Beeson Podcast, Episode #685 Dr. Carl Trueman Date >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I am your host, Doug Sweeney. I am joined today by the Reverand Dr. Carl Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, and last fall’s Reformation Heritage lecturer here at Beeson Divinity School. Dr. Trueman is a well-known public intellectual. His most recent book is entitled Strange New World. One of his best-known books is called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and The Road to Sexual Revolution. Dr. Trueman, I am pleased to say, is a well-known and very proficient church historian. So, we may ask him a church history question or two as we proceed here. But Dr. Trueman, thank you very much for being our Reformation lecturer this year and for being on the podcast today. >>Trueman: Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure, Doug. Thanks very much for inviting me to do the lectures and for inviting me on to the podcast. >>Doug Sweeney: I imagine many of our listeners know about you already, but just for those who don’t, why don’t we start by introducing you to them. Let me ask you just a little bit about your childhood, how you came to faith in Christ, and how you decided that the Lord was leading you into ministry. >>Trueman: Yeah, well I was born near Birmingham, which is right in the center of England. When I was pretty small, six years, seven years old I would think, my parents moved to Gloucester over in the west country of England. So, most of my childhood memories are associated with Gloucester, which is a very rural, pretty idyllic part of the country. The Cotswolds is where I grew up. I came to faith, I went to the local grammar school, state grammar school, and a couple of my good friends there were Christians and they witnessed to me over the years. And then when I was 17, one of them took me to hear Billy Graham preach. He was on a big rally in England. I think it was 1984. Mission England 1984. Heard Billy Graham preach, became interested in the Gospel. Looking back, I don’t think I was converted at that point. I started going to church. It was really when I went up to college. The local Baptist minister gave me a copy of J.I. Packer’s, a little book, God’s Words. And it was reading Dr. Packer that really made the Gospel very, very clear to me. I didn’t have a Damascus Road, dramatic conversion experience that I can point to, but over a period of time, I became convinced of my own sinfulness, convinced of the importance, the significance of Christ’s work, and came to trust him by faith. So, that’s my, sort of, Christian testimony. Call to ministry was a lot longer in coming. I served as an elder at a Presbyterian church in Aberdeen in the late 1990s. Then I moved to the United States to taka a job at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia in 2001. And while I was at Westminster Seminary, my wife and I were member of a local Orthodox Presbyterian church and without going into all the details, the church found itself without a pastor, and with that, the ability to pay for a fulltime pastor. And so, I stepped into the breach, so to speak, at that point. I, again, I’m sort of English. I’m not really mystical. There was no inner call to the ministry. It was well, there’s an external call here, I have the skills necessary to help the church out, so I pastored a church in Philadelphia for six years, my final six years, actually, in Philadelphia. I was not only a professor at the seminary, but also pastoring a local Orthodox Presbyterian church. So, that’s my like, story in a nutshell. Married, two very grown-up children now. They left the home long ago. So, my wife and I are in a rather blissful era of liberation, shall we say. Hence, her ability to travel with me to places like Beeson when I lecture there. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah, we are empty nesters as well. I mean, that’s a real thing. Your life really does change with your kids- >>Trueman: It does. It gets a lot cheaper and a lot freer. >>Doug Sweeney: Alright, so you felt like you were supposed to become a church historian, historical theologian, you tell us how you’d like to sort of define that. Before, you felt like you were going to be a pastor. >>Trueman: Yes. >>Doug Sweeney: Being a pastor was sort of biproduct of your position at a seminary and desire to be usefulness to your denomination. >>Trueman: Yes. My original academic degree, I studied Classics at the University of Cambridge, so I was a classicist, really with a focus on ancient history of Latin poetry, of all things. And in my final year, I was wondering what to do with the rest of my life, and I’d become very interested in church history. I didn’t come from a Christian background. So, reading the story of biographies of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Saint Augustine, these figures, that was the way that I was learning in many ways about the Christian faith. And because I had a natural bend towards history anyway, the two things kind of flowed together and on a whim almost, I put in some applications for post grad, for doctoral positions and was blessed. I was going to say fortunate enough, I suppose I should say, actually, blessed enough. I was fortunate enough to not only get offered a place at the University of Aberdeen to study church history, but they also offered me a full scholarship to do it as well. So, I moved from being a classicist to being a 16th, and then 16th and 17th century Protestant thought guy in my, my graduate, in my graduate studies. