A (3:33)

Well, and a lot of those other topics and other times were the focus of the councils or the creeds. What counts as scripture? Who is Jesus? How do we understand the nature of Jesus Christ? And it's notable that we don't have the anthropological discussions at those councils or in those creeds. You mentioned the technological dynamic of the 60s and 70s, but is that at some level because nature just. There were some givens about human nature that no one really questioned until recently?

B (4:00)

Yeah, I think so. As embodied creatures, we're naturally limited, and we have certain what we might call ends that we can really do nothing about up until fairly recently. Take the sexual revolution, for example. The idea that sex is about recreation rather than about reproduction. That's a fairly modern innovation in terms of being able to imagine that we need contraceptives, we need antibiotics to do that. What we've really seen, I think, really since the 17th century, is the idea that natural limits have become challenges to us. They're not things that we accept anymore. They're hurdles to jump over. They're challenges to conquer. They're problems to solve. And of course, modern technological revolution has merely exacerbated that. So, yes, I think you're absolutely right, John. There's a sense in which human beings have always been sinful. We've always been iconoclastic. We've always been in the game of desecrating that which is holy. Our capacity for doing that today and imagining ways that it can be done is so much greater than it was, say, in the 12th or the 13th century.

A (5:18)

Yeah. So in the desecration of man, you use the lens of Frederick Nietzsche's parable of the madman, which is one of the two primary places that Nietzsche made the famous statement, God is dead. And I think that's what a lot of people know him for more as a defiant, which he was figure against authority, against morality, certainly against the idea of God, against traditional religion and morality. But I've always been struck with the Madman. In fact, when I saw you, you kindly let me see an advanced copy of the book and I read it and I thought, oh, I hope he doesn't think that I'm plagiarizing him. Because the importance of the Madman is something that I have been just captivated by for the last two to three years. And it's so unexpected because Nietzsche's not so much defying God and talking so much about why we need to evolve past into the, the age of the Superman or the Ubermetch or whatever, but he's really talking about the implications for human beings to fully disconnect. And the most profound part of that is at the end, after he goes on this kind of epic rant, he basically says, oh, I've come too soon. Like this is prophetic. He's writing at the end of the 19th century and he's pointing that this is coming in the future. And it seems that that's exactly what happened. We are now kind of in an existential crisis of what it means to be human. That maybe was theoretical when Lewis was writing about it in the 40s and even Peter Berger talking about an identity crisis. There was an identity crisis when Berger's talking in the what, late 70s, early 80s, but not like now. I mean, there are ways we're questioning what it means to be human and it's. I don't think even Nietzsche could have imagined maybe some of those ways.

B (7:13)

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, the first thing to say about the madman, as you've, you've correctly pointed to, is that, you know, Nietzsche understands something that many Enlightenment philosophers did not understand, and that is you can't get rid of, go marginalize him without fundamentally changing what you understand it to be, to be human. If Western civilization, if Western morality tracks back to the idea that human beings are made in the image of God, well, if there's no God in whose image we are made, then everything built upon that idea has to be revised, re, examined, thrown out. So the first thing to say is that the madman really does grasp that. The second thing again as you correctly pointed to, is the madman says, I've come too soon. It's one thing for example, to say, well, as we've already touched on this, well, Christian sexual morality, we need to get rid of that. It's another thing to do that in the 19th century. You can get rid of Christian sexual morality in the 19th century, but you're going to get that girl pregnant. You're going to have to marry her. Or maybe you'll catch a terrible disease that can't be cured and that's going to wreak havoc on your body. So you can theoretically allow for what Nietzsche calls the transvaluation of all values. But practically, you can't realize this today. Of course, we can do that, and we can extend that to other areas. I couldn't in the 19th century imagine not acknowledging the sex authority of my body. Born a man, I'm going to die a man today, thanks to surgery, thanks to hormone therapy. I can at least, I would say, deceive myself. I can at least imagine that my body might itself be putty in my hands that my will can exert control over. So, as I say in the book, we now live in the hour of the Madman. Nietzsche sort of gestures towards this in the late 19th century, but it's the technological explosion of the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years that really delivers that Promethean power into our hands, that allows us to redefine what it means to be human.

