Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Even in the last three weeks, I have taught classes on campus criticizing the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision and Bruce Jenner’s gender transition—career-damaging lectures at almost any other institution of higher education in the United States. And I have for many years been one of the most vocal opponents of the way in which identity politics, particularly that of the LGBTQ+ movement, has damaged our culture and public life. I have received nothing but support from the college administration as I have continued to speak up on such matters.

“Do I teach at a woke school?” was not a question I seriously considered until one evening last week when I received an email from a friend assuring me of his prayers for me in my workplace. The reason was an article he had just read on a website, The American Reformer, entitled “Wide Awoke at Grove City College?”  The background to the article was a petition launched some weeks ago by parents of Grove City College (GCC) students and alumni concerning what they perceived as a woke drift on campus. The GCC president had responded to the petition in a way that I myself had thought was solid but American Reformer dismissed as “limp” and, by implication, disingenuous. I do not know if the author of the article has ever set foot on the campus which he writes about, but I confess that had he not told me he was writing about GCC, I might have struggled to recognize the ethos of my institution in the way he described it.
Now, wokeness is surely a serious problem in American higher education. Parents and alumni of all schools are right to be concerned about how various institutions are responding. I am not persuaded that petitions are ever the best way to address such problems but I can certainly sympathize with those anxious about their children or about their beloved alma maters. I myself am passionately committed to saving education from wokeness. I am a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University and the National Association of Scholars, both of which have a keen interest in maintaining the importance of academic freedom and excellence on campuses. I am a contributing editor at the decidedly anti-woke First Things and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, one of the best-known conservative think-tanks in Washington, D.C. I am acutely aware of the struggle many friends face at this difficult time and I understand why parents and alumni are disturbed when they hear stories (or, in this case, mostly misguided rumors) about their institution. They are right to ask questions and raise concerns. They need to know if the colleges that take their money are providing the education they claim to be doing.
At the heart of academic institutional excellence is, of course, academic freedom. That can be tricky at a school that holds a stated religious position, such as a Christian college like Grove City College, but it can be done. The way a Christian school can hold to its beliefs yet give students a good education is to hold faculty to a standard of belief but then ensure that they engage other viewpoints in the classroom, host speakers from a variety of political and philosophical traditions, and encourage students to wrestle honestly with the great ideas and the hard questions of the past and the present. For example, as I recently told the Religious News Service, I declare my classes to be free-speech zones (something none of the more progressive figures interviewed said about their classes). I do not require students to agree with me in order to get a good grade. But if they dissent from my view they need to do so respectfully and give me an argument as to why I am wrong. For me, education is not about cloning myself intellectually in the classroom (as it is becoming at so many woke schools); it is about giving the students the skills to think for themselves.
At the center of the storm surrounding GCC was an invitation to Jemar Tisby to speak in chapel. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and in retrospect inviting Tisby to give a chapel address may have been a mistake. A chapel address carries a certain institutional imprimatur that a simple guest lecture does not, though inviting guest lecturers to campus to engage our students on critical topics such as race, in this current culture, is an important role of any college or university. But that is not a criticism of my colleagues who invited Tisby to speak in chapel. One of the hallmarks of wokeness is cultural amnesia—the swift forgetting of what was true the day before yesterday in order to demonize those who still hold, say, to the importance of biological sex for gender. Conservatives need to be careful not to play their own version of the woke-amnesia game when it suits them. Tisby is a good example. He was first given a platform by Reformed Theological Seminary where he had been a student on its Jackson, Mississippi campus. That is a flagship conservative reformed institution. Indeed, as recently as 2015, he was appointed director of the African-American Leadership Initiative at RTS. He was described at the time by the RTS Chancellor, Ligon Duncan, as follows: “a man I trust … a dear friend … an educator and a churchman…. His commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture, the Reformed faith and the gospel ground all his efforts towards our honoring the image of God in all people.” Ligon Duncan is no woke progressive, as anyone who knows him will attest.
Duncan’s eulogy is a reminder that Tisby has been on a long journey, from RTS poster child in 2015 to working for Ibram Kendi’s outfit in 2021. Indeed, even The Color of Compromise, a book with which I have some stated disagreements, is surely not representative of where he is today. The fact is, the summer of 2020 appears to have been a radicalizing watershed for Tisby as for many others on both sides of the political divide. The college can hardly be blamed for failing in 2019 to predict the radicalization of the RTS graduate who had recently been seen as the emerging African American bridge-builder in conservative reformed Presbyterianism.