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. One of the interesting things about you is you’ve taught in a variety of contexts. As a young man, you did some teaching in a secular university context. >>Trueman: Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: I think I’m right about that. Then Westminster Seminary for quite a while. >>Trueman: Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: Now you’re at a Christian liberal arts college. Is there anything that ties those things together or you’ve just been trying your best to follow God’s leading and do the right next thing? >>Trueman: Yes. I mean, I think, I always had a great love of teaching. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy interacting with students. The move from I taught at the University of Nottingham and then you know, Aberdeen, which you’d say were both broadly secular state universities in the UK. I think moving to Westminster was very much wanting, I wanted to teach students for whom history was not just interesting because it was history, but interesting because they could see it having an impact on Christian lives and a ministry. And I did that for 16 years. Then I had a sort of hiatus year when I was a research fellow at Princeton University, another secular university, of course. And then I took the job at Grove. I, the president at Grove approached me, said he would be interested in talking about a job. It was the right time in my life. I’d always loved, I did love teaching undergraduates, and in some ways, the attraction of Westminster being I wanted to teach people things that were existentially significant to them rather than just be teaching them for credits. The attraction of Grove over Westminster was very much the battle for young minds. I’ve become convinced that the real key educational period for young people is 18 to 22. It’s the college years. And that’s when it’s so critical to, for them to be exposed to good ideas. And so, that was the attraction of Grove. It was ok. I’ve done a lot of teaching of pastors, but maybe the twilight of my career would be well spent teaching younger people. You know this, Douglas, when you teach at seminary, it’s great, but you’re by in large teaching people better reasons to believe what they believe already, which is a very, very worthwhile calling. But there’s also a calling of people that just left home, maybe they’re Christians, but they haven’t joined the faith for themselves. Maybe they’re not Christians and they’re wrestling with how do I think about the world. That’s all going on between the ages of 18 and 22, and that’s what makes undergraduate teaching such a consistent delight, particularly a place like Grove where we don’t have a lot of radical student activism. We, by in large, have students who are there to learn and think about things. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. Well, you had me wondering whether the logic that you’ve just described that’s led you to Grove City is a logic that’s similar to the one that has helped you make decisions about the kind of writing projects you want to engage in. Another thing that’s interesting about you is that you’ve done the standard church historical writing and publishing, but especially in recent years, you’ve kind of broadened out and written some big books on big contemporary topics. You’ve addressed them in a way that could only be done if you’re a proficient historian. But you’re not really doing traditional historiography. You’re making some big claims. You’re offering some big explanations. Why have you done that? On one hand, the answer might be obvious. You want to reach people and there’s some big things you want to say. But have you struggled with that, how to balance the more technical stuff that the academics are supposed to do with these big books that you’re becoming very well known for these days? >>Trueman: Yeah, yeah. I think there’s a sense to me in which when I hit 50, round about the age of 50, there was a, okay, I’ve pretty much made my contributions to sort of strict academic stuff by this point. I could go on producing articles and books that are essentially footnotes to what I’ve already done, but I think I’ve pretty much said everything academically. Secondly, I’ve always been somewhat undisciplined in my interests. I’ve got the attention span of a squirrel, I think. You know, we all know characters who, they’ve spent their careers seemingly writing the same book again and again and again. Once I’ve written a book, I get kind of, okay, I’ve done that, I’m sort of bored with that. What could I move onto next? So, there’s been that always wanting something new and interesting. I think when I was a pastor, that really made me realize that there was such significant things going on in our culture at this point, that I personally wanted to try to understand what they were. And I don’t know how you are, Douglas, but I tend to think best when I’m writing. I sort of, I don’t think that fast. I type with two fingers, so I type slow. But I type at the speed I think. And it’s great to work through some of these things on paper. And I was also struck that very little seemed to be being done for some of the most pressing issues that pastors are facing. I think a lot of pastors, and I include myself in this when I was pastoring, woefully unequipped to deal with some of the most pressing issues. Issues are developing so quick that I understand why guys in their 40s, 