• Who is Carl Trueman?
• How Has the Idea of Self Changed Over Time?
• A Problem of the Imagination
• The Rise of Theonomy
• Problematic Implications of Expressive Individualism
• How Do Worship and the Local Church Help Shape People?

Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Jonathan Leeman:

Hi, this is Jonathan Leeman

Mark Dever:

And this is Mark Dever.

Jonathan Leeman:

Welcome to this episode of Pastors Talk. 9Marks exists to help church leaders and pastors build healthy churches. Learn more at 9marks.org.

Mark, a little while ago, you and your elders all, I think read all of or parts of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Truman. Is that right? Did you work through that with your elders?

Mark Dever:

We did.

Jonathan Leeman:

Why that book?

Mark Dever:

Because we felt it had more than anything. Certainly, I had read in the last few years, put its finger on some of the changes that are happening in our world around us that either seem unconnected or surprising and help us to see a connection of thoughts and events, decisions, things that our cultures accepted that is much longer and older than a lot of people suspect.

Jonathan Leeman:

I assume light bulbs came on for your elders. Yeah, I think so. Not the sort of book they would necessarily immediately grab.

Mark Dever:

Right. It’s a history of philosophy in one sense.

Who is Carl Trueman?

Jonathan Leeman:

That’s right. Shortly after that, one of your elders, Ben Lacey, came up to me and he is like, you guys should do a nine Marks journal on this. And I thought, ah, it seems a little bit abstract. But then he gave me a table of contents and I thought, oh my gosh, that’d be great.

And so I contacted the author himself, Carl Truman, and I said, Hey, we should do a journal on this. And he was like, yeah, okay. How can I help? And so we did the journal and wouldn’t it be great if we got Carl here to talk with us about

Mark Dever:

All of these things? Yeah, but I mean, Carl, he’s English and he was educated Aberdeen, and he taught at Westminster up in Philadelphia. He’s now way over in the western side of Pennsylvania, Grove City College. There’s no way we could get Carl.

Jonathan Leeman:

I think we should.

Mark Dever:

I think we’ve had him on a long time ago, back in the nineties or something, but I dunno. That’s right.

Jonathan Leeman:

I think we should try.

Mark Dever:

Alright.

Jonathan Leeman:

Hey Carl, can you join us?

Carl Trueman:

No, I’m unavailable, I’m afraid.

Jonathan Leeman:

No that sounds like Carl.

Carl Trueman:

Of course.

Jonathan Leeman:

Wow.

Carl Trueman:

Very happy to join you. Very happy.

Jonathan Leeman:

Thank you, brother. So Professor Grove City College and you’re a professor of,

Carl Trueman:

Well, the official title is Biblical and Religious Studies, but the great thing is Grove, allows me to wander far and wide in terms

Jonathan Leeman:

Of you not to do what you want.

Carl Trueman:

I kind of do. Yes. Which is very nice. A bad gig. It’s not a bad gig at all.

Jonathan Leeman:

Now, are you an elder?

Carl Trueman:

Well, I’m a Presbyterian and I’m actually a minister and connected to the Presbytery. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church is the Presbytery of Ohio. I know you would not acknowledge that as a legitimate church court, but that’s official,

Jonathan Leeman:

We all have everything.

Carl Trueman:

And my wife and I worship at Grove City, the OPC Church in Grove City where she’s a member. And I’m under the oversight of the session actually. So I sort of am a member at Grove City OPC.

Mark Dever:

Wait, so you’re a member of the presbytery?

Carl Trueman:

I’m a member of the presbytery, but we have this odd clause in the OPC that allows the minister to be under the oversight of a local session. And I’ve invoked that Purist Presbyterians don’t like it, but I’ve always been a little bit of a congregationalist.

Mark Dever:

You’re just saying that because in my study, partly.

Carl Trueman:

Okay, there we go. But I also take the view that to be accountable, you’ve got to be rubbing shoulders with the people to whom you’re accountable on a weekly basis. My presbytery meets twice a year. What do those guys know about me? Yeah.

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, brother, you’ve done wonderful work in the two books. First, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self subtitle, cultural Amnesia, expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. And then Strange New World, how thinkers and activities redefined identity and sparked a sexual revolution. Is that just a shorter version?

