← Know What You Believe with Michael Horton
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Sola Media Announcer
At Sola Media, we're committed to helping Christians deepen their faith through clear, Christ centered teaching rooted in the riches of the Reformation. Every podcast, article and resource we produce is offered free of charge and it's only possible because of generous monthly supporters. When you become a partner Today, you'll receive two remarkable books as our Rediscovering the Holy Spirit by Dr. Michael Horton and and Praying with Jesus by Pastor Adriel Sanchez. We believe these books can guide you into a clearer understanding of the Spirit's work and a richer prayer life. To become a partner and receive these two books, visit solamedia.org partner we don't
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Dr. Michael Horton
want to live in the village Green. At the end of the day, we can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the village green where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.
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Caleb Waite
Hello, my name is Caleb Waite. I am the Director of Content at Sola Media. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing the usual host of this program, Dr. Michael Horton. Good to see you, Mike.
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Dr. Michael Horton
Good to see you, Caleb.
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Caleb Waite
But we're also joined by a very special guest. We're pleased to welcome Dr. Carl Truman, professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Grove City College and he is the Bush Family Visiting Research Fellow at the center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Trueman, thanks so much for joining us today.
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Dr. Carl Trueman
It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
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Caleb Waite
So Dr. Truman is the author of many books, including Luther's Legacy, Salvation and English reformers from 1525 to 1556 with Oxford academic John Owen, Reformed Catholic Renaissance man, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution. He's a longtime host of the Mortification of Spin podcast and his most recent book, which we'll talk about today, is the Desecration of How the Rejection of God Degrades our humanity, out April 7, 2026. And Mike, we're also going to be talking with you about your book. Your new book is out now. Magician and the Roots of the Spiritual But Not Religious Phenomenon from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution. This is volume two in your Trilogy series on this topic on the history and origin of the divine self.
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Dr. Michael Horton
So if I may, let me just say the Desecration of Man is the culmination of so much work that Carl has already done. And this is the book I'm going to hand out. I'm sad that it's not going to be out in time to be required reading for my Modern Mind class. But it's absolutely fabulous. And it's not only intellectually compelling, but accessible. It's just a very thoughtful, incisive work. So glad to see it.
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Oh, thank you very much. That's very kind of you to say, Mike.
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Caleb Waite
Well, we're going to be talking about some similar themes in both of your projects today. So for a long time, notable philosophers and historians and others have kind of asserted that the problem with modernity is that it's cold, it holds to a dogmatic materialism, it's atheistic, it's disenchanted and void of the spiritual and mystical. Both of your works tell a very different story than this one. A story about how the rise of modernity and secularization is in fact a story about humanity striving for deification, as you put it, Dr. Truman. And as you put it, Mike, striving to find the divine self within us. Why do you bother think that telling this story is important today? Dr. Truman, let's start with you.
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Yeah, a couple of reasons. One, I think that the disenchantment of man account of modernity doesn't allow us to explain certain things that are happening at the moment. The example I use in the book would be the transformation of the rhetoric surrounding abortion. For example, in the 1990s, abortion was to be safe, legal, and rare. And I would see that as it's sort of making. Making abortion a prudential thing, a regrettable thing. But, hey, we have to do it at certain points in time. If you look at the rhetoric surrounding abortion today, it's a basic human right. There are women who wear sweatshirts celebrating the fact they've had abortions. There was that crazy incident a few years ago where there was the man claiming to be a woman who wanted to transition to being a woman so that he could get pregnant and have an abortion. That kind of ecstatic exaltation in wickedness can't be explained simply by saying, well, the world's become a more disenchanted place. So first of all, I think disenchantment doesn't explain the delight we take in destruction, if I could put it that way. And secondly, I think if we don't analyze the problem correctly, we don't come up with the correct answer. If you think the problem is disenchantment, then you'll propose re. Enchantment is the answer. And re. Enchantment strikes me as a very vague kind of term. Does it mean that I just have to screw up the Courage to believe in Santa Claus and make Christmas more enchanted. Again, I would say if desecration is the problem, if the problem is that we want to desecrate what it means to be human, then the answer is not re enchantment. The answer is consecration. And that plays straight into the hands of Christians because we know how humanity is consecrated. It's consecrated in Christ, and that takes place in the context of the church. So I think knowing the problem helps us explain what's going on in modernity and also helps us point towards the correct and in some ways very simple solution.
