Dr. Carl Trueman delivered the Day-Higginbotham Lectures at Southwestern Seminary in October of 2024. This is the first of his two-lecture series. You can review his second lecture here.
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
David S. Dockery 0:00
A good evening. What a joy it is to see you tonight. Thank you for being with us. We are so pleased that you are here, and we’re so pleased with our lecturer for this year. I know that we’re all in for a very special treat. This is the Fall 2024 Day-Higginbotham Lectures at Southwestern Seminary, and this is a very special time in the life of our campus. TheDay-Higginbotham Lectures have been a fixture and feature at Southwestern Seminary since 1965. And in God’s kind providence, some of the finest Christian thinkers, theologians, and scholars across North America and Europe have come to deliver these lectures. And we are especially glad to have our lecturer for this evening, who falls into that highly distinguished category, and I’ll have the privilege to introduce him to us in just a few minutes.
David S. Dockery 1:05
But I want to ask us, as we begin, if you join me for a word of prayer. We commit this time to the Lord and then we look forward to this very special night. Oh God, we recognize you tonight as our Creator and Redeemer, Sustainer, Defender and Friend. And we pause to say thank you for your every blessing to us and to the Southwestern community. And we thank you for those who, in their generosity and kindness, established this lectureship years ago. And we thank you for the heritage of this institution that has been shaped by and through these lectures over the years. And now we pray for your blessing and your Spirit’s enablement for our speaker. And we ask that what we do this evening would honor you and be good for us in advancing the gospel. In the name of Christ, we pray, amen.
David S. Dockery 2:09
Our lecturer for this evening is Dr. Carl Truman, and he needs no introduction to many of you. You know of him, you’ve read his works. He currently serves as professor of religion and biblical studies at Grove City College in western Pennsylvania. Before that, he served as the Paul Woolley professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary. And he’s also been on the faculty at the University of Nottingham and the University of Aberdeen. His education: he holds degrees from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. is from Aberdeen. Most of us know him through his prolific pen, through his writings. He is historian, a church historian, historical theologian, and a public intellectual. He has written in the areas of church history, philosophy, cultural engagement, works on John Owen, Martin Luther, important works on creeds. And the work that many of you perhaps know best, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and other works […] related to that. Many of you get a weekly dose of Carl Truman through First Things blog posts, and there you get his take on some key issues of our day. And always thoughtful, always grounded scripturally, and always informed by the best of the Christian tradition. He has been the William Simon Fellow at the Center for Religion and Public Life at Princeton University, and also servedfor many years as editor of Themelios, one of my favorite journals, and I’m sure the same for you as well. He has been to Southwestern on two other occasions, and we’re delighted to have him back with us once again. And I am very pleased that he is here.
David S. Dockery 4:16
My first encounter with him personally, not through his writings, but personally, I had the privilege about six or seven years ago in the fall semester to give two lectures at Grove City College, and he had just come to join the faculty, having come from Westminster. And Dr McNulty, the president there, was so excited. He told me that among their new faculty was Carl Truman. I said, yes, I have read the story. Congratulations! I knew several their faculty, but adding Carl Truman to a faculty certainly steps things up a bit. And so he said, Are you willing to take questions and answers after your lecture? I said, Yes, as long as Carl Truman does not ask a question. And so I delivered my first lecture, and then they opened it up. The provost was leading the discussion, and there at the–I can see exactly where he was sitting, right there on the left, about two thirds of the way back–first hand up, Carl Truman threw me a nice softball that I tried to get right, but nevertheless, that was my first personal encounter with him, which I will not forget, and I have enjoyed opportunities to be with him on several occasions since, thankful for his friendship and thankful that he is here with us tonight at Southwestern Seminary. Please join me in welcoming here to the Day-Higginbotham Lectures, Fall 2024.
