Why the Modern World Is at War with Human Nature

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Carl Trueman

   To put it in simple terms, there's a retreat, 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, 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, that you were required to take, as impinging upon you, or to use the modern term, as making you inauthentic. If you'd asked my grandfather, have you lived an authentic life, he'd have 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?

2. 01:13

   Michael Horton

   We don't 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.

3. 01:38

   Caleb Wait

   Hello, my name is (Michael Horton)Caleb Wait). 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)(Michael Horton)Michael Horton). Good to see you, Mike.

4. 01:51

   Michael Horton

   Good to see you, Caleb.

5. 01:52

   Caleb Wait

   But we're also joined by a very special guest. We're pleased to welcome Dr. Carl Trueman, 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.

6. 02:15

   Carl Trueman

   It's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

7. 02:18

   Caleb Wait

   So Dr. Trueman 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 Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, out April 7th, 2026. And Mike, we're also going to be talking with you about your book. Your new book is out now, Magician and Mechanic: The Roots of the Spiritual but Not Religious Phenomenon from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution. This is volume two in your trilogy on the history and origin of the divine self.

8. 03:20

   Michael Horton

   If I may, let me just say The Desecration of Man is the culmination of so much work that Carl has already done. 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. It's not only intellectually compelling but accessible. It's just a very thoughtful, incisive work. So glad to see it.

9. 03:51

   Carl Trueman

   Oh, thank you very much. That's very kind of you to say, Mike.

10. 03:53

    Caleb Wait

    Well, we're going to be talking about some similar themes in both of your projects today. For a long time, notable philosophers and historians and others have asserted that the problem with modernity is that it's cold, it holds to a dogmatic materialism, it's atheistic, it's quote-unquote 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. Trueman, and as you put it, Mike, striving to find the divine self within us. Why do you both think that telling this story is important today? Dr. Trueman, let's start with you.

11. 04:49

    Caleb Wait

    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, which I would see as 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 as 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.

12. 07:04

    Michael Horton

    The disenchantment narrative is sort of 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, thinking that it means atheism. But actually, we live in an extraordinarily enchanted age.

13. Michael Horton

    If you look at the statistics on the spiritual-but-not-religious phenomenon, for example, when people leave 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. Max Weber himself thought that disenchantment 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 Milbank 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.

14. 09:06

    Caleb Wait

    Yeah. What are some early philosophical figures and ideas that you both see as examples giving rise to this kind of striving for deification beyond creaturely limits? Mike, you talk a lot about the city of Florence during the Renaissance -- who are some figures from there? Dr. Trueman, who are some early modern philosophers who give rise to these themes?

15. 09:42

    Carl Trueman

    Yeah, I would say Friedrich Nietzsche is absolutely critical to this. In some ways he crystallizes the challenge of modernity. A passage I've cited in earlier works and cite again in The Desecration of Man is the famous madman scene from The Gay Science, where this crazy individual rolls up in a town square and starts haranguing the atheists 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 that 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 that 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 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 listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with Peter Thiel. When Douthat asks Peter Thiel, is humanity worth continuing, what's fascinating about that interview is that Peter Thiel hesitates before answering.

16. 11:30

    Caleb Wait

    A long hesitation.

17. 11:31

    Carl Trueman

    Yeah, a long hesitation.

18. 11:32

    Michael Horton

    And yet he's fascinated with the Antichrist.

19. 11:36

    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, as with Nietzsche, that 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 this front. He calls the bluff of the Enlightenment, which was by and large living off capital provided by Christianity -- got rid of God but retained human nature. Nietzsche essentially says, in the nineteenth 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, in society, it seems we think we have.

20. 12:27

    Michael Horton

    We have a lot of cultural Christianity like that. They want the fruit but not the root.

21. 12:31

    Caleb Wait

    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 things in Florence during the Renaissance?

22. 12:47

    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 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. He wrote that moving manifesto, 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 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. 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.

23. Michael Horton

    That is in embryo what we have with Nietzsche, and basically the philosophical, psychological, and scientific communities down to the present that Carl talks about -- the Anabaptists too, especially the radical Anabaptists. I actually argue in this book that the Anabaptists are more significant in terms of understanding modernity than the Reformers.

24. 14:56

    Caleb Wait

    It's fascinating to hear -- I think people might 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 fewer people are aware of. Brief us on what that is. Why were folks interested in it at that time?

25. 15:33

    Michael Horton

    Well, Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great Hermes, was considered a 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 and Neoplatonism, you had this Hermeticism arise around especially twelve treatises called the Corpus Hermeticum, the body of Hermetic works. This continued in various decrepit versions down through the Middle Ages, especially through Islamic and 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 instead. And then he basically embraced, in his own words, the Orphic spirituality, including Orphic rites. 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, 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 highly of Hermes Trismegistus.