Carl Trueman:

Partly The origin of the book was Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who read the bigger book and wanted a short book that he could give to DC staffers. That was the origin of it.

But obviously, I finished the big book in 2019. A lot has happened since 2019. So it also contains some new material reflecting on technology, the collapse of national identity, those kinds of things. So there’s a bit more material.

Mark Dever:

You’re telling me that even if I have read through all of the rising trends of the modern self,

Carl Trueman:

Yeah

Mark Dever:

I still need to read Strange New World and I need the royalties. Sorry, you need to buy it. Alright. Right. Put that one on the list.

Jonathan Leeman:

I thought.

Mark Dever:

Okay.

Jonathan Leeman:

I’m having the same experiences as you, Mark. I read the long one and just thought, yeah, this is phenomenal. And I dunno if you remember this, but I emailed you and Justin Taylor at Crossway and said, we need a junior high version of this because for us old fuddy duddies we’re kind of baked in.

And it occurs to me though that everybody from zero to 18 who are still being formed would benefit so much from the categories and the discussions that you have here. So one of my hopes is that you’ll produce even a further volume for kind of the junior higher high schooler. Any plans for that?

Mark Dever:

RC Sproul did that by choosing your religion or choosing my religion. He did a great example of that.

Carl Trueman:

I have no immediate plans. Maybe somebody else will take that on. But there is a study guide that comes alongside this that’s designed for Sunday school material, so it’s easily adaptable to a Sunday school.

Jonathan Leeman:

Have you been pleased with the response to the book?

Carl Trueman:

Yes, completely shocked and surprised, stunned. I wrote the book out of curiosity hoping that it would help some people, and the response has been overwhelming and weird. I even had 72 hours ago, I had a professor of Islamic studies at Brandeis University drop me a note and say that he’s using the big book with an Islamic youth group that he’s teaching about these things.

Mark Dever:

So it is Carl, I can understand that because you’re decoding our culture, and for anyone who thinks there are fixed values or thinks there is a God or divine reality that’s revealed themselves somehow. We seem like such aliens in this world. And here you’ve done a good job explaining why these old claims that have been around for a long time that any person of faith would make involve divine revelation, why we seem so unbelievable to the people that we live around.

Carl Trueman:

Yeah, I mean we live in what Philip Reef, the philosophical sociologist would call a third world that lacks any sense of the transcendent as grounding its moral structure. But as religious people, we are people of what Reef would call the second world. We look beyond this world for the justification of how to live and how to organize our moral principles. So we are aliens at this point.

Mark Dever:

Did the response to this book, Carl, just confirm that in fact you do see and understand things that other people don’t see and understand,

Carl Trueman:

A lot of the responses ran along that kind of lines and some of the most, I wouldn’t say, well, perhaps yes. Heartbreaking responses came from people whose families have been torn apart by the issues that I discussed, particularly the L-G-B-T-Q stuff saying that finally they had an inkling of how their kids thought about these things and it had facilitated conversations, which is a good thing, but it also reminded me of how the issues I touch on have torn real lives apart across the country.

Jonathan Leeman:

Is it an unfair question to ask you? Can you sum up the book in five minutes? So you’re speaking now to the person who hasn’t read it and they like this podcast or they’re listening, but they’re like, ah, I don’t really know what they’re talking about. Give it in a nutshell.

How Has the Idea of Self Changed Over Time?

Carl Trueman:

Yeah. Well, the burden of the book is to try to find the common factors or denominators that pull together so much of the fragmentation we witness in our society. And to do that, what I latch onto is this idea of the self.

And what I mean by that is the way we think about who we are, the way we think about what constitutes us has changed over time. And the way it’s changed is this. We live in an era where we put more premium on our inner feelings than many previous generations.

If you think about the scenario of a man going to a doctor 200 years ago and saying, I think I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body, doctor’s going to say to him, that’s a problem. It’s a problem of your mind. We need to treat your mind and bring it into conformity with your body.

Carl Trueman:

Man goes to the doctrine, says that today the doctor’s going to say that’s a problem. It’s a problem of your body. We need to bring our bodies into conformity with our minds. The question is, what has happened between those two points in time?