Carl Trueman 5:43
Well, it is a great pleasure and honor for me to be invited to give these lectures and to be here to spend today and tomorrow with you. And I want to thank Professor Dockery for his kind words of welcome. I think listening to that anecdote of your time at Grove, we were both being set up. Because I remember the night before, the dean called me and said, The president is worried nobody will have a question for Drs Dockery, come with a question. So we were being set up, I think, by the highest levels of Grove City College at that point. But I do want to thank President Dockery for his kind invitation, and to thank Dan Darling for setting this up. And also to thank Emily and Meagan, who worked behind the scenes to make sure that I got here on time, and to put on the lovely dinner that my wife and I both just enjoyed a few moments ago. So thanks to all of the Southwestern team who were involved in setting this up, and also another word of thanks to Southwestern. I have indeed been here twice before. I spoke in chapel, and then Dr Patterson, who was then the president, invited me back to to give a lecture. And I remember saying to Dr Patterson, But I’m a Calvinist, and you’re not very keen on Calvinists. And he said, I hate Calvinists, but in your case, I’ll make an exception. So I came back, and in 2016, I gave a couple of lectures on a book I was planning to write. And the book I was planning to write was an introduction to the writings of Philip Rieff. Crossway had approached me and asked if I would do something for Philip Rieff, the equivalent of that which James Smith had done for Charles Taylor, a sort of introduction to his work for students. And I gave a couple of lectures here, and had some wonderful interaction with students and faculty. After those lectures, that set me down a completely different path. And that book was never written, but actually became The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. So, I’m very grateful to the students and faculty at Southwestern for redirecting me, without even knowing they were doing it, onto what proved to be much more (from my perspective), a much more interesting and fruitful path. So thank you for that.
Carl Trueman 8:20
My title tonight is Blessed Are the Transgressors. I am fortunate enough to be at the point in my career where I basically only read and write things that I’m actually interested in. If you’re an academic, you spend many years of your academic career teaching stuff you don’t want to teach and having to read books you don’t want to read. I’m now close enough to retirement that I’m able to indulge myself. And if there’s a problem I see, or an idea that I have, that I want to explore, I’m able to explore it. And one of the things that has gripped my imagination over the last couple of years is not so much, why our world is becoming so “secular,” in the typical sense of the word, but why it is becoming so exultantly so? And the example I might give you from election year would be this. 30 years ago […] the mantra about abortion from the Democratic Party would have been “safe, legal, and rare.” We now in an election season, and I’m saying this not to score a political point, but simply to draw out a difference in the way we think and speak today. We’re now at a point in our culture where abortion is something to be boasted about, shouted about, “glory to it!” It seems to me that the former (“safe, legal, and rare”), is that kind of, “Okay. We live in a world that is not perfect. We live in a world where sometimes problematic decisions have to be made, sometimes maybe there is no obviously right answer, and reluctantly, we find ourselves doing something we would rather not do.” That is quite different to boasting about that thing. Now, as I say, I’m not here to make a political point. I’m interested in, why is it that we now live in a world where boasting and exalting in what would typically have been considered wrongdoing has become a virtue? Why is it that transgression, if you like, is now something in which we are to glory?
Carl Trueman 10:43
We see this manifested in various ways, in the way that the Christian faith, for example, is gleefully derided by the whole cadre of academics as an instrument of imperialist oppression. We see it in the casual blasphemies of pop culture. I raise the question often in class […] if nobody listens to the lyrics of pop songs, why are the lyrics so uniformly obscene most of the time? You know, you don’t get anybody, mainstream rapper rapping about chastity, for example. Well, if nobody’s listening to the lyrics, one wouldn’t have thought the content of those lyrics made any difference. But it seems that the market says otherwise. I think of the European Parliament, decorated with a picture of a queer Jesus and his disciples dressed in BDSM gear. It is many generations since Christianity was a an oppressive cultural force in Europe, and yet constantly the transgressing of Christianity, the blaspheming of Christian symbols pops up in the public sphere. Why is this? Well, I want to come to that a little bit later. What I want to suggest is this, and it’s something that I don’t think I really grasped when I wrote The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and that is, that the way that the modern self intuits the world and thinks of the world isn’t just a therapeutic one. That was my argument in the book. It isn’t just about making ourselves feel good. It also tilts towards transgression. It tilts towards the constant crossing of lines that have been deemed to be holy. We’ll come to that in more detail later. But before we do, I want to set this against the background of the general problem that we face today. And the general problem is this. It is not that we don’t know how to define “woman” anymore. I think it’s that we no longer know exactly what it means to be human.