50s, and 60s aren’t spotting them because the world has changed so rapidly. We’re not aware of these things. So, I wanted to do something that would allow pastors to, and other Christians, to get a better handle on why, for example, good young Christian people don’t necessarily think the Bible teaches the sexual ethics that guys of our generation think it obviously teaches. The young people who struggle with what does the Bible teach about homosexuality, many of them, they’re not rebelling against biblical authority, they just, they’re coming at the Bible with a very different framework that leaves them very confused about what the Bible says. And I wanted to help those in positions of authority, educational authority in the church, understand and perhaps sympathize somewhat with, with what, with the struggles that our culture is creating for young people and for families. So, that was driving things as well. >>Doug Sweeney: Well, the things you’ve written, especially in the last several years about our contemporary cultural situation in Stange New World and The Rise and Triumph of Modern Self, have been so powerful. And you’ve had lots of readers, of course. But I don’t want to assume that all the people listening to this podcast know what you’ve been arguing in those books. Would you mind giving us just a brief thumbnail sketch of the things you’ve worked on recently in those books? >>Trueman: Sure. Well, the big books, The Rise and Triumph of Modern Self, really arose out of my curiosity about why the statements, “I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body,” why these statements had come to make sense not simply to people who are deeply immersed in gender theory, not simply to people who, you know, students of Judith Butler at the University of California in Berkeley, but to the ordinary men and women in streets. Why is it that, you know, I bet if you randomly walked up to somebody on the streets of Pittsburg or Philadelphia or Birmingham and asked them, you know, what is a woman, why is that quite a number of them these days might really struggle to offer a cogent answer to that. and I was sharing this with Professor Robert George from Princeton when he happened to be visiting Westminster and he said to me, “You should apply for a Madison Fellowship. Come to Princeton and spend a year thinking about that.” So, I was very blessed to have a year at Princeton to wrestle with that, that idea. And the big book, Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and then the shorter version, Strange New World, really an attempt to condense my reflections on that down into a form that people can read and find helpful. My conclusion was essentially this, that these things that seem to be happening so fast in our culture, particularly relating to sexual morality, sexual behavior, and thinking about gender, though they seem to be happening very, very fast before our eyes, one of the reasons for the speed of that is, the roots of them a very deeply embedded within our culture. And that certain things have become intuitive in western culture over the last 3 or 400 years that have culminated in something like transgenderism being very plausible. One of the things that’s taken place in western culture is we’ve come to grant more and more authority to our feelings. How we feel has been much more significant for who we think we are than it would have been in times past. Another thing that’s happened is that external authority has become less and less plausible as a way of understanding who we are. Another thing that’s happened is we’ve come to start prioritizing the sexual dimension of our inner feelings as determining who we are. And that leads to another development, which is that we come to see sex as something very political. When one looks at the Bible and you see sex being dealt with in the Bible, it’s generally dealt with in terms of behavior. You can do these kinds of activities, you can’t do those. You can do this activity in this context, but not in that context. Sex is behavior and western society is, by in large, put together law codes on that basis of some things you can do, some things you can’t do. When you realize that we’ve started to think about sex as identity, as something we are rather than something we do, then those sexual codes become not so much codes about behavior as codes about who society will and will not allow you to be. That’s very political. And that helps us understand why, in many ways, the most private act that takes place between two people has become the most pressing public policy issue of the last 10, 15, 20 years. So, my books are really an attempt to set the sexual revolution against the background of a much bigger, if you want to use the term, revolution of how we think about ourselves, and how we think about what it means to be a human being, and what identity means. >>Doug Sweeney: Well then, your diagnosis has rung true with lots of people. Very helpful book, Carl. Thank you very much for them. I’m imagining I’m one of the Beeson Podcast listeners who knows a little bit, maybe from experience, about what you’re describing, and maybe has even read a little bit about it, but is plagued about what to do about it. >>Trueman: Yeah. >>Doug Sweeney: Is there a, is there a word of prescription that you might offer for parents or pastors or ordinary Christians? Obviously, this is a huge, complex set of issues. But in so far as you’re ready to provide some guidance and coaching, what kind of guidance do you want