In an email exchange, the editor of The American Reformer expressed concern to me that Grove City College was platforming Tisby while not platforming faculty like me on woke issues. Well, Tisby came to campus for one day and (I believe) spoke twice. Then he left and has not returned. As for me, I lecture for several hours every day on campus to classes that are full. I speak in chapel every year. I write things almost weekly at places like First Things and World that whack wokeness. The college launched its Great Lectures series by showcasing me on identity issues as they culminate in today’s identity politics. The college arranged for me to speak to a Washington D.C. group of Capitol Hill staffers twice in the last 18 months—once on sexual-identity issues, once on race. Even in the last three weeks, I have taught classes on campus criticizing the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision and Bruce Jenner’s gender transition—career-damaging lectures at almost any other institution of higher education in the United States. And I have for many years been one of the most vocal opponents of the way in which identity politics, particularly that of the LGBTQ+ movement, has damaged our culture and public life. I have received nothing but support from the college administration as I have continued to speak up on such matters. And from my vantage point, the same could be said of my colleagues who share my support of GCC’s Christ-centered mission, but do not come down on every hard issue where I do.
That makes Grove City College, even with all of its mortal failings and human flaws, a remarkable place. My wife and I recently hosted students at our house for a dessert evening. One of them asked if I hoped to stay at Grove City College until I retire. I responded yes, because I love the college and, more significantly, because my writings and lecturing have made me likely unemployable almost anywhere else in this age of the woke. As evidence, I told them about a Christian college where I gave a lecture by Zoom in the last year. The professor who invited me to speak asked if he could record the session because he expected to be the subject of a complaint that he had created an unsafe learning environment by having someone of my views speak. And that was a Christian college. A Christian college. That would not happen at Grove City College.
Is Grove City College perfect?  No more than I am. But I am a conservative and a Christian and that means that I believe certain things are true. For example, I believe that no institution can ever make no mistakes and do the right thing every time. And the larger the institution, the more likely it is that issues will arise. With nearly 200 faculty, a large staff, a student body of more than 2,000, and more than 800 courses taught each semester, GCC is too big for even the most perfect administration to micromanage. Built from the crooked timber of fallen humanity, Grove City College, like all institutions, reflects our own failings and weaknesses. But if the test of people’s character is not whether they live a perfect life but how they handle their mistakes and failings, then the test of an institution’s integrity is how it addresses those things which have not gone as planned or have proved unexpectedly counter-productive. GCC’s management of this continuing challenge is smart and effective. It strives to hire excellent scholars with solid Christian convictions. There is no tenure; everyone gets a one-year contract requiring affirmation of the college’s mission and values. When occasional issues arise, direct and constructive conversations take place with the expectation of missional alignment. That is why it is sad that the college’s recent statement about its commitment to addressing the matters raised by the petition has met with such cynicism from an ostensibly conservative Christian source.
I do appreciate my friend praying for me. I hope that he prays that all of us at Grove City College will stand firm for God’s truth, academic freedom, and intellectual integrity in this storm of wokeness that surrounds us. But above all, I hope that he gives thanks that I and my colleagues work at a place where we have the freedom to be faithful in our callings, a freedom that exists in few other institutions of higher education today.
Carl R. Trueman is professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College. This article is used with permission.

Redemption doesn’t end our suffering in this life. Christians suffer (1 Thess. 3:3; 2 Thess. 1:5). But we suffer in the comfort that our pains are “in the hands of our all-wise, all-powerful, all-good Father.” Not in the hands of Satan, fate, or a god who’s self-amused by our pain. Every sting in life is appointed and managed by a loving Father toward our final good (Rom. 8:28). So we can draw comfort from the fact that (1) God appoints our pain, (2) for our ultimate good, (3) to advance his wise purposes. Through it all, he will hold us fast.

In the midst of suffering, we often want to know the reason for our trial.
Sometimes our most painful suffering is directly caused by our sin (1 Cor. 11:30–32). But often it isn’t (John 9:3; 2 Cor. 12:8–9). So how do we know if our suffering should be met (1) with patient endurance or (2) with immediate repentance?