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Dr. Michael Horton
The enchantment narrative is sort of a. Disenchantment narrative is sort of like the flip side of the Whig narrative of the march of history going from superstition to rationality and science and so forth. This is just the flip side. The anti moderns throughout modernity have agreed basically with that, but disdain it. I think that Carl and I both disagree fundamentally with the assumptions beneath that thesis. In fact, I think it's not only inadequate in its explanatory power, but it actually, when we read about disenchantment, a lot of Christians use that language too, that we live in a disenchanted age, thinking that that means atheism. But actually we live in an extraordinarily enchanted age. If you look at the statistics, you know, spiritual but not religious phenomenon. For example, when people leave Christianity, traditional Christianity, they become more superstitious, not more rational. It's not materialism that wins, but pantheism. And this idea that I have some sort of divine self within me. Weber himself, Max Weber, thought that disenchantment was the result of. Started with Moses and the Hebrew prophets, and then it goes on to Christianity and is perfected in the Reformation and the Puritans. And I think Charles Taylor and John Milbanke roughly take the same course. Well, that's not that different from the more general rejection in our culture not of spirituality, but of religion, by which they specifically mean that religion from Moses to Jesus.
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Caleb Waite
Yeah. What are then some early philosophical figures and ideas that you both see as examples of that is giving rise to this kind of striving for deification beyond creaturely limits. Mike, specifically, who are some figures in. You talk a lot about the city of Florence during the Renaissance. Who are some figures from there? Dr. Truman? Who are some early modern philosophers who give rise to these themes?
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Yeah, I would say Friedrich Nietzsche is absolutely critical to this. I mean, in some ways he crystallizes the challenge of modernity passage I've cited in early works and I cite again, in the desecration of man is this famous madman scene from the Gay Science, where this crazy individual rolls up in a town square and starts haranguing the atheists who are standing around saying to them, you've killed God, but you don't really understand the significance of what you've done. I think what Nietzsche's trying to convey there is if you get rid of God, everything changes, including humanity itself, and he crystallizes that vision. Now, what's interesting about the madman passage is the atheists first laugh at him and then they're just confused. And the madman, towards the end says, I've come too early. He clearly realizes that, okay, he's got this message, but the culture that he's speaking to is not yet ready to receive that message. Well, my thinking is, and I suspect Mike is pretty much in agreement on this point. My thinking is that thanks to various factors, not least technology, that are now in play in our world, the hour of the madman has arrived. The idea that, yes, we can rise up and be gods has become possible. We have this idea now that humanity is something that can be transcended. I don't know if any of your listeners listen to the. I think it was Ross Douthert's interview with Peter Thiel. When Douthat asks Peter Thiel, you know, is humanity worth continuing? And what's fascinating about that interview is Peter Thiel hesitates before answering the answer.
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Caleb Waite
A long hesitation.
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Yeah, a long hesitation.
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Dr. Michael Horton
And yet he's fascinated with the Antichrist.
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Yeah. And he writes for First Things. I'm not sure what category to put Peter Thiel in, but he's certainly well enough connected to the transhumanist movement to think, you know, as with Nietzsche, man is something that needs to be transcended in the exaltation of our godlike will and power. So I think Nietzsche is a very, very significant figure on. On this front. He calls the bluff of the Enlightenment that was, by and large, living off capital provided by Christianity, got rid of God, but retained human nature. And Nietzsche essentially says in the 19th century, no, I'm not going to allow you to do that. You get rid of one, you've got to get rid of the other. Have you got the courage to do it? And now it seems in society, we think we have.
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Dr. Michael Horton
We have a lot of cultural Christianity like that. They want the fruit but not the root.
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Caleb Waite
And Mike, where do we see some of these themes even earlier? Not quite as pointed and articulate and brazen as Nietzsche. Where do we see some of These themes in Florence during the Renaissance.
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Dr. Michael Horton
Well, think of Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man, which is often called the charter of Modernity, along with Ficino. In fact, Ficino was influenced by him more than the other way around. Pico della Mirandola was a nobleman who was. Who became steeped in Kabbalah and Hermeticism and wasn't so much interested in astrology and magic, but definitely in Jewish Gnosticism and a Christian version of it. And he wrote that moving manifesto on the Oration on the Dignity of Man, which was intended for the Pope's reading. Basically, God has placed man in the middle. He gave all of the animals different natures. But then he came to Adam and he said, we're not going to give you a nature. You're going to choose your own nature for yourself. You're the one part of creation that will choose its own nature. You will either become like God or you will become like the animals. And so you have this really astonishingly new idea that you can actually choose not only where to live and what your vocation will be and all sorts of other things, but you can actually choose your nature. That is in embryo what we have with Nietzsche, basically the philosophical, psychological, scientific communities down to the present. That Carl talks about the Anabaptists too, you know, especially the radical Anabaptists. But I actually believe, I argue in this book that the Anabaptists are more significant in terms of understanding modernity than the Reformers.