Well, what’s happened is inner feelings have come to Trump in all forms of external authority. So the burden of the book is how do we get here? Who are the thinkers? What are the cultural, and social trajectories and circumstances that led to us granting such tremendous authority to our inner feelings?

And the narrative of the book breaks down really into three parts. First of all, I argue that there’s been a move to what I call the psychologizing of the self, that inner space that we all have and that human beings always had. The psalmist had it and Augustine had it. Paul had it inner feelings.

Jonathan Leeman:

So that’s not all wrong,

Carl Trueman:

It’s not all wrong, but that has come to be granted an authority that it never had before in terms of being decisive. Think about the psalmist, even in Psalm 88, the most introspective and despairing of Psalms, the psalmist still uses the covenant name of God. In other words, his inner feelings have to be understood in the context of some greater reality that we might say stands in judgment over those feelings.

You Are What You Feel

Jonathan Leeman:

So nevermind what the church tells me I am, nevermind what my dad and grandpa tell me who I am, nevermind all of these givens of a life, but what do I feel inside?

Carl Trueman:

What do I feel?

Jonathan Leeman:

That’s who I am.

Carl Trueman:

That’s who you are. Then the second move after the psychologizing of the self is we come to understand that inner space is defined above everything else by sexual desire. That’s a move that the intellectual level Sigmund Freud made in the late 19th and early 20th century, but is a message that’s preached from almost every commercial, every soap opera, every sitcom, and every movie you watch tells you

Mark Dever:

Popular songs.

Carl Trueman:

Every song you listen to is truly you, to be truly happy. To be truly satisfied means you have to outwardly express and find satisfaction in your sexual desires. And the third stage.

Jonathan Leeman:

So just to sum up step one, is the cyclization of the self, step two, the sexualization of psychology, and then step three.

Carl Trueman:

Step three is the politicization of all this. And in some ways, step three is inevitable after you’ve made step one and step two

Jonathan Leeman:

Inevitable. Why?

Carl Trueman:

Well, when you think about how sexual codes, what you’re allowed to do and not do sexually typically work, we tend to think of them as behaviors. Once, however, you start to think about your sexual desires as being foundationally who you are, then the codes that tell you how you can and cannot behave sexually, they’re not simply codes about behavior.

They become codes about who society considers to be a legitimate person and who it considers to be an illegitimate person. That’s a political thing. What does it mean to be a member of the policy? What does it mean to be a member of a political society?

So once you decide that something is fundamental to identity, you inevitably make that thing political. And I think in our day and generation, it’s sexual desire. I would give an example of ancient Greece, where there was a lot of homosexual behavior. Nobody thought of themselves as gay.

It was not a point of identity. Our world is very different and in a world where sexual desire becomes identity, the codes surrounding the expression of sexual desire become codes that make you either a legitimate or an illegitimate person.

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, they didn’t think of themselves as gay as you said, even if they were engaging in such activities, and B, they weren’t devising massive legal structures around that penalized those who would say, I don’t think so right now. Mark, you got to the conclusion of the book and thought to yourself, this is just the beginning.

Mark Dever:

Yeah. I mean, Carl, you warned the reader not to hark back to the 16th century, but back to the second century, which is why it’s good to hear your Baptist roots still harkening out someplace in your thoughts and coming out your mouth. I couldn’t have agreed more and I felt like you were writing an introduction to nine marks.

I mean, at the bottom of that page, I thought like, well, therefore the importance of healthy churches, it is just driving us to community, to authenticity in our relationships, to a willingness to draw lines, to be able to support each other, help each other. And to me, that’s what we’ve been trying to do through our church and through 9Marks for decades.

Carl Trueman:

And just to say your work is greatly appreciated. In Presbyterian circles, the 9Marks books on the local church, are very popular and certainly in the Presbyterian circles, which I connect with.

Jonathan Leeman:

Yeah, so I think up here at Capitol Hill in nine marks, we read this and thought, yeah, the church that we’ve been talking about is the solution to these problems

Mark Dever:

Well insofar as there’s a solution, yeah, it’s the immediate practical thing that we do. Now, Carl’s analysis is hugely helpful for revealing mental moves that have gone on to make us self-aware and then make us rethink on every level.