26. 17:39

    Caleb Wait

    Yeah. So these are practices -- magical, occultic, what have you -- of people who are tired of contemplating reality as Plato did, and they want to change it, right?

27. 17:51

    Michael Horton

    To quote Marx. Yeah.

28. 17:54

    Caleb Wait

    Okay. So both of you -- Dr. Horton in volume one, but you continue it into this book -- you talk about how these themes are subverting these other ancient views that said to just stay in your place, stay in your station, that's where you're meant to be. People wanted to change that, and that's the type of thing you'd expect to hear from your tattooed barista today. Dr. Trueman, 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 are 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?

29. 19:13

    Carl Trueman

    I think there are various strands to that story that we've sort of pulled together. First of all, I think we could say that the last five, six, seven hundred years of the West have witnessed the increasing implausibility of external authority. If you grew up in the twelfth 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, lived, and died in the same community, or most people did. You'd be baptized, married, and buried in the same church. In that kind of world, external authority is very strong, very solid. The way people thought about themselves was generally connected to external things -- village, family. When you think about surnames, what are they? 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 referred 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 fifteenth, sixteenth century, with the rise of technology and the transformation of economies -- external things become much more fluid and liquid. And there's a sense in which, well, what 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 ancestors did. What is the constant about me? To put it in simple terms, there's a retreat, a move towards seeing that inner self-consciousness as being definitive of me.

30. Carl Trueman

    Now, when you think about that, that's not just a neutral thing, 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, making you inauthentic. If you'd asked my grandfather, have you lived an authentic life, he'd have 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 they've been taught, they never think about why, they surrender their agency to the crowd. And that, I think, 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 arises in sophisticated literature in the nineteenth century and is now commonplace in pop culture.

31. 23:04

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. As you mentioned, Rebel Without a Cause, for example -- it's not the point, there is no point, the point is to transgress.

32. 23:14

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, yeah. And I might add that certain ways we live our lives now also intensify that. When you think about X, the artist formerly known as Twitter -- who gets the most clicks on X? The rude people, the disrespectful people. You're not going to build a big following on X by behaving yourself or conforming to yesterday's standards. 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 towards exalting transgression.

33. 23:56

    Caleb Wait

    Mike, give us some concrete examples, also from the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods, of figures encouraging people to push back against their station, their embedded life, their place. What does that look like?

34. 24:18

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. Well, I can only sketch a little bit here. I've really drawn significantly on the distinction drawn by J.Z. Smith between locative and utopian societies. It's not that we move historically from one to the other -- it's more of a zigzag, sometimes more locative, sometimes more -- and in many ways the Reformation was just as locative as the medieval church. Now, of course–

35. 24:51

    Caleb Wait

    And locative being?

36. 24:53

    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. Every aspect of life is infused with religion -- it's not a separate part of life, it infuses everything. And 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 is that it can become oppressive, and those higher in the social order can use it to oppress 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 argue that it's rooted in this fundamental idea of a divine spark 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, that divine spark, I have to express myself, I have to escape from all the limitations of that locative environment. In 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. He would basically lead them to their dead loved ones. 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 give you that kind of comfort. And so now there was a rediscovery of the soul, a discovery of individuality, a discovery of an afterlife that individuals could inhabit.

37. Michael Horton

    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 Orphics. The Orphics were the ones who translated the shaman into a sage, taking those myths and 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 it on 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. You can go on and on with that history, but–

38. 29:08

    Caleb Wait

    No, thank you, thank you. So Dr. Trueman, more recently than the last hundred, hundred-fifty years, with the rise of these streams of thought and the rise of 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?

39. 29:37

    Carl Trueman

    Well, first of all, there's 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 years, 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. We see that manifesting itself in the twentieth 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.

40. 30:39

    Caleb Wait

    Right.

41. 30:39

    Carl Trueman

    Well, 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 we can overcome the limits 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. 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 human limitations, specifically bodily limitations, are problems that need to be overcome, whether it's finitude of intelligence, physical strength, or even mortality. These are all things 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 Feminism Against Progress, refers to human beings as meat Lego. I wish 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 the body is a problem. If the body ceases to be you but becomes the equivalent of a spacesuit that this spooky, mystical you inhabits in some way–

42. 32:26

    Michael Horton

    Or an obstacle to you.

43. 32:27

    Carl Trueman

    Or an obstacle, yes. 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 the technological revolution. This is where, sadly, a lot of Protestants have been left somewhat shorthanded. 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've 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? I love a bit in Thomas Aquinas's lectures on First Corinthians, where he makes a comment to the effect that 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.

44. Carl Trueman

    And I love that emphasis. I think that's something we as Protestants need as a foundation to push back -- we need a proper understanding of the significance of the body, and the gospel gives us that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's the foundation for understanding that the body is not a spacesuit. It's actually you, in a deep and profound sense.