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Caleb Waite
It's fascinating to hear. I think people might be surprised. The average person would be surprised how hundreds of years ago there were these figures who were self consciously Christian, yet very much interested in and dabbling in astrology, alchemy, trying to turn lead into gold, but also the philosophy of alchemy. You mentioned hermeticism. I think that's a term less people are aware of. Brief us on what that is. Why were folks interested in it in that time?
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Dr. Michael Horton
Well, Hermes Trimagistus, the thrice great Hermes was considered the God, well, semi divine, legendary figure who invented technology, art, culture, science and religion, theology. He was called the first Theologian. Ficino called him the first theologian. Again, he's legendary. He didn't actually live. But in second century Alexandria, where you had Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, you had this Hermeticism arise around especially 12 treatises called the Corpus Hermeticum, the body of Hermetic works. This continued in various sort of decrepit versions down through the Middle Ages, especially through Islamic sources, Arabic sources, but Ficino one day was brought a complete manuscript by Cosimo de Medici himself of the Corpus Hermeticum, and was only too delighted to stop his translation of Plato and translate the Corpus Hermeticum. And then he basically embraced his own words, the Orphic spirituality, including Orphic rites. And this was so powerful in the Renaissance that even Pope Alexander had the papal apartments decked out with hermetic themes and had all sorts of hermetic rituals, including orgies, in his papal apartments. So this was a very powerful movement, powerful trend, harnessing technology, both spiritual and natural, in order to change the world. A very revolutionary kind of early modern idea. And that perspective found its way often into early modern science, all the way up to Isaac Newton, who was a devoted alchemist and thought very much of Hermes Trimogistus.
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Caleb Waite
Yeah. So these are practices, magical, occultic, what have you, that it's fighting against the man. People who are tired of contemplating reality as Plato did, and they want to change it, Right?
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Dr. Michael Horton
To quote Marx. Yeah.
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Caleb Waite
Okay, so both of you. Now you guys talk about Dr. Horton in volume one, but you continue it in this book. You talk about this. Some of these themes again. Yeah, they're subverting these other ancient views that said to just stay in your place, stay in your station. That's where you're meant to. To be. People wanted to change that. And that's the type of thing you would expect to hear from your tattooed barista today. Dr. Truman, what is it about these modern views of the self that finds self fulfillment, self actualization, in subverting and transgressing natural things? Your place, your station. Obviously there's things we wouldn't agree with. Now, Aristotle said some people are born to be slaves and some people are born to be managers of slaves. Yet today, people think anything natural is as bad and oppressive as that is. And we find ourselves through transgressing anything we want. Why is that the narrative for self actualization?
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Dr. Carl Trueman
I think there are various strands to that story sort of pulled together. First of all, I think we could say that the last five, six, seven hundred years of Western history really witness to the increasing implausibility of external authority. When you think if you grew up in the 12th century, the rhythm of time had huge authority because you were part of an agrarian society. You had to follow the rhythm of the seasons. You didn't travel very far from where you were born. You were born, you lived and you died in the same community, or most people did. You would be baptized, married and buried in the same church. In that kind of world, external authority Is very strong, very solid. And the way people thought about themselves was generally connected to external things. Village, family. When you think about surnames, surnames locate you in a family rather than as an individual. I went to a very traditional boys school in England and the teachers only ever refer to us by our surnames. The family was more important than our individual existence. Well, all that's changed. It starts to change I think probably in the 15th, 16th century with the rise of technology, the transformation of economies, external things become much more fluid and liquid and there's a sense there in which, well, what is it provides continuity for me. I grew up here, I worked there, I don't do what my dad did. I chose my wife from a bigger pool of candidates than my aunt ancestors did. What is the constant about me? And I think, to put it in simple terms, there's a retreat or a move towards seeing that inner self consciousness as being definitive of me. Now when you think about that, that's not just a neutral thing though, because the tendency when you tend to think, well, I am the sum of my choices, I am the sum of the decisions that I make is that you start to think of decisions and things that are imposed upon you or that you were required to take as impinging upon you or to use the modern term as making you inauthentic. You know, if you'd asked my grandfather, you know, have you lived an authentic life? It had looked at me as if I'd grown two heads. Now it's standard jargon. We understand authenticity is more important perhaps than fulfilling our obligations towards others. So there is that impatience with external authority. And that of course then gets intensified when you think of something like moral codes. Why should I behave morally as my parents taught me? Am I simply becoming an avatar or a product of them? Must I not really stand on my own two feet? And standing on my own two feet, what's the best way for me to demonstrate that? To ride a coach and horses through the patterns of behavior that they taught me. And again, I think Nietzsche is very helpful on this. He's very concerned about what he calls herd morality. That people just behave morally in the way that they've been taught. They never think about why they surrender their agency to the crowd. And that I think is, you know, lies at the very heart of the modern conception of what it means to be a genuine human being. So there's a sense in which transgression is part of the essence of who we are now. It's why the rebel, the anti hero first rises in Sort of sophisticated literature in the 19th century and is now commonplace of pop culture. Yeah.