It helps us to realize that this conversation about Freud or this conversation about Marx is not simply something for those who are interested in the academy, but these are things that are having a great impact on people who don’t know those names, but who are living in the world that their ideas have made.

Carl Trueman:

One of the ways to misread the book I think would be to say, well, we’ve got these thinkers. People have read them and their behavior has been shaped by them. So the answer is we just need to produce books with arguments that refute these thinkers.

I use the thinkers I do in order to make us self-conscious about the intuitions that shape our culture by looking at men and women who’ve reflected on these things in depth, you become more aware of the dynamics and the significance of the ideas.

But most people have not read these figures, and I think that that’s a useful thing for pastors to understand. I mean, the three of us at this table are bookish cerebral types. We like reading books, and we like arguments, but that’s not the way most Christians think.

Mark Dever:

It’s not the way most pastors think,

A Problem of the Imagination

Carl Trueman:

Not the way most pastors think. So one of the things I wanted to do in the book was, I won’t say make the problem worse than it is, but make pastors aware that the problem isn’t simply a case of man, I got this great argument that refutes this position, and if I teach people that it will change everything I wanted to present the problem as it’s a rather slippery term, but almost as a problem as one of the imagination and the imagination is shaped by more than just arguments.

We need to think about community, we need to think about worship, and we need to think about what we sing and the way we sing it. All of the elements of the church come into play. I think in addressing this problem

Mark Dever:

20 years ago, Bernard Lewis at Princeton wrote a book What Went Wrong in which he wrote about what happened to the Islamic world. It seemed to return in the 13, 14, and 15 hundreds, and all of a sudden within 200 years, it seems like a cultural backwater.

What happened? One of the interesting things he notes is when I think it was Ottoman ambassadors first went to the courts in Paris, in London, how they had to learn to think of themselves outside of an Islamic structure because all of Islam was about structure submission the society as a whole. It’s not the Christian interiority, it’s the experience of the palace

Mark Dever:

And it’s ordering life. And so when you self-consciously step outside of that palace, now it’s just like you are an individual Muslim in Paris or London. What does it mean even to be a Muslim? When I was reading your book, I thought of that Muslim in London in 1580 how entirely disoriented he was, and what it meant for him to be a Muslim outside of that structure.

I think, well, that’s kind of like Christians today when we know we’re strangers in the world, that’s endemic to the Christ who’s been rejected that we follow. So we understand all of that, but what’s going on with the idea that we should as Christians, how do we follow the Lord when we are such aliens and such strangers? And I think some of us in the West had become accustomed to thinking of ourselves as being far more at home than we ever really were.

Carl Trueman:

Yes, I would agree. I think I’ve sometimes put it like this, the situation in the West, the historical norm in the West is a theological exception. We’ve had 15, 1600 years where Christianity and the culture have tracked pretty closely, and Christianity has been in some ways the dominant view of the culture.

Now one can quibble over the nature of civil Christianity as opposed to vital evangelical Christianity, but by and large, there’s not been any tension between the churches and the wider culture. I would say there’s very little in the New Testament that would’ve led us to have expected that

Jonathan Leeman:

Agree.

Carl Trueman:

The model of Christianity in the New Testament is much more, in some ways antithetical to the broader culture. So what has been theologically normative is historically exceptional, and that’s where we find ourselves

Mark Dever:

Now. Two things quickly. One, I have been thinking that about a hundred years ago in America, William Borden known as Borden of Yale, decided to go as a missionary in this young 20-something-year-old era of a large fortune.

He’s prayed over ordained at Moody Church in Chicago and all the headlines of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, all these headlines have these celebratory articles about this consecration of this young man to the mission field. William Howard Taft, running for president in 1912 has this campaign speech he sends out in which he talks about the importance of foreign missions. He’s a unitarian,

Mark Dever:

But he’s talking about the importance of Christianity for reaching the nations and the burden that he realized when he was governor of the Philippines a few years earlier, that we had to Christianize this world and he’s writing that as a unitarian. So there was an assumption that Christian orthodoxy was at home even among people who the three of us would assume are in no way born again, whether the reporter was who was writing this fluff story about a rich young man like you would a celebrity a hundred years later in Hollywood or this presidential candidate running for office, affirming a movement because of its what he understands. Its sociological implications will be among the people. It will quote civilize unquote and how entirely reversed the tables are now.