A (9:31)

I'm talking to author, theologian, philosopher, Carl Truman, professor at Grove City College, about the new book Desecration of Man, which I think is just another landmark work from Dr. Truman. We are offering it through the Colson center this month for a gift of any amount of will send you a copy of this. And I think it's one of the most explanatorily helpful ways of thinking about kind of where we're at today. You can give a gift of any amount by going to colsoncenter.org restore colsoncenter.org restore and we'll send you a copy here of the Desecration of man. I want to get to that word desecration, because that's another way. And I saw you throw this out probably in a First Things piece couple years ago, maybe longer. And at the time, we were certainly in the heyday, I think, of the threat of transgenderism, where it seemed unstoppable. It seemed like we were going to start doing this to kids at an alarming rate. And everybody was on board, from the medical professionals to the schools to way too many parents. And like we saw with same sex marriage, there was a whole lot of churches and pastors that had chosen to be silent and didn't want to jump in this. And so it just seemed unstoppable. It's different today. And I want you to help me think through how the thesis of desecration stands up, you know, now. But at the time, desecration just seemed like the right word, and you were throwing it out in a way of replacing one that had defined the modern era. From Charles Taylor's, you know, kind of classic work on secularism, the idea of disenchantment. In the intro of the book, you describe a little bit of this, but I want to just give you a chance to talk about that. To me, this was a big aha. Because I was just like, oh, yeah, disenchantment doesn't explain this desecration. Now, that's a better word. Talk a little bit about that vocabulary shift.

B (11:26)

Yeah, I think this is. It's an important distinction of disenchantment, stemming really from Max Weber as a concept, is the idea that the. The modern world has lost its mystery, it's lost its magic, that we become, you know, to use a cliche, we become cogs in the machine, lines on a balance sheet. If you read the novels of Franz Kafka, we get very much a vision of a world that's disenchanted. Human beings no longer treated as persons, they're treated as things. And I think that captures something very important about modern society, but it doesn't allow us to explain everything. And where I go in the book is I look at the language that's been used about abortion. In the early 1990s, associated with, say, the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton, the pro choice lobby was arguing that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. Now, I disagree with that, but there's a sense in which I can say. I can think, well, that's a sort of. I can see that arising in a disenchanted world. Yeah, the world isn't as it should be. Sometimes we have to do bad stuff. We don't like it, but it's just the way it is. Compare that to the campaign of 2024, where abortion is being celebrated as a basic human right. In other words, if you're not allowed access to abortion, then you are somehow being made less than human.

A (12:48)

But there was an abortion clinic, right, at the Democratic National Convention, right?

B (12:53)

There was indeed. And you have women being encouraged to shout their abortions. We had that highly perverse case of the person claiming to be transgender, a man who wanted to become a woman so that he could have. Get pregnant and have an abortion. There's an exultancy to that, an exhilaration that disenchantment doesn't explain. And again, I think this is where Nietzsche is helpful, because when you read the madman passage, you realize that the madman is not disenchanted by the idea of the death of God. He's terrified and exhilarated because he realizes that he. If we have killed God, then we ourselves have to rise up to be gods. And what more powerful experience can a human being have than feeling like God than, as I say in the book, you know, having the blood of God on our hands? And so I think desecration is a key impulse in the fallen human condition. It's not simply that we marginalize God. We delight in dancing on his grave. And when you think about, you know, how do you smash a God, typically. Well, I'm a Reformation historian by background. In the Reformation, when the reformers wanted to smash the Catholic God, what did they do? They went to the local church and they smashed the images. That was how you exerted your authority. But what do we do today? We smash the image of God that is human nature. We mutilate our bodies. We attack the embodied human person, and we delight in doing it. Why? Because even though it destroys us, even though it degrades us, it makes us feel like gods.