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Dr. Michael Horton
As you mentioned, rebels without a cause, for example. It's not the point. There is no point. The point is to transgress.
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Yeah, yeah. And I might add that certain ways that we live our life now also intensify that when you think about X the artist formerly known as Twitter, who gets the most clicks on X? It's the rude people, it's the disrespectful people. You're not going to build a big X following by behaving yourself or conforming to the standards of yesterday. You have to constantly be breaking those barriers of taste. So there's a certain economic gravity, I think, in the highly technologized world we now live in that presses us towards exalting transgression.
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Caleb Waite
Mike, what are some. Give us some pictures, some concrete examples also from the ancient and the medieval, early modern periods, where you have figures encouraging people to push back against their station, their embedded life, their place. What does that look like?
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Dr. Michael Horton
Well, I can only sketch a little bit here. I think I've really appreciated and drawn significantly on the distinction drawn by JZ Smith between locative and utopian societies. And it's not like we move historically from one to the other. It's more of a zigzag. We go, you know, sometimes more locative, sometimes more. And in many ways, the Reformation was just as locative as the medieval church.
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Caleb Waite
And locative being,
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Dr. Michael Horton
you were born here, you belong to a family, the family belongs to a clan, the clan belongs to the city, and the city belongs to God or the gods. And that is kind of every aspect of life is infused with religion. It's not a separate part of life. It infuses everything. And there is a feeling in a very locative environment, there's a feeling that you belong and what you do has meaning and purpose because it's part of a broader project. The downside of it is it can become oppressive and those higher in the order social order can use it to oppress and to their own advantage. But the utopian says it's not just this limit or that limit we need to overcome it's limits, period. And I think that it's based, I argue that it's rooted in this fundamental idea of a divine part of me, a spark of divinity trapped in a material body, in a material family, in a material social world. And I need to escape all three. And in order to realize who I really am is that divine spark. And so I have to express myself, I have to escape from all limitations of that locative environment, the pre Socratic world that was really the figure of the shaman who lived outside the city and had clients who came out and paid him money or whatever. They came out and he would basically lead them to their dead loved ones. Well, the public religion didn't do that. When you were dead, you were dead. The only way you could have immortality was if you did some really heroic things and your kids maybe followed after you. But the utopian could bring back the dead spirits and could give you that kind of comfort. And so now there was a rediscovery or a discovery of the soul, a discovery of individuality, a discovery of an afterlife that individuals could inhabit. And then you had the Eleusinian mysteries in Athens and then the mystery religions that grew up around it, very different from the public cult. And you can find these parallels in Christendom as well, with, for example, extreme mystics like Meister Eckhart representing a more shamanic religion. Certainly Ficino explicitly wanted to be a shaman, considered himself a shaman. But the shaman became a sage. Plato will quote these sacred sayings as if everybody knows what he's talking about. And the sacred sayings are taken from these Orphic. The Orphics were the ones who translated the shaman into a sage, basically taking those myths and using them, transposing them into a philosophy that has since shaped the modern world. So you have the radical mystics who carry on that tradition. The radical Anabaptists carried on that tradition to the point of having no interest in any external authority, no interest in the body, no interest in the Scriptures as a dead letter, as they called it. In fact, they were the first to write criticisms of the Bible. The first biblical critics were the Anabaptists because they wanted to shift authority from the Bible and the church to the inner divinity of the self. So you go on and on and on with that history.
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Caleb Waite
Doctor Truman. More recently than the last 100, 150 years. With the rise of these streams of thought and the rise of tech, technological advancement, comes an idea that humanity itself, our bodies, are just raw material. You talk about that in your work. Help elaborate. What do thinkers mean by that? That we're just raw material?
