence” crowd when it suits you but then keep quiet when events reveal that your “evangelicalism is the most pressing and dangerous threat to America” is arrant, self-serving nonsense.

The scenes that have been playing out on elite American campuses—scenes of the most explicit racism—are a national disgrace. Of course, in the United States, people have a right to public protest. And while I am pro-Israel in the current conflict, it does not seem irrational to me that others might wish to support the Palestinians and criticize aspects of the Israeli war strategy. But the protests are not merely supportive of Palestinians. They are supportive of Hamas. And they are targeted not at Israelis in particular but at the Jewish population in general. Such protests are racist, at least according to the traditional definition before folks like Ibram Kendi and the BLM activists of this world managed to twist the term to suit their own interests.
Some may wish to argue that support for Hamas is not anti-Semitic but rather anti-Zionist. They will likely claim that the 2017 Hamas charter identified the problem as “Zionists” rather than “Jews” for this reason. But that is a specious dodge. When you think that the state of Israel is the result of a Jewish conspiracy, the terms become basically interchangeable. And when events on elite college campuses in the USA have created an environment where Jewish students are under threat simply because of their Jewishness, Israeli military action would seem only to be the pretext and not the true cause of the hatred.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
The thing that unites these groups is neither concern for Arab lives nor a respect for Islamic culture. They are united only in wanting to tear down. In short, these protests are a manifestation of the Mephistophelean spirit of negation or, in religious terms, the spirit of desecration. To borrow from Marx, all that is holy must be profaned. What is to replace it—Shariah law, drag queen story hour, Judith Butler reading groups—is anybody’s guess. There is no agreed moral vision here. There is only consensus on a hatred of Jews, of Israel, of America, and of what is. And ironically, it comes from those who enjoy some of the greatest privileges that America has to offer.

The recent pro-Palestinian student protests on elite university campuses across the country offer fascinating, if somewhat depressing, insights into the state of modern American culture. It is not so much that the lunatics have taken over the asylum as the kindergartners have taken over the nursery.
First, society takes the attitudes and antics of the young far too seriously. In an era when we are reliably informed that adolescence persists well into the twenties, it is strange that we deem the views of anyone under the age of thirty to have any real significance or merit. Yet it seems to be an unspoken assumption that young people, especially young, angry, and opinionated people, are to be indulged as important. World leaders were clamoring to have cringeworthy photo ops with Greta Thunberg when she first rose to prominence. Thunberg types now abound on the left and right of the political spectrum. They often combine their ill-informed opinions with a confident youthful extremism that should be summarily dismissed or mocked without mercy rather than featured on the news.
This exaltation of youth is simultaneously the exaltation of ignorance and incompetence. Early claims of Israeli occupation of Gaza and the continued sloppy use of the language of genocide, fueled by people at the U.N. who could benefit from using a dictionary, are two obvious examples of the former. As for the latter, when, for example, did adult revolutionaries hold hunger strikes lasting a whole twelve hours or seize buildings and then demand that the university authorities give them food and water? I have no affection for Che Guevara, but he did at least spend time in a Bolivian jungle while trying to foment revolution. I presume he never once considered whining to the Bolivian government about the harsh conditions of jungle life and had to find his own food and water. A cynic might say that even our revolutionaries are pathetic these days.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, April 22, 2024
This points to their value in today’s debates. One of the striking lacunae on both the right and left wings of the Christian political spectrum is the general absence of any reference to the transcendence of God and the supernatural nature of the church. Immanent concerns rule the day. The pundits on both sides seem more concerned with making sure that no criticism goes unmocked, and no critic’s character goes unsmeared than with relativizing the affairs of this world in the light of eternity.

I recently revisited a book that I had not read for many years: Robert P. Ericksen’s Theologians Under Hitler. It is a study of how three intellectuals, Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel Hirsch—scholars of the Old Testament, Luther, and Kierkegaard, respectively—came to support Hitler in 1933 and ultimately be identified with an evil ideology that cost millions of lives, both in the death camps and in the war that German expansionism precipitated.
It is a troubling book because, while Hirsch was always a nasty anti-Semite and remained so after the Third Reich collapsed, Kittel and Althaus started as what we might call orthodox, patriotic conservatives. The story of their corruption by Nazi ideology is a sad and disturbing one. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, they succumbed step by step; each step they took made sense to them, given the exigencies of the time, but the end result was catastrophic. There was a logical line from voting for Hitler to, at a minimum, standing silently by as Nazi behavior became more outrageous and systematically murderous. While I was working on Luther for my PhD, I was particularly dismayed to discover the attitude of Althaus. He was one of my scholarly heroes. How could he have been so wrong?
It is an interesting thought experiment to wonder how Christians today might have voted in Germany in the early 1930s. Hindsight grants great privileges. It not only gives us all 20/20 vision, but also exempts us from the difficult moral trade-offs and compromises that all voting booths contain in a manner unavailable to those at the time. We should not be so certain that we would have necessarily acted as we might like to imagine. It was a world where it seemed that either the Nazis or the Communists must triumph and where the full evil of both was as yet not fully visible. But even as we can acknowledge these difficulties, it is important to note that there were still theologians who did see the problem in 1933 and who refused to strike a deal with the devils on either side of the political spectrum.
The most famous example is that of the Barmen Declaration of 1934, signed by, among others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. What is disappointing about that document in retrospect is its failure to address the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, something Barth later regretted. But there was an earlier and better document that is today all but forgotten: the Bethel Confession of 1933, which Bonhoeffer had composed along with another Lutheran, Hermann Sasse…The Bethel Confession has recently been reprinted and is well worth study and reflection.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
The problem here is that today “reasonable” has no real content. Indeed, the legislation uses the adjective “reasonable” again and again as the essential criterion in judging whether an act or statement is a crime, but it offers no definition. That is surely a worrying lacuna. We should remember that this is a world where J.K. Rowling’s (to me perfectly reasonable) claim that we don’t need to talk about “people who menstruate” because we have the term “women” can be described by GLAAD as “dangerous.”