A (14:36)

Wow. See, this, to me, is just such a profound piece of social analysis because it does explain a lot more. It explains kind of things that I think that even those who were talking about the identity crisis in the maybe mid 20th century just maybe couldn't foresee. There's a couple different directions I want to go, but the idea of transgression and the idea of transgressing specifically against the image of God. Not just humans have lost touch with God, so we don't know who we are. It's that now we have to violate. You use those words, violate and transgress and exhilarating, the finding those things. Exhilarating. And that does explain an awful lot. But let me. Let me. Let me go here, because certainly we've had in the last couple of years, but especially in the last 18 months, a dramatic pullback on at least one form of desecration, which is the transgender ideology. And praise God. Right, Praise God.

B (15:40)

Absolutely.

A (15:41)

That. You know, we have these Vanderbilt, you know, that was the center of it with Matt Walsh, you know what? You know, a couple of years ago, and they've just pulled back on adult transgender surgery, which is, you know, amazing to hear. We could. There's just a lot of them. We've had whistleblowers. We certainly have a different mandate coming out of hhs. All of this is good news. Does this change the analysis for you of desecration that we've seen a little, Some breaks put on at least this one form of it?

B (16:11)

Not in any major way. I mean, like you, I rejoice in the setbacks that the trans lobby has faced. I'm not willing to do a lap of victory yet because I think they're well funded and highly organized. We need to keep up the pressure. But what's interesting, of course, is how this came about. And I think if you look at the American situation, you have to say Elon Musk plays a very significant role in this, partly or maybe largely because his own family has been tragically affected by the trans issue. And praise God that Elon Musk was able to influence the current administration in, I think, a healthy, sane direction on the issue of gender. But when you take a step back and look at Elon Musk, I'd say on that issue, he's right. But actually, he's still part of the larger problem, because if we don't treat transgenderism in isolation, but see it as part of the larger transhumanist project, this idea of smashing through human limits, then Elon Musk is. He's on the forefront of that. So one of the things I've tried to say to students this year is praise God for Elon Musk on this issue. That's great. But realize that transgenderism is more connected philosophically to transhumanism than it is to the L, the G, and the B. That's the political alliance. The philosophical issue is transhumanism. And transhumanism really involves the abolition of man, aspiring to abolish man. You think of a figure like Peter Thiel when Ross Douth that asked Peter Thiel some of the effect of, you know, should humanity continue to exist? Something along those lines. And Peter Thiel hesitates for a disturbingly long time before he answers that question. And that's striking to me, that, no, the. It's still human nature in the crosshairs, and we are still pressing ahead with the exhilarating destruction of human nature, even though on the trans issue, we've seen some significant steps in the right direction. Maybe the madman has come too soon on the trans issue.

A (18:19)

Yeah, we all have to celebrate that. But, you know, you talk about many other issues, and the technological piece I think is in. In the book is. Is what's also helpful, because culture doesn't just proceed or change on ideas alone. Artifacts are required. You don't get the. You don't get the Protestant Reformation without the printing press. You don't get the sexual revolution without the pill. You don't get desecration without an awful lot of ways to reimagine humanity. Technologically and actually then kind of, kind of actualize it. Can we jump to artificial intelligence a little bit? Is, is. Is this a. A technological artifact that's going to enable desecration? Is there a way to embrace aspects of artificial intelligence without capitulating to desecration?

B (19:08)

Yeah, it's. Of course, artificial intelligence is a very broad term covering a whole variety of different things. And I myself, I use chat GPT.

A (19:18)

Not to write the book though, right?

B (19:19)

Not to write the book.

A (19:21)

I just want everyone to say that. Yeah, there we go. All right. What everyone didn't know that, you know, you made that public statement.