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Well, first of all, there's a sort of, I suppose, a philosophical background to this. When you think about it, if you see the essence of yourself as freedom and autonomy, the real challenge to that, of course, is the body, the thing that makes us dependent, our physical bodies. Even in a very simple way, when a child is first born, human beings are, as babies, terribly dependent upon their parents for many, many years. Why? Because of their bodies, because of their physicality. So in this kind of world where you exalt the autonomous self, the physical body is always going to be a problem. And we see that manifesting itself in the 20th century in a number of ways. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, the great early theorist of what we call second wave feminism, makes this comment in an interview to a magazine in the 1970s, that women will never be truly liberated until motherhood is eliminated. Well, when you think, what is motherhood? It's a biological reality as much as anything else. So the body becomes highly problematic. Now, what makes the contemporary world unique, of course, is that we have technology that allows us to think that we can overcome the limits that the body places upon us. In my earlier work, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, I dealt with transgenderism, and I dealt with it there very much as part of the political LGBTQ movement. And actually, philosophically, it's less connected to the L, the G, and the B, and far closer to transhumanism, which is a term used for a broad range of philosophies that share one thing in common. That is that human limitations, specifically bodily limitations, are problems that need to be overcome. Whether it's finitude of intelligence or physical strength or even mortality, these are all things that we can apply technology to overcome. So the body becomes a real battlefield. Now, going back to the comment, I think Mary Harrington, in her book Against Progress, refers to human beings as meat lego. I wish that I had invented that term. It's a great term, meat lego, this idea that the body just becomes, if you like, a set of blocks that we can shift around, build what we want out of, well, that's the inevitable result of thinking that the body is a problem. If the body ceases to be you but becomes the equivalent of this spacesuit that this spooky, mystical you inhabits in
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Dr. Michael Horton
some way or an obstacle to you.
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Or an obstacle, yes. I mean, hey, if you're a woman, but you just happen to have a spacesuit like body that has male genitalia, that's a problem. Got to fix the spacesuit at that point. So, yes, the body becomes a problem. And this idea that the body has no integral authority or significance, I think flows out of the philosophical revolution and out of the technological revolution. And this is where, sadly, a lot of Protestants, I think, we've been left somewhat shorthanded on this. Catholics have had a fairly rich understanding of the significance of the body for a while. As Protestants, we've not done that so much. And I found that with students, sometimes I'll say, what is the gospel? And they'll say, well, the gospel is forgiveness of sins. Imputation of Christ's righteousness. Absolutely. So why do we need a resurrection if it's just forgiveness of sins? Was it not enough for Christ to die and pay the price? Why did he have to rise physically again? And I love there's a bit in Thomas Aquinas's lectures on First Corinthians where he makes a comment, the effect of when you die, your soul departs from the body, but it is not you. It's only part of you. You are not you until the day of resurrection, when soul is reunited to body. And I love that emphasis there. And I think that's something as Protestants, you know, this would be a foundation of starting to push back. We need to have a proper understanding of the significance of the body. And the Gospel gives us that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, there's the foundation for understanding that the body is not. It's not a spacesuit, it's actually you in a deep and profound sense.
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Dr. Michael Horton
You interact, Carl, with Peter Singer quite a lot, the Princeton Ethicist, which sounds like an oxymoron. I mean, Singer ethicist sounds like an oxymoron. But when you talk about freedom, it strikes me that that's where his Gnosticism comes in, that why would you need to include the body in an analysis of whether somebody should live or die? Because you're not really qualified to live. Even if you're born, even if you're a child, even if you're an old person. You're not qualified to live unless you have autonomy, unless you have this freedom. Your body plays absolutely no role in who you are in this system.
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Yeah, and I think the incoherence of Singer's position is demonstrated actually by the inconsistency of his own life. There's an interview online you can find where Singer is being interviewed about his philosophy. And the interviewer, towards the end, raises the issue of Singer's own mother, who sadly, I think, struggled with Alzheimer's disease, she struggled with dementia, and by all accounts, Peter Singer helped to care for his mother rather beautifully. And he's asked by the interviewer, you know, isn't that rather inconsistent with your philosophy? And Singer's answer is eloquent. Singer says something, and I'm almost quoting verbatim, he says effectively, yes, but I guess it's different when it's your own mother. Well, sure, because that was the womb that bore you, man. That was the woman who put sticking plaster on your knee when you grazed it at school. That was the body that looked you in the eye and smiled and told you she loved you when you came home from school having been bullied. Yes, it's different when it's your own mother, precisely because of that embodied connection that exists between you. And that's what I love actually, about Mary Harrington's arguments against abortion in that she appears initially to concede the feminist case that the child in the womb is just part of the woman's body. And then she goes on and says, yes, and when my daughter was born, I continued to think of her as just part of my body. So I cared for her as I cared for my own body, as I care for my hands, as I care for my eyes, as I care for my physical fitness. The physicality of human existence, I think, has profound moral significance for who we are.