Yesterday, April 1, Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021 went into effect. The date may amuse some, but this new law is unlikely to prove very funny in the long run. It abolishes the common law offense of blasphemy, a law that has not been invoked in practice since the mid-19th century. At the same time, it consolidates previous laws dealing with, for example, expressions of racism, while extending their scope to include stirring up hate against someone or some group on the grounds of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity.
Religious leaders, politicians, and lawyers pushed back against the legislation in 2021 and this version of the law is modified to include new protections. Indeed, the law makes clear that discussion of certain matters, including both religion and transgender identity, is protected.
But there is a problem here: Who decides what counts as hatred? I have always found the idea of hate crimes in general to be somewhat perplexing, especially when applied to acts of physical violence as a reason for escalating penalties.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, April 8, 2024
Given the extremity of the president’s rhetoric and the confident damning of any who might demur, it seems legitimate to ask (yet again) how much gender theory and gender “science” Joe Biden has read. One has to assume he is an expert, given that he feels comfortable dismissing anyone who dissents as motivated by hate and bigotry. If that is not the case, then it is worth noting here that it is not just Trump’s boorishness that damages democracy. It is the practice of dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as evil and hateful. That destroys the kind of forbearance and respectful discourse needed for democracy to function properly.

Cultural times are hard for traditional Christians. American evangelicalism has proved a fruitful target for those both outside and inside the church who want to stir up popular panic about Christian nationalism, racism, homophobia, and all the other ill-defined but nonetheless mortal sins of our day. Evangelicalism is presented as the root of all contemporary evils. Donald Trump’s recent hawking of a Bible bound together with America’s founding documents simply adds fuel to this fire. But in a week where it seemed that Trump’s would be the most blasphemous action of a leading politician, President Biden outdid him at the last minute, declaring that this year Easter Sunday would be an official day of trans visibility, and predictably characterizing any who disagreed with him as motivated by hate. 
As conservatives decried the declaration, so the president’s supporters pointed out that the trans day of visibility has been held on March 31 since 2009. Its coincidence with Easter this year is just that: a coincidence. But this scarcely exculpates the president. There was no need for a formal White House statement on the day. More importantly, the underlying theology of trans ideology that problematizes the human body and legitimates hormonal and genital mutilation assumes an anthropology at odds with Christian teaching, which requires respect for the human body and the distinction of male and female. So the president was still celebrating the desecration of the image of God, even as his opponent desecrated the word of God. 
The White House statement was very disturbing yet revealing in its rhetoric. Here is a representative passage:
But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families—silencing teachers; banning books; and even threatening parents, doctors, and nurses with prison for helping parents get care for their children. These bills attack our most basic American values: the freedom to be yourself, the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and even the right to raise your own child. It is no surprise that the bullying and discrimination that transgender Americans face is worsening our Nation’s mental health crisis, leading half of transgender youth to consider suicide in the past year. At the same time, an epidemic of violence against transgender women and girls, especially women and girls of color, continues to take too many lives.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, April 1, 2024
Where once bodies were givens that decisively shaped our identity, now they can be reconstructed if their sexed nature is a hindrance to a sense of psychological well-being. Inevitably this plays into all issues of life. Abortion is considered a right because the baby in the womb can be a hindrance to the happiness of the mother. And it has made euthanasia first plausible and now even desirable. The Swiss assisted suicide pod is only the most obvious example of this.

“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” So opines Orson Welles’s character, Harry Lime, in the movie The Third Man. Well, to the cuckoo clock we can now add the assisted suicide pod that has passed an independent legal review confirming that it conforms with Swiss law.
The advent of assisted suicide is both emblematic of the deepest concerns of contemporary Western culture and of the way in which the taboos of yesteryear are being overthrown at an alarming rate. As to the first, it is clear that personal happiness is now the foundational criterion for judging the morality of acts and institutions. This is not the happiness of earlier generations. When, for example, the Founders subscribed the Declaration of Independence and asserted a right to “the pursuit of happiness,” they assumed this “happiness” had an objective moral shape. They assumed the world possessed such, that it was discoverable, and that happiness, private and public, was found by living life in conformity with it. Happiness today is subjective, not objective.
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