Carl Trueman:

Yes, I mean, we are strangers in a strange land at this point, and as I say, I think that’s more akin to the model of church we see in the New Testament.

The Rise of Theonomy

Mark Dever:

So what’s the rise of Theonomy these days among conservative theologically, conservative Christians, and not just Presbyterians Carl? I mean, we’re seeing it among Baptists as well,

Carl Trueman:

And the Catholics actually have their own equivalent in deism. That’s I think to a large extent, I would say it’s a movement of reaction at a moment in time, particularly in Protestantism. Well, when you feel something’s being stolen from you, you get angry and you react and I think

Jonathan Leeman:

Protest Peter picking up the sword in the garden.

Carl Trueman:

And I think Protestants for many generations in America thought they owned the country and now they feel it’s being stolen from them. And that’s precisely the kind of moment when you get retrospective, nostalgic, extreme reactions,

Mark Dever:

Exertions

Carl Trueman:

And I think

Mark Dever:

Sentiment replacing piety.

Carl Trueman:

Yes, yes. And anger replacing careful reflection and thought. And we live in an internet age where two dozen guys on the internet who make a lot of noise can kid themselves into thinking they are about to take over Congress for Jesus. It’s not going to happen, but we’re able to generate these believable myths for ourselves because of the technological environment we now live in.

Mark Dever:

Well, and as somebody who has lived right next to Congress for decades now, I can tell you the laws that are passed there are not unimportant, but they seem comparatively unimportant compared to the movies and songs that are written in Los Angeles

Carl Trueman:

And that’s in the book. I use the figure of Percy by Shelley, the great romantic poet. I feel kind of bad because I clearly see problems in the book with the romantic move and I’m a huge fan of romantic poetry.

But Shelley has this great statement where he says that the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind and his contemporary William Haslet makes the comment, that the man is a poetical animal playing off of Aristotle. The points they’re making there are the things that shape how we think about the world, the things that give us our moral vision if you like.

They’re not arguments, they’re not legislation, not that those things are trivial. I was saying to somebody earlier today, that good legislation isn’t going to change the culture, but if it protects children, I’m all in favor of it.

These things are not unimportant, but the things that really shape how we think are artistic products, would the artists who control our culture would that they were as sophisticated as Percy bi Shelly? We are in a kind of degraded culture on that front, but really these are the people who shape the way we think about the

Mark Dever:

Law. Someone popularly said, let me write the songs and I don’t care who writes the laws. Who was that somebody popular staying anyway?

Carl Trueman:

Wasn’t Keith Getty, was it?

Mark Dever:

No, no, no. This is before Keith. Okay. I was told by a former clerk of a Chief Justice that who greatest advice he gave to this clerk he had was

Jonathan Leeman:

The chief justice’s advice

Mark Dever:

Of the United States Supreme Court that the greatest advice he gave to this clerk, this young lawyer was to have a good story about Trump’s law every time. So when you’re talking to the jury, have a good story.

Carl Trueman:

And when you think about some of the most fundamental changes in society, gay marriage, for example, I don’t think gay marriage triumphed in the culture because of arguments. I think Robbie George, sheriff Gie and Ryan Anderson’s book, what is Marriage is a brilliant defense of traditional notions of marriage. I doubt that it persuaded anybody to change their,

Jonathan Leeman:

It doesn’t beat the sitcoms that came out in the nineties.

Carl Trueman:

No, it doesn’t hold a candle to will and grace,

Jonathan Leeman:

Right?

Carl Trueman:

Stories that pull on the heartstrings, and it’s the same with the trans issue. The trans issue on one level is so bizarre. And if you’d said to me, mark 25 years ago that the most of all the unbelievable aspects of continental philosophy, and gender theory would carry all before it, I would never have believed you.