to offer us? >>Trueman: Yeah, that’s a great question and as an individual, you know, I only have very limited competence to offer to the proposals and guidance on this, but I’ll offer some general principles. So, I think first of all, it very important, particularly in our current moment of very polarized politics within the culture, to make an important distinction between what I would regard as the ideology of the LGBTQ+ movement and individuals who are caught up in it. And I would say we need to be, you know, we need to be electing the right people. We need to be pushing for the right legislation on the ideological front. We need to realize that we are up against, in some cases, some very evil people who would really like to transform society in ways that will not lead to human benefits and flourishing at all. Having said that, we mustn’t allow our opposition to that to lead us to dehumanize the people who are struggling with this, even perhaps some of the people we vigorously disagree with on this. Every human being is made in God’s image. Every person struggling with gender dysphoria or struggling with same sex attraction, or affirming gender dysphoria, or affirming their same sex attraction is a human being. And we need to treat them as human beings. So, in terms of talking to parents or to friends, first thing I’d want to say is keep channels of communication open, you know, even if you’re tempted to cut off communications with your friends or your relatives for whom this is the issue. Keep channels of communication open. If you’re a pastor or if you’re just an ordinary Christian, somebody walks into your room, your office, your study, and says, “I need to tell you something, I think I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body,” what should be your first response? I think your first response is sit and listen because the first thing you have to do with that person is show them, you can’t just tell them this, you have to show them that you care about them, and you think they’re a real person made in God’s image. So, my first strategy, my first tactic or strategy in these situations is always to say to the person something like, “Well tell me, why do you feel that way? How did this start? Give me the story of your life relative to this particular issue.” Thirdly, I think we all need to pray. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying here that people struggling with LGBTQ stuff are demon possessed. I’m not saying that. But, when Jesus is faced with some difficult cases, he’ll say this kind only comes out with prayer and fasting. And I think when we’re dealing with, we all need to pray for wisdom, in these situations. And one of the difficulties of giving advice is there’s no one, as in many pastoral issues, there’s no one size fits all approach. We need to pray for wisdom in these situations. We need to be encouraging, particularly if they’re professing Christians, the people who are struggling with this, that to be in church, to be under the proclamation of the word, be taking the sacraments, the things that the Lord has appointed for working within our lives. If we have friends who say have family members that have come out as trans something, we need to be there to support them. Don’t cut them off. Chatting to parents whose kids have come out as trans, the only, the nearest thing I can liken it to in my own pastor experience, is talking to parents whose children have died. When somebody comes and says, “My son now says he’s my daughter,” you look into their eyes, and you see there what you see when somebody tells you that their child has got terminal illness, or their child has died. And your heart just breaks for them. So, be there to support the families. If it’s your family struggling with this, seek out support. There are places online where people who are facing these issues in their own families can go for support. If you’re bereaved, it’s intuitive that we go to hang out with people and to speak with people who’ve gone through the same thing to get support. I think when your child comes out as trans or gay in the Christian community, there can be shame attached to that that leads you to avoid that sort of thing. So, don’t avoid it. Seek out help. I have no idea what it’s like to have a child come out as trans. So, people like me, we can offer the objective advice, but the real empathy comes from those who are going through the same thing. So, I would say, all of those things. Many of them are just common sense, but all of those things, I think, come into play when you are struggling with this yourself, or when you’re trying to help a friend who’s going through it. >>Doug Sweeney: That’s great advice. Let me shift gears briefly and remind our listeners that you gave the Reformation Heritage lectures last fall. By the time they’re listening to this interview, these lectures will be available online through our website, our Beeson YouTube page. And they were fantastic, and we want our listeners to tune in and listen to the lectures themselves. Can you give them just a one-minute teaser? What did you do for the students and the faculty when you were here in October in those lectures? >>Trueman: Yeah. What I didn’t want to do is just another, hey Luther nailed the 95 theses to the castle door in 1517. I wanted to do something, I wanted to try and bring, if you like, the two spheres of my academic work together. The work on the self and the work on the reformation. If you know, if you read it in any depth, and