Carl Trueman 13:21
It was 80 years ago last year that C.S. Lewis gave the lectures that were to become The Abolition of Man. I was joking last week about C.S. Lewis. I I grew up in a non-Christian home. Somebody gave me a copy of Prince Caspian once for Christmas, and my mom said, don’t read that. It’s religious propaganda. So I never did, but I fell in love with C.S. Lewis when I was a pastor in Philadelphia in my last six years at seminary. And each summer we did an outreach. We called it Narnia in the Park. And if you can imagine this, I literally sat on a rocking chair in a local park and read Narnia books to any kids from the local neighborhoods who would come and sit at my feet. I kind of got the accent when my associate pastor did it one year, and it didn’t work as well. He sounded– Lewis was Irish, but he sounded English. And I fell in love with Lewis then, and I started to read him. And it’s a little bit like that experience Mark Twain describes, about leaving home. You know, when you leave home at 18, your parents are the biggest idiots you’ve ever come across. When you return at age 21, you’re staggered at how much they’ve learned while you were away from home. And I remember going back to Lewis and suddenly realizing that actually Lewis has a lot to say. And The Abolition of Man, I would suggest–I said this about Philip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic when I spoke here in 2016, [and] I’ll say it about Lewis’s Abolition of Man. Lewis could not possibly have understood how truthfully he spoke when he actually spoke. It is one of those books like Triumph of the Therapeutic, that is in some ways more true now than it was way back when it was first delivered. And what Lewis put his finger on was, humanity is being abolished for various reasons, because he’s writing at the height of the Second World War, the height of the conflict with Nazism. What Lewis saw, I think, though, was this. That, among other things, technology was going to scramble what it means to be a human being. Technology scrambles our identity. Some of you will no doubt have read the great moral or ethical philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who makes the famous statement, I can only answer the question, “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question of, “What story or stories do I find myself apart?” Technology has scrambled those stories. Technology has scrambled those stories, and has therefore scrambled what it means to be human.
Carl Trueman 16:08
For the pre-Enlightenment Christian, the story of human existence was that of divine creation, and of men and women as made in God’s image, that determined the boundaries and the purpose of ethical behavior, which was to reflect the character of God here and now in order to prepare for life in eternity. What has happened over recent centuries, however, is that the markers that made that story so stable have slowly but surely been scrambled, deleted. If you think about it, think about a little thought experiment. Imagine being born in the 12th or 13th century. I grew up in a very rural part of Gloucestershire. I compared it to Arkansas, not very flatteringly, in the lecture I gave last week. I did have somebody from Arkansas come up and introduce themselves to me after the lecture. We parted on good terms, I would say. But we did part at the end. I think about growing up in Gloucester in the 12th century. Imagine that you would be born in a certain place, and the chances are you would not move from that place more than 40 miles during your entire life. In other words, my wife and I went on an epic journey this morning from Pittsburgh to Dallas / Fort Worth of a kind that would have been almost unimaginable in terms of the distance. For almost everybody living in the 12th century, space had a tremendous power. Time also would have had tremendous power. I grew up in a very rural agricultural area. I now live in a very rural agricultural area. I’m getting to the point in western Pennsylvania when I can almost tell you what week of the year it is by the state of the fields round about, because the rhythm of life in western Pennsylvania is an agrarian rhythm of life. It’s built around the seasons. That’s increasingly unusual today, because more and more people live in cities.Bbut in the 12th century, pretty much everybody lived in an agrarian environment, and that meant that time was very fixed. There was no flexibility to time. I joke with my students that we have a word for expressive individualist farmers in the Middle Ages, they are dead farmers. They have to follow the rhythm of the seasons.
Carl Trueman 18:57
Religion would not have been a choice. Now we could get into debates about how many people in the Middle Ages were truly Christian or not. That’s not my interest here. Religious adherence was not a choice. In Western Europe, there was only one church. You were a Catholic Christian. You were baptized as a Catholic Christian. You would probably have met the person you were going to marry pretty early on in your life, because he or she would come from the same village. The church calendar would reinforce the rhythm of time and the authority of religion. The liturgical calendar patterns the agrarian rhythm of time and the world itself would have possessed solidity and stability such that the questions, “Who am I and what am I for?” would not have been a very difficult one. It would have been given to you. I am Elred, son of Theodon, the blacksmith. When I grow up, I’m going to be a blacksmith. I’m going to live and die in this village. I was baptized in that church. I will get married in that church. I will be buried in that churchyard next to my fathers. Pretty much everything about you would have been given. The world would have been solid, and your identity would have been solid as well. All of this, of course, remains stable for a remarkably long time. If you jump from the 12th century to the 13th century, the 14th century, if you could travel through time in this thought experiment and do that, you wouldn’t see much difference. The faces would change, but the land would look the same. The rhythm of life would be the same, probably the names would be the same. Nothing would change decade to decade, century to century, and those questions, “who am I and what am I for?” would not only remain stable, but would appear to be fixed. There would appear to be nothing to ask about there. The world is fixed. All of this, of course, begins to change in the late 15th and 16th centuries. New ways of life and interestingly enough, new ways of thinking about the world and man’s place within it, begin to take hold. The world is becoming less solid. As populations start to move. More space becomes less authoritative. As cities rise, family structures change, the possibility of real career choices begins to emerge. Space will be rendered increasingly negotiable. Think about the 19th century. One of my heroes, sort of a guilty pleasure hero, Cardinal Newman. He’s born in 1801 and he dies in 1890. What a life. Imagine being born in England in 1801 and dying in 1890! What a complete transformation of everything you would have witnessed in your lifetime. Modern technologies scramble everything. We get a little premonition of this in the Reformation itself. 1522, Christophe Roschauer, the great printer of Zurich, calls his men together during Lent, into the workshop, in his printers office. And there he fries up a plate of sausages, and he and his men eat them. And I say to the students, that’s the moment the modern world is born. I said, What do you mean? Eating sausages? Do people not eat sausages in Middle Ages? Yes, but they didn’t eat them in Lent. And they didn’t eat them in Lent because they didn’t need to. They worked on the farm. If you know anything about farms, not a lot goes down on the farm during the sort of Lent period of the year. A printer needs to work, can work, every day of the year. A printer does not have the luxury of allowing his diet to be determined by the rhythm of a liturgical calendar based upon the agrarian rhythm of the seasons, when Roschauer breaks the Lenten fast, the new world meets the old world, and the New World wins. And technology has only accelerated since then.