Gender theory is carried all before it, not because people have read Judith Butler, gosh, if you read Judith Butler, it’s incomprehensible anyway. It’s carried all before it because the concept of gender, the concept of human freedom, and the concept of human happiness have been shaped by what we might think of as the fluff of pop culture. But he is actually the most significant.

Jonathan Leeman:

I remember how much I was shaped by a movie like Dead Poet Society in which you have the young man trying to define himself over and against the world or dirty dancing or whatever. So that’s not Judith Butler, but it’s accomplishing a similar sort of cyclization and sexualization of the self in a very chocolate-covered pill form. I want to bring a couple of these things, these threads of this conversation together, and just kind of reassert the church, which is what the journal tries to do.

Mark Dever:

And by the journal you mean the most recent journalism, right?

Jonathan Leeman:

That actually then did come out of this called expressive individualism in the church and it’s got a picture of an elephant with zebra stripes

Mark Dever:

And it’s green and white on the front.

Jonathan Leeman:

It’s a self-expressing elephant I think is the idea there.

Carl Trueman:

Zebra trapped in an elephant’s body, by the way?

Jonathan Leeman:

That’s right. And to say that the church is the solution, it’s the solution. The sentimental politics. No, we’re not trying to get a vision of the nation. We’re looking to the church as the true Pauls and as Peter makes so clear, it’s the church that does define us in who we are as Christians.

I’m going to read a little bit from Jonathan Parnell’s article on church discipline. He says, Carl Truman then takes sociologist Philip Reef’s idea of a psychological man who lives to attend to his inner self and combines it with Charles Taylor’s expressive individualism.

You do you is the result. And that only counts if you’re letting everybody know about you. However, for Christians to even join a local church or submit to a local church, they must directly renounce expressive individualism by accepting the church’s role in announcing and shaping their public identity.

Problematic Implications of Expressive Individualism

Jonathan Leeman:

What happens when a member’s inward quest for personal psychological happiness contradicts the teaching of scripture? Who decides whether that’s true? Who has the authority by becoming a church member, an individual Christian relinquish to the church, the authority to discern whether one’s conduct is sinful as guided by the Bible?

The individual effectively says I’m no longer an independent authority unto myself. I invite the church in. However expressive individualism cares less about unrepentant sin and more about the unrepentant audacity of the church to judge behavior sinful when the individual disagrees.

And then Bobby Jamison picks it up and talks about the true identity politics are going to come through the ordinances, it’s in baptism, in the supper that we mark off who the church is, who we are. I’m the one who’s died and been buried with Christ and raised again. That is who I am.

Mark Dever:

I think part of the courage that we have to have in this conversation, and part of the things that I think Carl, your scholarship has helped us with is to say, these are not as mysterious as my preference for this or that flavor or this or that color, but these are not fundamentally merely intellectual conversations.

These are fundamentally spiritual and moral conversations, and they have to do with the things that we know from the gospel and from scripture are the most important things about us. And so we have to engage seriously and spiritually with our own thoughts, with analyzing how we’re responding to things, let alone when we’re talking to someone who disagrees with her or doesn’t seem to understand what we’re saying.

Carl Trueman:

Yeah, I would agree. And I think one of the burdens of the book towards the end is we need to understand our own complicity in what’s gone on. It’s fascinating that the interest in the inner space, at the same time as Rousse was writing his stuff, Jonathan Edwards was writing the religious affections. The inner space is important and we need to think as Christians about how we are able to address the valid questions that arise out of that, but in a way that doesn’t concede the kind of ground to the authority of the self that Rousse does.

Mark Dever:

Exactly. You talk about that in your larger book, and one of the things that you’ve helped us with is unmasking or making clear these things that would be hidden from many of us. We wouldn’t know the background of thought and the long dialogue that’s gone on well enough to realize right there is a crucial move.

I need to stop and examine this according to what scripture says. I’m sure you’ve heard before the Als Huxley quote from 85 years ago in his Ends and Means where he said, for myself as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.

The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. We objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust.

The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confusing these people and at the same time justifying ourselves and our political and erotic revolt. We could deny the world any meaning whatsoever.

Carl Trueman:

Yeah, and they succeeded.

Mark Dever:

Exactly. That’s exactly what’s happened and that’s what you trace out.