B (19:28)

So I'll use it to find a restaurant in a city I don't know. But my preference difference is if I know somebody in that city to ask somebody with real intelligence where they would eat of an evening. But I think, you know, there was a document that came out. I don't think there's an official Vatican document, but it came out under the auspices of Pope Francis just over a year ago on the issue of AI. Pope Francis is quoted in this document, really as raising questions about the use of the term intelligence to refer to what AI is doing. And the burden of what he says is the danger of using that an anthropological word is that we end up thinking that what AI does is true intelligence. And we reframe, redesign, rethink what it means to be human and intelligent in light of that. And there I would say that's. Yep, that's pointing towards an impulse that could be a matter of desecration. I was just doing a review of Gunter Anders newly translated book. It's an old book, but it's from the 1950s. The obsolescence of the Human was translated into English last year. Just finished a review of it today. And Anders there is. He has this concept, what he calls the Promethean gradient, where he says, you know, our ability to do things technologically far outstrips our ability to imagine the moral consequences of what we are doing. And in the 1950s, he's saying, and. And that means that technology runs away without any moral framework. His particular burden is nuclear weapons. And one could say to sort of quote Stalin, one death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic that gets at what Anders is trying to say. We can imagine a pistol shooting somebody, and that's tragic. It's hard to imagine a nuclear bomb wiping out a million people. The moral effect of that is minimal on us because we don't have the imagination for it. And I think what we see with artificial Intelligence is this running away of technology without any moral framework setting up the limits or giving it even a goal. There's no teleology to it. We do it because we can. I was struck a couple of years ago chatting to a friend, not a Christian friend actually, but a religious leader who'd been invited to an artificial intelligence summit. It was a two day summit and he said on day one the tech bros were all making their presentations and on day two the, the theologians, religious leaders and moral philosophers were all going to make their presentations. He said the interesting thing was everybody was there on day one, all the religious leaders etc listened to the tech bros. Day two, all the tech bros had left. They didn't have any interest in thinking through a moral framework for what they're doing. So to me it's almost not so much the details of artificial intelligence as the technological culture within which it's being pursued that is so potentially dehumaniz.

A (22:30)

Yeah, I've thought a lot recently both around AI, also around medical technologies. But there's a line from Peter Kreft in one of his books on ethics and he must be, you know, writing about the same time, maybe a little bit later than probably in the 70s, I guess. But anyway, he says something along the lines of just about the time that our weapons grew up from being bows and arrows to thermonuclear bombs, we became moral infants. So the technology has so outstripped our capacities and our willingness to do it. Maybe the problem isn't so much the thermonuclear bombs as it is the fact that we are moral infants. Right. We, we, we have not done the moral justification. And when you, and when you talk about technology running ahead of ethics, I mean that's, that's a decades old problem. I mean that's, that's the issue of abortion, that's the issue of ivf, that's the issue of surrogacy, that's the issue of doctor assisted suicide. I mean there's so many issues that fall into that category that we can do them. So we do and we ask should we do them after we're doing them?

B (23:37)

Yeah. And you know, Gunter Anders is writing in the early 1950s.

A (23:41)

I mean, that's amazing. It's like he was concerned about the A bomb and what else was there? There really was. I mean that was, I mean that's a big concern. But we just, I just feel like our concerns are so populated from so many different areas.

B (23:53)

Yeah, well, Anders has this other term he talks about Promethean Shame. And what he's trying to get at. I wish I'd read this book before I'd written mine because I'd have borrowed his phrase. What he's trying to get up there is the fact that technological brilliance has, as you pointed in the realm of morality and ethics has made us small. It's because we are so exceptional that we are actually able to think of ourselves as nothing at all. We develop the A bomb, which means we are the only creature in the world that can wipe ourselves out. We make ourselves radically contingent at that point. When you think of the rhetoric surrounding artificial intelligence, it's all about replacing human beings. We're going to be replaced by something we have made, but which is superior to us. So there is this strange thing that our Promethean talents lead us to being amoebas in the grand scheme of things.

A (24:49)

Yeah, that brings up a question I wanted to ask as well, and you mentioned it before, and I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things I also appreciated about the analysis is the word desecration probably also implies a little bit of nefarious intent. And there is certainly some that are. We talked about celebrating in transgression, and that can almost raise kind of mental images of demon like or devil like people. One of the things you point to is just the arrogant side of it. I mean, maybe not even so much of nefarious intent up front or, you know, demonic activity up front, but just obliviousness to our own limitations or just kind of searching, you know, getting swept along the cultural waters. And I guess the question is, when we talk about desecration and kind of willing transgression, is it always coming out of this, I want to shake my fist at God and show that I'm better, or are there other motivations as well?