Contemporary Reformation scholars, your listeners will know, that Catholics, in particular, tend to blame Protestants for some of the kind of problems I’m talking about. It might sound a bit bizarre to think there’s a connection between Luther and transgenderism, but the Reformation really does, it does stand, in some ways, as the fountain head of the source. But the sum of the issues that have risen in modernity relative to how we think about ourselves. So, what I wanted to do was lay out a brief compass, the case against the Reformation on that front, and point to the various things that certain Catholic scholars will say about the Reformation, and then offer some push back. And in offering the push back, also point people today towards some of the kinds of practical solutions I’ve just mentioned and, you know, that actually, you know, the church remains important in Protestantism. Corporate gatherings of the church remains important in Protestantism. Liturgy remains important. What we hear, what we’re seeing, how the community forms us, all of these things remain the same. So, that was what I was trying to do in those two lectures. State the problem and then offer maybe not a complete solution, but hopefully enough for the students or listeners to have some things to go away and think about relative to to formulating a solution. >>Doug Sweeney: Yeah. They really were fantastic. Thank you, Carl, for doing that. So, what are you writing now? You got a new book project under way? >>Trueman: Well, I always do cheerful projects these days. I’ve just wrapped up a little book for Boadman and Holman. During the heat of all the critical theory stuff a couple of years ago, B&H approached me and said, “We want somebody to write a book that we can recommend to undergraduates or seminary students introducing them to critical theory.” And I said, “Sure, but I want to do it on early critical theory, the early Frankfurt School, not the critical race theory.” I’ve said all I want to say on that, I don’t want to have my head blown off once more by, so I’ve just finished, it turned out to be a 200 hundred page book introducing readers to critical theory in a very expository way. It’s not polemic. It’s okay, this is what they say, you know, what do they get right, what do they get wrong. It’s that kind of thing. And at the same time, I’ve been writing a book that I’m just about to wrap up the manuscript on Nihilism in modern life. So, the cheerful themes, you know, transgenderism, critical theory, Nihilism, you know, it’s getting bleaker, I think, as the years go by. It’s a good job I know of a cheerful guy by nature. >>Doug Sweeney: We’ll look forward to them. Dr. Trueman, we always end our interviews by asking our guests what God is doing in their lives these days. So, you’ve been a faithful Christian, a pastor, a seminary teacher, a Christian college teacher, etc. After all these years, is God still doing some things in your life? Is he teaching you anything new these days? >>Trueman: Yes. I think I feel very blessed to teach where I teach. I teach great students. I have wonderful colleagues. Without wishing to insult anywhere else I’ve worked, I’m certainly enjoying my professional life more than ever. It’s a great blessing and I don’t, I don’t take that for granted. That is the Lord’s blessing in my life. I delight in my family. My wife and I spend more time together now than ever before. And we have not only two sons who are both walking with the Lord, we have a wonderful daughter-in-law for whom the same is true, and we have a little granddaughter. So, we rejoice in our growing family and in the new life. Though, you know, given that I’m a cheerful person, I still remember when I first held my granddaughter, my first thought were, this is a great blessing. My second thought was, oh no, I’ve got to worry about the next 70 years now. And in terms of things to pray for, the longer, the longer I’m a Christian, the more I realize that the most important thing to pray for, I think in anybody’s life, is that they finish well. I’m acutely aware of the fact that a lifetime of ministry can be destroyed in a moment of indiscretion, or in a failure to guard one’s heart against sins. So, I, you know, if listeners want to pray for me, my request would be, pray that I finish well. I think of Dr. Lloyd Jones. I think of Dr. Packer. I was not, in many ways, the many things the great Tim Calah did that I would have had questions about. But all of those men finished well. The Lord brought them to the end, and they were faithful servants till the end. And all I would wish is that I too, hopefully I won’t be able to say it, but after I’m gone, people will be able to say, well, he finished well. That’s my real primary quest. >>Doug Sweeney: Listeners, please pray for Dr. Carl Trueman. He serves as Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College. We are pleased to say he was our Reformation lecturer here at Beeson this year. He’s a widely published, very learned, thoughtful man. Please tune into his Reformation Heritage lectures on the Beeson YouTube site. We remind you, please pray for our students here at Beeson. We just graduated another class last week and they’re off doing ministry all over the world right now. We love you. We thank you for tuning in. We’re praying for you, and we say goodbye for now. >>Rob Willis: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our engineer is Rob Willis. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes and Spotify.