How Do Worship and the Local Church Help Shape People?

Carl Trueman:

Yes. I mean, one could put it simplistically, but in a way that I think captures a lot of truth. And the big question is do you think the world has a shape or do you think it’s just stuff? Does the world have a shape to which we need to conform ourselves or is it just a piece of cosmic Play-Doh to be submitted to our will and shaped in any way we wish? And I think that the latter has crept into Christian circles in ways that have not served as well.

Jonathan Leeman:

Something Michael Lawrence does in his article is he says to preachers, preachers, your job is to redefine people’s identity according to the Bible. Every chance you don’t just get up there and give moral expectations, do this, do this, do that.

Jonathan Leeman:

You get up there every Sunday and say, this is who you are and you’re doing it. Mark, back to your Supreme Court justice story about a narrative. You do that by aligning people with a new narrative, the biblical narrative creation, fall redemption, and glorification. And then in the ordinances, we define people who they are.

And in our worship our singing and our praying, we help people understand a new political submission and obedience as we go before the Lord and say, you are king of kings and Lord of lords. Right? We’re redefining people and all of these things.

And so it just again and again our points of connection for the pastor and speaking to the youth group and speaking to the Sunday school class and speaking to the whole congregation. Yeah. Again, I think your book wonderfully helps the pastor understand the world we’re living in. And then I think the Bible gives us how to respond to it.

Carl Trueman:

And what you’ve just described of course is by and large the logic of Paul in his letters. It’s not always the case, but typically Paul, the first part of the letter is telling people who Christ is and who they are in Christ. And the second half of the letter is saying, therefore, as a community you need to behave in the following way.

One of the things that I think pastors need to reflect on as well as what is worship. There’s been a long tradition of thinking of worship is where I go to express myself. Actually, worship is where you go to be formed and the Presbyterian and the Baptist tradition are not as formally liturgical as say the Anglican tradition.

I think there’s something we can learn from the Anglicans here you go to an Anglican church and you follow a liturgy. Why do you follow a liturgy? Because it isn’t about you. It’s actually about a sort of rhythmic practice slash recitation that over time shapes and forms you in the right way.

Mark Dever:

Peter is right here with us in 1 Peter 4, 12, and 13 when he says, beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. It’s hard to feel this world is strange if you’ve calibrated your relationship with it by poles of what it wants.

Carl Trueman:

Yes. And I mean this is one of the problems to just make the situation even more complicated, I guess freedom of religion is a great thing. Who wants to live in China? I delight to live in a country where I’m free to worship on a Sunday.

I’m free to choose where I go to worship on a Sunday. But there’s always a flip side to social virtues like that. The downside is, of course, that freedom of religion tilts the church towards being a consumer commodity. I get to choose. Power is tipped distinctly in the direction of congregants as opposed to elders. And this is the dilemma I think we face.

Again, all three of us around this table believe that strong local churches are important to shaping people, but the power of the local church is not that great because hey, as you know yourselves, and I’ve had experience in my church, you discipline somebody for some agreed your sin, they clear off, but they’re worshiping somewhere else five miles away on a Sunday morning. There is a practical problem of how one reinstates the true formative power of the local church in a context when there are so many local churches to choose

Mark Dever:

From. One story of hope for pastors in the DC area, I think we’ve been able to see a sort of family of churches grow up that are Baptist Presbyterian and Anglican, which respect each other’s membership and discipline a lot.

And therefore the relationships between the pastors help the respect of the congregations. We interchange members, and I can think of one example where we excommunicated someone. It was a tough case. The local Anglican church, it’s Evangelical, took him into membership, but they did it incredibly respectfully.

Their pastors met with our pastors. They were very careful and we understood what they were doing. We didn’t feel they were destroying us or our discipline. It was a tough case. He ended up being with him for some years. He ended up repenting of his sins, acknowledging them, seeing them becoming to be restored to us.

And then along with that church, we helped him get a place he needed to go physically to help things. And I could point to a number of ways in which a local PCA church we’ve worked with. So while there may not be a formal ecclesiastical court that causes it to happen necessarily, there can be respect between healthy congregations that recognize the integrity of what each other is doing and try to work with each other across some of the differences because of so much we see in common.