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Caleb Waite
Dr. Truman, in the desecration of man, in your work, you warn that the renewed interest that we see
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Dr. Michael Horton
in culture
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Caleb Waite
in the last couple of years in Christianity, among cultural elites, large podcasters, influencers, this is often driven by resistance to WOKE ideology. You warn that this might be short lived if it treats Christianity mainly as culturally useful rather than itself. True. A friend of the show, James Wood, who was on with us, he's a PCA minister.
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Dr. Carl Trueman
Oh, no, James. Yeah. Used to look at first things. Yeah.
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Caleb Waite
Oh, right, right. And so he coined a great term called reality respecters. And what he means by that is, well, he says reality respecters are welcome. We've heard stories from like, Luis Perry and others who are, like, it seems like Christians or Christianity are the ones who recognize anthropological reality. Men can't be women and women can't be men. And so maybe there's something to this. Maybe I'm a Christian now. No one wants to dismiss or cast skepticism when these influencers convert to Christianity. We want to celebrate that. At the same time, there's a mix of figures kind of swimming in this current. Jordan Peterson, Dawkins even called himself a cultural Christian. There's more who kind of just like the aesthetic and taste of Christianity. You warn against that. Share more about that, because I think some folks might think, like, well, you're just trying to. We don't want to cast skepticism to true conversion. But what do you mean by that?
- [39:37]
Dr. Carl Trueman
Well, I think, first of all, you have to understand the Gospel requires belief in the physical resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. As Paul says, if Christ is not raised, we're of all people to be most pitied. And my fear is that those who latch onto Christianity solely for the purpose of providing cultural or social or political stability are engaging in what Nietzsche himself would have defined as nihilism. We tend to think of nihilism as. As not believing in anything, just the rejection of any positive truths. Well, Nietzsche has a more subtle definition. For Nietzsche, nihilism is carrying on as if nothing has changed when everything has changed. And for him, Christians and philosophers like Immanuel Kant, they are your classic nihilists because they're pretending that God isn't dead and they're living as if God isn't dead, but he is dead. That's nihilism. And I fear that some of our leading conservative voices are vulnerable to the Nietzsche accusation of nihilism. I remember being at Princeton nearly 10 years ago. I went to hear Sir Roger Scruton give a lecture, and it's a brilliant lecture. I'm a huge fan of Roger Scruton's writings on the whole. But the respondent that day was the Catholic philosopher John Halbane. And John Haldane stood up and said, roger, everything you've said is beautiful. I agree with everything. But unless you believe in God, all you have done is built a beautiful castle floating in the air that's liable to fall down at any moment and scrutiny credit. I remember he hesitated for a moment and he smiled and he said, yes, I know, but I just can't go there. And I think Haldane put his finger on something. If your only interest in Christianity is it happens to justify your cultural tastes or your political tastes or provides you with a useful rhetorical weapon for beating your opponent with. That's not biblical Christianity. I very much welcome the renewed interest among the intellectuals and elites in Christianity. I really do, partly because I think cultural Christianity does do some social goods. Bottom line is, if your street is full of cultural Christians, you Probably won't get mugged when you walk down it at night. That's a good result. But in terms of the church and in terms of real truth, we actually need to see genuine conversions. Now. I welcome the interest of intellectuals in Christianity. If it gets them reading the Gospels, if it gets them reading good theology, if it gets them going to church and hearing the word being proclaim, then there's real hope for their souls. That's fantastic. But I think you just make yourself vulnerable to the postmodern critique. If you say, well, I don't believe in the resurrection, but I think Christian, you do the Richard Dawkins thing. I think any critical theorist worth their salt is going to point the finger at him and say, that's just manipulative. You're just arbitrarily grabbing hold of something because it fits your taste and it does what you want it to do. You're not interested in the truth claims that Paul presses again and again and again in the New Testament.
- [42:58]
Dr. Michael Horton
Yeah, yeah, that's so good, Carl. It seems to me that in our current climate, in a sense, what's happening on the political right today is more dangerous than what's happening on the political left for this reason that Christianity is being undermined. The left is attacking Christianity, but the right is using Christianity to justify all sorts of positions that Christians and non Christians could agree or disagree on. And when Christ becomes a mascot for one party or the other, Christianity rises or falls with that party. And I'm really concerned that a lot of Americans, I talk to, a lot of my neighbors, just assume that evangelical Christianity in particular is this particular ideology. And you're even handed in your criticisms here that there's a lot of Nietzsche on both sides of the aisle.