Carl Trueman 19:17
We live now in a world where it might be characterized by the terminology of the the German theorist Hartmut Rosa. Hartmut Rosa talks about “social acceleration.” What does he mean by that? He means a world where, well, take the printing press. The printing press is invented–1430s, around about then–really takes off in the early 16th century. Leads to 150 years of bloody religious warfare before Europe can stabilize around the impact of this new technology, patterns of power change dramatically as people start to read. Rosa points out that we have the equivalent of a printing press being invented every few years today. And he raises the question of, what does that do to how one perceives time? And he talks about social acceleration. He says, We live in an era where we feel everything is constantly getting further away from us. I’m at that glorious stage in my career where, you know, it probably takes (we don’t have tenure at Grove City College), but it probably takes two or three years to get rid of a faculty member. Anyway, I’m learning my last software package. Well, I’m learning a software package. It’ll take me a few years, and I still type with two fingers. I type at the same speed, I think, which is not very fast. Two fingers have done me just fine. I still use written grade sheets. Next week, you’ve got to call in the computer person to set me up with online grade sheets. I just dread. I’m thinking that I’m learning a software package here that I’m told will solve all the problems that, I have a sneaking suspicion, the last software package actually created for us. And I’m thinking, I only have to do this once more, because next time a new software package comes along, I’ll be close enough to retirement that I’ll be within that sweet spot of three or four years where they’ll just decide, oh, it’s just easier to let him retire in three years time than risk being sued by getting rid of him in the interim. But think about it. Think about how today we constantly have to learn new skills right the way through to the end of our careers. Many of you are young, and that’s it’s fine. You grow up with computers. I was the last person in my school, literally the last person to learn Latin and not to do computer science. I was that perfect break point between the old world and the new. Think about it. Think about how technology destabilizes a sense of everything. Social acceleration, Hartmut Rosa calls it. It’s this idea that the next technology is hitting the beach before we’ve had a chance to assimilate and accommodate ourselves to the last one. We are constantly falling further behind. Two years ago, Chat GPT, I’d never even heard of it. Now it’s the biggest issue. It’s mentioned at pretty much every faculty or department meeting I go to. How do we handle Chat GPT? And it’s like, relative to assessment, and you can bet your life as soon as we come up with something that allows us to address that issue, there’ll be something else beyond it. One of my colleagues noticed the other week, actually, that Chat GBT doesn’t understand sarcasm. So, I propose that we made it compulsory for all students of Grove City College to include five sarcastic comments in every paper they wrote. Didn’t seem to gain any traction with the faculty, but it’s, you know, I throw it out there in case Southwestern is looking for a cheap and easy way to solve the artificial intelligence problem.