Carl Trueman:

And I think that’s great. Pastors need to be thinking in those terms. Presbyterianism has a sort of geographical reach, but of course, there are so many Presbyterian, that it doesn’t solve the problem of so many Presbyterian denominations.

So we have exactly the same problem as Congregationalists just in a slightly different form. So what you are talking about there of geographical cooperation between like-minded churches has to be part of the future if we’re going to solve this problem,

Mark Dever:

Get to know the pastors in your area, particularly the ones whose ministry, and the word you trust, and build relationships and credibility with each So that you can work together for those weakest of sheep. The strongest of sheep are going to be fine, whether they’re in the Anglican church or the Baptist church, the Presbyterian church, but it’s those weak sheep that you really want to show care for by building that correct Catholicity between the churches so that you can care for them. Well.

Carl Trueman:

Yeah, that’s a very encouraging anecdote. It’s a great story,

Jonathan Leeman:

Carl, brother, thank you so much for your time. The longer book is called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. The shorter one is called Strange New World, and the addition for junior hires is yet untitled and unwritten. But I trust it’s coming soon.

Mark Dever:

Somebody listening to this right now may end up writing that one.

Carl Trueman:

That’s, why I want to say I have no monopoly on this stuff. My hope is that these books will inspire others to develop materials that will be helpful.

Mark Dever:

David Wells, a quartet that he did back in the eighties and nineties feels like it headwaters of this in some ways. He was doing some similar stuff. He was, what’s

Carl Trueman:

Interesting about David Well’s books, of course, he doesn’t address the sexual revolution much at all. And I think that’s a, it’s not that he was incompetent scholar, it’s that the tide had not yet broken on the church at that point. So it’s interesting seeing what David doesn’t cover to remind ourselves of, yeah, how quickly this has changed and how quickly we’ve been overwhelmed.

Jonathan Leeman:

Well, in the nineties when he was doing that research and writing non-Christians were still saying adultery was wrong.

Mark Dever:

Yeah,

Jonathan Leeman:

Homosexuality is.

Mark Dever:

Well, Obama had a different position on marriage even when he was elected as president.

Jonathan Leeman:

Yeah.

Carl Trueman:

My mom, I remember my mom was not a Christian, but I was shocked when we stayed at a hotel when I think I was 13, which would’ve been the late seventies, or early eighties to find out there was a couple staying in the hotel in the same room who weren’t married. My mom hadn’t been to church for decades, and she was horrified that the hotel would countenance that. It’s hard to imagine.

Mark Dever:

And now you have Boris Johnson, and with

Carl Trueman:

That, no, no, no. Get a final encouraging comment, Carl. A couple of things. One, I mean, one can immediately default to the promise and say, we know how the story ends. The church is going to win. Maybe not my congregation or your congregation, but we know the church is going to

Mark Dever:

Win. Maybe not my denomination or your denomination,

Carl Trueman:

But we know that we know how the story ends. That can be a little glib and trite, but it doesn’t make it less true. In the short to medium term, I think I would suggest we reorient how we think. The example I use in class is I put up on the screen early in my humanities course a picture of Cologne Cathedral, and I say Cologne Cathedral. I think they began building it around about 1244. Didn’t finish it until 1888.

There were a couple of hundred years when they suspended work because of the reformation. But one thing we know for certain is that the first man who laid the first foundation stone at Cologne Cathedral knew he would not live to worship in that building, but still, he thought it was worth doing.

And I think one of the things that pastors need to focus on today is cultivating a long-term mindset among their congregants. Make the congregants realize that what we do today is not so that we win everything a week on Wednesday. We do things today so that our grandchildren still have a gospel to grasp hold of and still have a church to attend.

And so I would encourage people to stop thinking short term. Don’t worry about what’s going to happen in the next 5, 10, 15 years. Act now in a way that’s laying a foundation 40, 50, 60 years from now.

Jonathan Leeman:

Carl, Mark Dever once said to me when I was much younger, Jonathan, if you’re ever going to be a faithful pastor, you got to learn to play the long game. Thank you for your time, brother.

Carl Trueman:

Thanks for having me on.

Mark Dever:

Thank you, Carl.