- [44:06]
Dr. Carl Trueman
Oh, yeah, yeah. I think that the right, at the moment, the right are instrumentalizing the gospel in very, very disturbing ways. And of course, Mike, your own work has been very influential on me at this point. If we, of mutual back scratching, you know, right from when you, you know, you, you cut your teeth going after the prosperity gospel people, the Robert Schuler's, you know, what was he doing? He was instrumentalizing the gospel relative to a version of the American dream. What we see now is the instrumentalizing of the gospel relative to a certain political project. I, I, just before I came on air, a friend sent me a video clip of a group of pastors saying that they'd, they were fed who opposed women's ordination because guess what? Paula White. God had spoken to Paula White and given her a prophecy about Donald Trump. That had proved to be true. What complete nonsense. And that is the kind of stuff, I think, that is really leading to a downplaying of distinctive Christian truth. It's being made subservient.
- [45:16]
Dr. Michael Horton
Yeah. The recruiting video I just saw yesterday for new ICE recruits, they had in the background explosions, shooting, you know, your typical kind of military engagement. And then in gothic letters, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be sons of God. And what a picture for people to see how incongruous that is, just completely using, actually blaspheming the name of Christ.
- [45:59]
Dr. Carl Trueman
It reminds me of George Lindbeck's famous example of saying the crusader warrior shouting Christ is Lord as he smashes his saw down to the head of some innocent bystander. We live in an age where the social gospel is now a bigger problem on the right than on the left.
- [46:20]
Dr. Michael Horton
One of the things I appreciated was how it wasn't just critique. It wasn't just definition and explanation, which was helpful, but it was also really, okay, well, where do we go now? It's hard to find succinct practical summaries of what we should be looking for now. And I really loved your trilogy of creed, cult, and code. Christianity, Uniquely is a creed, a cult, and a code, and you can't have one without the other. Can you explain that?
- [46:59]
Dr. Carl Trueman
Yeah. Well, I'm very grateful, actually, to my editor, Bria Sanford, for that, because she kept pressing me on. You can't. You can't end on a negative note. You need to give me some hope here. And what I do in the final chapter is like, well, if, you know, taking. If desecration is the problem, and if desecration manifests itself in us treating each other in inhumor or dehumanizing ways. Couple of comments to make on that. One, consecration is going to be the answer. And two, the answer can't simply be a set of ideas. This is a battle for the imagination as much as it's a battle for the intellect. And so in last chapter, I said, well, how does the Christian consecration take place? How does the battle for the Christian imagination take place? And my answer is, it's really in the church. The church is where we receive proper teaching, and that's good. We need to get the right ideas populating our head. We need to think about the world in the right way, and the primary place where we're taught that is church. But secondly, there's also a worship aspect to Christianity, and that the cult or the liturgy is important, that we need to be in worship services. Where the rhythm, the content and the rhythm of the service reinforce the dogma that's being taught. And some of that happens through unusual ways. I cite some research in the book how we now know that if people get together and sing communally in any context, they will tend to feel more part of a whole. They will think of themselves less as individuals and more as connected to other people. Well, doing that in church is often the only place other than sports grounds where communal singing takes place for most people today. But then what you sing is important. The rhythm, the structure of the worship service presses home the drama, the gospel. And then when you move to a code, typically as Christians, we tend to think of the moral code of Christianity very much in terms of do this, don't do that, don't sleep together before you're married, don't do this, don't steal, don't be rude to your parents. I think hospitality, the treating of other people as human beings, that both reflects the character of God, who's a God, who loves the widow, the sojourner and the orphan. And it also grips the imagination. I don't know about you guys, but I can still remember the names and faces of people who gave me hospitality when I was an undergraduate student or a postgraduate student.
- [49:37]
Dr. Michael Horton
Student.
- [49:39]
Dr. Carl Trueman
They've long forgotten me. I'm sure if they're still around, they've long forgotten me. But you never forget. You never forget the names and the faces of the people who were kind to you when you needed somebody to be kind to you. So hospitality. Now I anticipate an objection coming from the sort of the activist political right will be. This is low energy stuff. My answer to that is, so what? I think it's obedience to scriptural teaching. And I think you fool yourself if you think you're going to solve the problems of modernity by a week on Wednesday. We're playing the long game here, as in the early church, so today it may take significant length of time to do it, but we have to start now. And of course we have divine promises attached. We're not simply relying on technique when we say that the teaching and the liturgy will shape us. We are not simply relying on our own linguistic ability there. We're resting on promises that God has made relative to the proclamation of his word, to the administration of his sacraments, to the gathering of his people together in worship. So I really did want to end the book, not just on a positive note, but on a positive note that any Christian can engage in. You may not be able to teach, but you can be hospitable. There's something in the last chapter for every Christian can be part of the solution here.