B (25:54)

Yeah, I think not. I think we can, we can say unintentionally engage in desecration if you like. I mean, go to a restaurant where you sit, you're sitting and having dinner with your loved ones, and you look across at a table and you see a family of four, as my wife and I did recently, all sitting at the table staring at their cell phones. What are they doing? They're transforming the other people in whose presence they are, and in whose presence somebody's paying good money, good food for them to be there. They're turning them into inconveniences or they're negating their presence in some way. I would say that's desecration. Human beings, we are embodied persons and our primary form of engagement is to be embodied and personal. Any behavior that leads us to treat somebody else as an inconvenience or an intrusion is potentially an act of desecration.

A (26:50)

At the end of Nietzsche's parable of the madman, after he says, I've come too early, he runs out of the marketplace where he's been, you know, epically ranting here about, you know, all of his ideas. And almost as a passing thought, Nietzsche says it's later reported that the madman ran into churches and talked about them being basically the sepulchers of God, you know, the tombs of God. What's the. What's the implication of that? Is it. Is it that while all of this is happening, all of this desecration is moving forward, that Nietzsche really believes that the churches are clueless about what's happening? They're not even kind of tuned in to what all's happened?

B (27:29)

Yes, I think Nietzsche would have regarded the churches, ironically, as hotbeds of nihilism. We often tend to think at a popular level of Nietzsche as a philosopher of nihilism. Well, he would deny that for Nietzsche, nihilism is carrying on as if nothing has changed when everything has changed. And he would say for the churches to keep going through their rituals and teaching the same old stuff long after God is dead, that makes them more irrelevant than the polite atheists the madman first confronts. The churches have really ceased to have any, you know, any significance beyond being memorial markers for a greatness that once was. Ironically, of course, you and I, John, would say the church is the answer.

A (28:15)

Right. Well, I was going to bring this up because I want to go into your solution. This book is not just about how bad everything is. You point back, but one of the things you point to in what you propose is consecration as an answer to desecration, which I love the idea. I love the sacredness. I love the re. Enchanting language of the world. You know, for Nietzsche, that's the problem. Or at least that kind of sticking to your traditions is irrelevant. That's one of the things you kind of call for and the conclusion is, you know, right, worship, like, stick to what you have in the past. How do you think through that? That's really interesting.

B (28:53)

Well, I think one of the things that nature exposes is what we might call cultural Christianity. It pained me to do this because I'm a big fan of his writings. But one of the figures that I critique in the book is the late Sir Roger Scruton, who argues very strongly for the importance of religion and indeed Christianity. But I searched high and low in his writings, and I could never find affirmation of the truth of Christianity because it was true. He thinks it. It grounds beauty, it grounds ethics. He thinks God is a very good idea, if I could put it that way. He. He never seems to go beyond that. And what I do at the end is, you know, I. I want to. I want to set the battle up as between Nietzscheans and Christians. If God is true, then certain things follow. And I would ground Christian worship and Christian life in the prior truth of God and the prior truth of the Gospel. So my appeal at the end is not for a scrutinian return to religious ritual because, hey, it helps stabilize society and stabilize our understanding of what it means to be human. My appeal is for return to Christian ritual because I think Christian ritual is grounded in Christian truth. And we need, you know, as Christians, we need the truth. We need properly ordered worship that shapes our imaginations, and we need to live in our communities every day in accordance with that Christian truth. And one of the real accents I draw at the end is that I think hospitality is one of the great antidotes to the. The treating of other people as things, inviting outsiders into your home and treating them as human beings. That's a powerful way of consecrating what it means to be human. And this is where I think, again, desecration is better than disenchantment as a concept. Because if the problem's disenchantment, then the answer's re. Enchantment. That lacks an existential urgency to me, and it also lacks a formal content. If the problem's desecration, then there's an urgent answer. You need to be consecrated. And it also has a clear shape and content. The Christian Gospel.