Two Categories
Both categories are true. God sends some suffering for us to evaluate our lives (Heb. 12:6). And God sends some suffering for us to magnify God as we endure it in faith and patience (John 9:3). So how do we know which pain has come into our lives? “God may make it plain. He may. But he may not.” Normally, these categories are “permeable” and “overlapping.” So we should respond to all our suffering with self-evaluation and patient hope.
James calls us to meet all the various trials of life with “all joy” so those trials can build “steadfastness” in us (James 1:2–4). And “he doesn’t distinguish whether they are coming in response to specific sins we’ve committed or not. What he says is that in every kind of trial—every kind—faith is being tested. And the aim in every trial is a kind of steadfastness that shows that God is trustworthy, and wise, and good, and valuable, and all-sufficient for our situation.”
Whether or not we can tell that a certain sin has caused our suffering, we respond the same way: “Let every trial have its sanctifying effect of killing sin, and furthering faith, and furthering patience, and furthering love. If the sin is known, kill it. If it is unknown, ask the Lord to protect you, to cleanse you from hidden faults, and to advance your capacities for faith and patience” (Pss. 19:12; 139:23–24).
Note that Job’s suffering began when he was a blameless man (Job 1:1). But over time, they stirred up in him “the sediment of remaining sinfulness,” which he repented of later (42:5–6). “Whether the suffering in our lives is chastisement for some specific sin, or whether the suffering is an opportunity to glorify God through faith and patience—in both cases, we’re going to discover remnants of sinfulness in our lives, which we should repent of and move beyond. Which is why I said there’s always room for self-evaluation.”
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“And now, my good mother, I beg you to show yourself as a virtuous woman in your afflictions, and bear patiently and joyfully  this trial that God has sent you, knowing that it is the good will of God against which no one can resist, even if he would.  Live the rest of your days in the fear of God, remembering me, and how I served my God till death.”

Among the Reformation martyrs was the author of the Belgic Confession, Guido de Brès. He served as a pastor in present-day Belgium during the Spanish Inquisition. Eventually he was captured by the authorities and spent a long time languishing in a dirty, sewage-filled dungeon in Valenciennes. Nevertheless, as he lived out his last days somehow he was able to find the strength and resources to write several letters. One of them was a letter to his mother. I’m pleased to be able to share this letter with you, as it gives a personal glimpse of this brother and father in the faith.
Last Letter from Guido De Brès to His Mother
The grace and mercy of God the Father, and the love of his Son our Lord Jesus Christ, be for your eternal salvation.
My dear and beloved mother, when I consider what a sorrow my imprisonment is to you, and how hard to bear because of the enormous maternal love you have always had for me, I cannot keep my heart from becoming sad nor from greatly trembling within me.  And certainly I can say from experience that it is a hard parting that takes place between a mother and her child.  But the parting would be much harder if a man would leave his God and give up eternal life.  I am somewhat relieved of my sadness when I think of my calling and the cause of the Son of God which I have upheld before men.
It seems to me that I hear Jesus Christ, my Master, speaking with a loud voice and saying to me, “Whoever shall love his father and his mother more than me, he is not worthy to be one of mine” (Matthew 10).  Then he says to me, “Truly I say to you that every one who has given up home, or parents, or brothers or children for the kingdom of God shall receive much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life” (Matthew 19).  Such words cause me to put all other things aside, and my heart leaps for joy.  When I think of the certainty and truth of the one who has spoken thus, I can say with St. Paul, “I esteem all things as dung and consider them for loss, for the excellence of the knowledge of my Lord Jesus Christ.”
You too, my beloved, must rise above your sorrows with the consideration of the good will of God, who wants to bring glory to himself through this poor, fragile body.  Restrain your grief remembering how it has pleased God to call me to his service against all human expectation.  Recall how, before I was born, you were going through Mons to hear a certain Italian Jesuit, who was preaching in the streets.  You said then, praying to God, “My God, if it could be that you could give me such a child, even maybe the child that I am carrying, to preach your Word.”  You said it and God heard your prayer.  Because he is rich and merciful, and because he can do all things more abundantly than we dare to ask, he gave you more than you asked for.  You asked that the child you were carrying could be like that Jesuit.  He became a Jesuit alright – but not of the new sect that people call “Jesuit.”  In order to make me a true imitator of Jesus, the Son of God, I was called to the holy ministry, not to preach the doctrines of men, but the pure and simple Word of Jesus and his Apostles.  This I have done up to the present with a good and pure conscience, seeking nothing else than the salvation of men, not my own glory nor my own profit.