45. 34:25

    Michael Horton

    You interact, Carl, with Peter Singer quite a lot -- the Princeton ethicist, which sounds like an oxymoron. But when you talk about freedom, it strikes me that that's where his Gnosticism comes in -- 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.

46. 35:18

    Carl Trueman

    Yeah. I think the incoherence of Singer's position is demonstrated by the inconsistency of his own life. There's an interview online where Singer is being interviewed about his philosophy, and the interviewer, towards the end, raises the issue of Singer's own mother, who sadly struggled with Alzheimer's disease and dementia. By all accounts, Peter Singer helped care for his mother rather beautifully. He's asked by the interviewer, isn't that rather inconsistent with your philosophy? And Singer's answer is eloquent -- 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. That was the woman who put a sticking plaster on your knee when you grazed it at school. That was the body that looked you in the eye, 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 about Mary Harrington's arguments against abortion -- 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 to say, 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, my eyes, my physical fitness. The physicality of human existence, I think, has profound moral significance for who we are.

47. 37:04

    Caleb Wait

    Dr. Trueman, in The Desecration of Man, you warn that the renewed interest we see in culture over the last couple of years in Christianity, among cultural elites and large podcasters and influencers, is often driven by resistance to woke ideology, and that this might be short-lived if it treats Christianity mainly as culturally useful rather than itself true. There's a friend of the show, James Wood, who was on with us -- he's a PCA minister. He was–

48. 37:48

    Carl Trueman

    I know James, yeah. He used to work at First Things.

49. 37:52

    Caleb Wait

    Right, right. And he coined a great term, reality respecters -- he says reality respecters are welcome. We've heard stories from people like Louise Perry and others who say it seems like Christians, like 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 swimming in this current -- Jordan Peterson, Dawkins even called himself a cultural Christian. There are more who just like the aesthetic and taste of Christianity. You warn against that -- share more about that, because I think some folks might think, well, you're just trying to -- we don't want to cast skepticism to true conversion. But what do you mean by that?

50. 39:08

    Carl Trueman

    Well, first of all, you have to understand that the gospel requires belief in the physical resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. As Paul says, if Christ is not raised, we are of all people most to be pitied. My fear is that those who latch onto Christianity solely for the purpose of providing cultural, social, or political stability are engaging in what Nietzsche himself would have defined as nihilism. We tend to think of nihilism as not believing in anything, just the rejection of any positive truths. But Nietzsche has a more subtle definition -- for Nietzsche, nihilism is carrying on as if nothing has changed when everything has changed. For him, Christians and philosophers like Immanuel Kant are your classic nihilists, because they're pretending God isn't dead and 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 Nietzschean accusation of nihilism. I remember being at Princeton nearly ten years ago -- I went to hear Sir Roger Scruton give a lecture, 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 Haldane, and 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 build a beautiful castle floating in the air that's liable to fall down at any moment. And Scruton, to his credit, hesitated for a moment, smiled, and said, yes, I know, but I just can't go there. I think Haldane put his finger on something -- if your only interest in Christianity is that it happens to justify your cultural tastes or 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 intellectuals and elites in Christianity -- I really do, partly because I think cultural Christianity does do some social goods. Bottom line, 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 the 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 proclaimed, then there's real hope for their souls. That's fantastic. But you make yourself vulnerable to the postmodern critique if you say, well, I don't believe in the resurrection, but I think Christianity is useful – doing the Richard Dawkins thing -- any critical theorist worth their salt is going to point the finger and say, that's just manipulative. You're just arbitrarily grabbing hold of something because it fits your taste and does what you want it to do. You're not interested in the truth claims that Paul presses again and again in the New Testament.

51. 42:30

    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. 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 -- there's a lot of Nietzsche on both sides of the aisle.

52. 43:38

    Carl Trueman

    Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think the right, at the moment, is 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 do a bit of mutual backscratching, right from when you cut your teeth going after the prosperity gospel people, the Robert Schullers -- 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. Just before I came on air, a friend sent me a video clip of a group of pastors saying they were fed up with those who opposed women's ordination, because guess what -- 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 that's really leading to a downplaying of distinctive Christian truth.It's being made subservient.

53. 44:51

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, the recruiting video I saw yesterday for new ICE recruits had, in the background, explosions, shooting, your typical military engagement, and then, in Gothic letters, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be sons of God. What a picture for people to see how incongruous that is -- just completely using, actually blaspheming the name of Christ.

54. 45:31

    Carl Trueman

    It reminds me of George Lindbeck's famous example of the Crusader warrior shouting, Christ is Lord, as he smashes his sword down on 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.