A (31:06)

At some level, I think that could sound maybe too simplistic. But then you look at some of the stories recently of people coming to faith. I'm thinking of a conversation I had the privilege to just be a part of recently with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who certainly is an advocate for cultural Christianity, but as someone who's been personally transformed and her inner life restored. And as she told it on that evening, her view of herself was pretty desecrated, honestly and famously coming out of atheism after abandoning Islam. But it wasn't anything uber profound. It wasn't some kind of maximalist sort of idea. It was coming to grips with the truth of who God is. It was being influenced by stories of Christian courage. It was being, I think of Chloe Cole, Chloe, who herself was a victim of this desecration in her teenage years and came to second guess that, but then just surrounded by believers who were loving and treated her like she was a consecrated bearer of God's image. And so it just almost sounds too simple to be true. But then these are the stories to me that stand out and say, well, it worked for them, and it seems to have worked in Christian history. Maybe we should, you know, get back to some of that stuff.

B (32:30)

Yes. And I went off my critique just then of cultural Christianity. I don't mean to say that cultural Christianity has no good to commend it. And one of the goods, I think, is, you know, you get people like Ayaan Hirshi Ally or husband Niall Ferguson or somebody like Mary Harrington, Louise Perry in the. In the United Kingdom, they see the problems with modernity and they start to look for answers and they realize, you know, hey, God is a good idea. And that can be the first step on the way to something that becomes much more profound and more real. I've always taken the view I don't really care why people go to church on a Sunday morning, but once they're in church, I really care about what they hear and what they experience. Yeah, you can go to church because, hey, you want to date a girl you've seen going into through the door just then, but you come under the sound of the word, you partake. You know, you see people partake in the sacraments that can have a powerful effect that leads you to a deeper truth. So I certainly don't want to be seen as a cynic who says, you know, cultural Christianity has nothing to commend. It has numerous things to commend it, not least that it can actually draw people closer to the truth. It's not stable, it's not fully adequate in itself, but it can be a step on the way. You know, conversion is a mysterious thing that involves not just the mind, but the heart. And that reshaping of the imagination has to have numerous facets.

A (33:57)

Yeah, and there's a submission to it, right? I mean, there's a submission to it that the truth is actually true and it's not just useful. And you think about some of the advocates of just merely cultural Christianity today, and it goes back to that question of submission. Are they willing to bow the knee to Jesus or not? And the ones that are, I tell you, they realize that the cultural Christianity is useful and helpful because it's rooted in things that are true and has both personal and cultural things anyway. Well, look, I think this book is very, very helpful. I really commend it to folks. I commend it as a way of not only understanding the cultural moment in which we're in better, but also as a further nudge. I was further nudged into what the task of consecration, maybe what Paul called in Second Corinthians 5, the ministry of reconciliation. What does that look like in an age of desecration? What are the things we're putting back together and what is the extent of that? And I appreciated the substance of that challenge. It was helpful for me, and I think it'll be helpful for our listeners, you know, especially as, you know, we we talked about the crisis of identity for a long time. This adds a level of clarity to that that I've not seen really anywhere else. So the book again, the Desecration of Man by Carl Truman. You can find this book anywhere books are sold, but we are happy to send you a copy. If you send a gift to the Colson center, you can visit colson.org restore colsoncenter.org restore and for a gift of any amount, we'll send you a copy of this. Carl, I want to end our conversation here. We're out of time, but I just want to say I'm grateful for you. You've been really supportive of the Colson Center. You have been supportive as a teacher. You've spoken at numerous conferences. You're going to be at the Colson Center National Conference in Knoxville at the end of May. I'm just grateful for you, not only your contribution as a thought leader, as a theologian, as a philosopher, but just specifically to us. It's been a real blessing to me personally. So thank you and thanks for being a part of this bonus episode of Breakpoint this week.

B (36:12)

It's been a privilege, John, a privilege to help you. Thanks very much for having me on.