- [51:12]
Caleb Waite
The last chapter truly is worth the price of the entire book, in my opinion. One last question for you both here. Your works are again, you're tracing the influences and trends that have impacted and shaped the modern imagination. So neither of you are trying to be polemical to other Christian traditions or specific leaders to step back a bit. I will say in evangelical circles there is a tendency among pastors, leaders, online influencers to explain cultural breakdown, sometimes in overly simplistic terms. You know, we're in this state now and this is just what happens when society becomes secular. That's true so far as it goes, but it often ignores the historical particulars that you guys write about the specific figures and events that have shaped modernity over time. Okay, so with what your work highlights for me is that I think many contemporary Christian narratives, even those trying to be quote unquote traditional, are often deeply modern. Instead of desecrating traditional values that the left and progressives and postmodernists do, many today in our own circles are hell bent on just desecrating liberal egalitarian values. Many Christians online make a spectacle of this, wanting to ban the Civil Rights act, the First and 19th Amendment. Some so called Christians online fantasize about the genocide of Jews. And suddenly they are ironically speaking as Nietzscheans in this Promethean way, neo pagan way, in this utopian way. How can we in the church, pastors and leaders not only better diagnose what's happening out there, out there in the culture, but how can we resist those trends that ironically appear and bubble up inside of us? Because I know those folks don't think of themselves as moderns. But when you read your books, you realize this isn't just out there, it's everywhere and it's in us. What are things we can practice to resist those things that percolate and bubble up in us?
- [53:49]
Dr. Michael Horton
Well, one forgotten word is repentance. People can say, well, I turn to Christ, but I'm still in a same sex relationship, or I turn to Christ. And yet I still think that I can make misogynist comments in public. I think that I'm a Christian, but I can completely tear other people down in order to raise myself up. No, repentance means in order to turn to Christ, you have to turn from all of that. And where does that happen? It happens. Certainly Metanoia is to change your mind. It certainly is about that. But the fruit of repentance I think, is exposed in the liturgy. We all participate in a liturgy. Liturgy forms us, whether it's the liturgy of our nine to five jobs or the liturgy of election cycles or the liturgy of baseball games. There are liturgies all over the place, and we indwell many different liturgies. Do we really? Especially once a week. Once a week, there's a chance of this liturgy to shape us in different ways as children of the kingdom. And if even that is not a place where the doctrine gets transformed into doxology, then there will be no discipleship.
- [55:36]
Dr. Carl Trueman
I agree with Mike. I think if we step away from the theology and look at some of the practicalities, I would suggest one area where a lot of Christians tend to just assume that something's a tool, where it's actually very transformative would be our use of technology. For example, I get the students to ask in class, you know, okay, you go to the airport. Where do you sit in the departure lounge? Well, I sit near a plug so I can charge my cell phone. Okay, so who is the master and who is the servant here? I think it's helpful. It's become very helpful in the last few years for more and more Christians to realize that technology, the technology we have today, is not just a tool, it's transformative. It reshapes how we think about ourselves. And that would be just one simple example. I think if you. If you understand the specific ways that sin is able to get a grip on how we think about ourselves, they vary from generation to generation and time and place. So knowing if you like the tools that sin has at its disposal makes you able to think of strategies to mitigate or to combat that. So I would say it's helpful to have the genealogies of the modern crisis in order to see where you need to practically press on. Things go through church history, 4th, 5th century, it's doctrine of God, it's Christology. 16th century, it's sacraments and authority. Today, it's the doctrine of man. Okay, so we need good teaching on what it means to be human, and we need to be acutely aware of those unique features of our day and generation that are placing particular pressure on that biblical understanding.
- [57:30]
Caleb Waite
Amen. And for what it's worth, I think both of your works trace that kind of Christian humanism that is, I think, desperately needed today. The Desecration of Man, how the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity by Dr. Carl Truman, magician and mechanic. The Roots of the Spiritual but Not religious Phenomenon from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution by our very own Dr. Michael Horton. Please pick these up, sit with them, think on them, so that we can press, press against those trends that subvert our own humanity. So thank you both for your time. This was great.
- [58:13]
Dr. Michael Horton
Thank you, Calum.
- [58:13]
Dr. Carl Trueman
Thanks for having me on.
- [58:14]
Dr. Michael Horton
Thank you, Carl.
- [58:19]
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