Witness the zeal of God which has been in me, accompanied by many crosses, afflictions and sufferings, and not for a small number of days, but for many years.  To all these things you ought to return for your comfort, and you should consider yourself fortunate that God has given you the honour to have carried, nurtured, and reared one of his servants – who will receive the crown and glory of martyrdom.  Then it is not for you to object, if my God wants to now receive me as a pleasant-smelling sacrifice and strengthen the elect by my death.
I myself am joyful and I pray that you will join with me, knowing that all will be for my great good and salvation.  I submit myself to what it pleases him to do to me, knowing that he will not do anything that is not just and fair.  He is my God and Father, having only good will toward me and the power to deliver me, if he finds it good to do so.  Therefore, I rest in that knowledge.  If he has found it pleasing to take me from this poor life now, I shall be taken in the prime of life, having laboured diligently and sowed in the Church of his Son.  He has already allowed me to see the fruit of my labours and trials, having blessed and made my ministry so fruitful that the Church will feel the effects for many years after my death.  I am happy to see that which my God has permitted me to see.  There is yet much good seed that I sowed, which is still in the ground, but after being watered with my blood, it will grow and manifest itself amazingly.  What more then should I now desire, since the will of my God has been done, and I am ready to reap in heaven in glory and incorruption the fruit of that which I have sowed on earth with tears in my eyes?  And I hope that the many people which I have won to my Lord Jesus through the Gospel will be my glory and my crown in the last day.
I am going along the way where all the prophets passed, and the Apostles, even the only Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, and thousands of martyrs who shed their blood for the witness of the Gospel.  It is the voice of Christ who says, “Enter by the narrow way, for I say unto you that many will try to enter and will not be able.”  It is the narrow way of which Ezra speaks, which is not wide, and under which is a great river and a fire which devours those who stumble and fall.  This road leads to a city filled with blessings, where the children of God have want of nothing.  What should it profit me if I should travel with the world along the broad and spacious way, only to fall at the end into ruin and eternal perdition.  I know well that if I should renounce my good Lord Jesus and return in my impurity and pollution to this life, the world would embrace me and respect my person.  But it would not be pleasing to God to renounce my Saviour, to put idols in his place, and put profane things in the place of his precious blood.  I have served him for more than twenty years, and never has he failed me in anything, showing to me always a love which surpasses the understanding of men.  Beyond this great benefit, he gave himself to the inglorious death on the cross in order to give me eternal life.  What then?  Should I leave the living to find refuge among the dead?  Should I give up heaven for the earth?  Eternal things for temporal?  Abandon the true life for bodily death?
He who alone is my strength and my rock will keep me from it, and himself will be my shield and defense and the strength of my life in my weakness and infirmity.  I can say with St. Peter, when Christ asked him after many of his disciples had abandoned him, “And you,” he said, “do you not also wish to go as the others?”  Peter replied, “Lord, to whom should we go?  For with you are the words of eternal life.”  The Lord my God will not permit me to leave with the world the fountains of living water, in order to dig cisterns which do not hold any water, as God so rightly said by his prophet Jeremiah of his people Israel.  I believe with conviction that I am not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul.  I can say with Moses that I would rather be afflicted with the people of God, than to enjoy for a time the pleasures of sin.  I would rather esteem the favour of Christ as greater riches than all the treasures of the world, for I look to the reward, and trust that the power of faith will not fail me in my need.  For by it I have already overcome the world and all my adversaries.  The Apostle has showed me how the faithful ones of the Old Testament, having the same faith, surmounted their afflictions.  He speaks of some as being regarded as drums to be beaten, who refused to be delivered, hoping for a better resurrection, and of others who were mocked and battered.  They were arrested and put in prison.  They were stoned. They were sawn in two.  They were tempted.  They were put to death with the sword.  They wandered about dressed in the skins of sheep and goats.  They were destitute, afflicted, and tormented, of whom the world was not worthy.  They wandered about in the deserts, in mountains, and dens and caverns of the earth.  All these holy people have overcome the world through their faith at death, and stand as victors though people killed them.
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