55. 45:52

    Michael Horton

    One of the things I appreciated was that it wasn't just critique, wasn't just definition and explanation -- which was helpful -- but it was also, okay, where do we go now? It's hard to find succinct, practical summaries of what we should be looking for now. 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?

56. 46:30

    Carl Trueman

    Yeah, well, I'm very grateful to my editor, Brea Sanford, for that, because she kept pressing me -- 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 -- if desecration is the problem, and desecration manifests itself in us treating each other in inhumane or dehumanizing ways, a couple of comments. One, consecration is going to be the answer. 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. So in the last chapter I ask, how does Christian consecration take place, how does the battle for the Christian imagination take place? 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 heads, we need to think about the world in the right way. The primary place we're taught that is church. But secondly, there's also a worship aspect to Christianity -- the cult, or the liturgy, is important, because we need to be in worship services where the content and rhythm of the service reinforce the dogma being taught. Some of that happens in unusual ways -- I cite some research in the book showing 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. 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 and structure of the worship service presses home the drama of the gospel. And then when you move to 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 -- treating other people as human beings -- that both reflects the character of 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 or postgraduate student. They've long forgotten me, I'm sure, if they're even still around. But you never forget the names and 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 activist political right that 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 a significant length of time to do it. But we have to start now.

57. Carl Trueman

    And of course, we have divine promises attached. We're not simply relying on technique when we say the teaching and the liturgy will shape us -- we're not simply relying on our own linguistic ability. We're resting on promises God has made relative to the proclamation of his word, the administration of his sacraments, and the gathering of his people together in worship. So I really wanted to end the book not just on a positive note, but on a positive note that any Christian can engage with -- you may not be able to teach, but you can be hospitable. There's something in the last chapter for every Christian to be part of the solution.

58. 50:44

    Caleb Wait

    The last chapter truly is worth the price of the entire book, in my opinion. One last question for you both. Your works trace the influences and trends that have shaped the modern imagination -- neither of you is trying to be polemical toward other Christian traditions or specific leaders. To step back a bit, I'll say that in evangelical circles there's a tendency among pastors, leaders, and online influencers to explain cultural breakdown in overly simplistic terms -- 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 you both write about, the specific figures and events that shaped modernity over time. What your work highlights for me is that many contemporary Christian narratives, even those trying to be quote-unquote traditional, are often deeply modern. Instead of desecrating traditional values, as the left, progressives, and postmodernists do, many today in our own circles are hell-bent on desecrating liberal egalitarian values. Many Christians online make a spectacle of this, wanting to ban the Civil Rights Act, the First and Nineteenth Amendments. Some so-called Christians online fantasize about the genocide of Jews. And suddenly they are ironically speaking as Nietzscheans, in this Promethean, neo-pagan, in this utopian way. How can we – in the church – pastors and leaders not only better diagnose what's happening out there in the culture, but resist those trends as they ironically bubble up inside of us? 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?

59. 53:21

    Michael Horton

    Well, one forgotten word is repentance. People can say, well, I turned to Christ, but I'm still in a same-sex relationship, or I turned to Christ, and yet I still think I can make misogynist comments in public, or I'm a Christian, but I can completely tear other people down in order to raise myself up. No -- repentance means that in order to turn to Christ, you have to turn from all of that. And where does that happen? It certainly involves metanoia, changing 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 -- it forms us, whether it's the liturgy of our nine-to-five jobs, the liturgy of election cycles, or the liturgy of baseball games. There are liturgies all over the place, and we indwell many different liturgies. Especially 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 doctrine gets transformed into doxology, then there will be no discipleship.

60. 55:08

    Carl Trueman

    I agree with Mike. If we step away from the theology and look at some of the practicalities, I'd suggest one area where a lot of Christians tend to assume something's just a tool, where it's actually very transformative, is our use of technology. I get students to ask in class -- 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? It's become very helpful, in the last few years, for more and more Christians to realize that the technology we have today is not just a tool -- it's transformative, it reshapes how we think about ourselves. That's just one simple example. If you understand the specific ways sin is able to get a grip on how we think about ourselves -- and they vary from generation to generation, time to time, place to place -- knowing the tools sin has at its disposal makes you think of strategies to mitigate or combat that. So I'd say it's helpful to have these genealogies of the modern crisis, in order to see where you need to practically press on things. You go through church history -- fourth, fifth century, it's the doctrine of God, it's Christology. Sixteenth century, it's sacraments and authority. Today, it's the doctrine of man. 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.

61. 57:03

    Caleb Wait

    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 Trueman. 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)(Michael Horton)Michael Horton). Please pick these up, sit with them, think on them, so that we can press against those trends that subvert our own humanity. Thank you both so much for your time.

62. 57:45

    Michael Horton

    Thank you, Caleb.

63. 57:46

    Carl Trueman

    Thanks for having me on.

64. 57:46

    Michal Horton

    Thank you, Carl.