Carl Trueman 28:12
All of this is to say, in the world we live in now, the questions “What am I for and who am I?” are incredibly complicated compared to the way they were in the past. And that, I think, plays into this need to transgress. But there’s another step in the argument I need to make before we get there. Second thing I want to draw your attention to is not the, you know, the social acceleration chaos, not just that, but this. We are riding on the back of four or five hundred years where culture has slowly but steadily come to be detached from nature and even opposed to it. It’s interesting that the very time the printing press is starting to scramble things in Europe, we have the emergence of Martin Luther, we have the emergence of the first person in the language. Martin Luther: “How can I be righteous before a holy God?” He’s emphasizing the first person. Theologically, the same sort of time that Montaigne, the great French essayist, is suddenly writing a lot of prose that has I, me, and mine in it. The first person is emerging. The individual is starting to become the center of interest in Western intellectual culture. Descartes is perhaps only the most famous of these. And what’s happening at the same time as this also, and you see this in Luther and you also see it in Descartes, is that we might. say the world “out there” is becoming problematized. For Luther, of course, in his famous distinction between theologians of glory and theologians of the cross (a distinction that I happen to think is quite a good one, theologically myself), but let’s think about what it does for your attitude to the world. At this point, the world ceases to be a safe guide to who God is. The world is one thing. Reality is another. Reality is hidden under the contradictions of the cross. The way the world is stands in opposition to truth. Think about Descartes. I know there are big debates about the extent to which Descartes makes a mind/body problem, but it seems to me that, at a minimum, the body becomes more of a problem for Descartes than it ever was for Thomas Aquinas. What do you do with the body? There’s that very creepy bit in The Discourses where Descartes is talking about wax coming off his candle. And then he says, I look out of the window and I say that I see men. But do I see men, or do I just see automata wearing hats and coats? The body… how does the body connect to the person, seems to be something that Descartes is struggling with. Most significantly, for the purpose of what I want to say this evening is this, we have Jean Jacques Rousseau, who sets the inner, uncultivated psychological life of the savage, the noble savage. Not sure that he ever uses that term, but I think it captures neatly what he’s trying to say. He’s set in opposition to the demands of the surrounding culture. Man is born free, but finds himself chained to the demands and conventions of polite society. Rousseau’s focus on the inner life is not unique to him so much as it is a sign of the times in which he lived.
Carl Trueman 32:08
One thing I missed in the the self book, of course (one of those sort of “face palm” moments afterwards) Jonathan Edwards is writing Religious Affections at the same time as Rousseau is wrestling with, what do I do with my inner feelings? It’s not just Rousseau, it’s Western culture in general, including its Christian branches, Methodism, Pietism. Jonathan Edwards wrestling with, what authority do we grant to our inner feelings? We have this great emphasis on the inner space, then emerging on the “I” and the problematizing of the outside world. But we don’t have chaos. Why don’t we have chaos? We don’t have chaos with people like Luther or Rousseau or Descartes, because the bottom line is somewhere down the line, they considered that there was such a thing as nature and it had a kind of authority to it. Rousseau, I think, would say that if three people who were not corrupted by culture, but had never sat in a moral philosophy class, were confronted with a scene of dramatic injustice, say, an old lady being beaten up by a gang of Hell’s Angels, they would all respond in the same way, because they all are human beings. They have human nature. They see the face of the suffering lady, and they instinctively and intuitively feel empathy for her. So what saves these guys from anarchy and chaos is a belief in human nature.
Carl Trueman 33:53
Now bring the two sides of my lecture together. But what’s happening to human nature in a time of social acceleration, it’s being attenuated. It’s being eroded. It’s being abolished in a significant way. And that then raises the question, How do I know that I am authentic in this world? How do I know who I am? And I want to suggest that the answer that has come back is transgression.
Carl Trueman 34:39
We see this figure of the Transgressor emerging as a kind of hero, or perhaps anti-hero, in some cases, in the 19th century. Two figures, one of whom I’m going to come back to in a few minutes. But Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both offer images of the transgressor as the one who truly discovers and finds who they are. Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, sometimes translated as Superman (which, of course, has unfortunate kind of “comic book” connotations now), more typically translated these days as “the over man.” Well, who’s the over man? He’s the man who stands above and beyond the moral codes of his day. As moral codes have no foundation, but they grip the imagination and they prevent us from truly realizing who we might be, and therefore to be somebody in this world involves transgressing those codes. And in some ways the most perfect example of that in literature is Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov murders the old crone and her daughter. Why does he do it? He does it because he can. He refers to her, she’s a cockroach, and in slaying her, he demonstrates his own authentic superiority to her. And if you read the book, you’ll know the reason why the police chief gets on to him so quickly is because he’s written this article in a journal a few months earlier where he’s argued that murdering somebody is the way to prove that one is truly human and has an authenticity about one.
Carl Trueman 36:30
Nietzsche saw that transgression of moral codes, the given moral codes, was the way of asserting authenticity in this world. In some ways, he’s the guy who takes the scrambling of human nature that has been going on for several 100 years before him, and applies it most consistently. When he writes about Immanuel Kant, he will talk about Immanuel Kant as the spider in the web weaving his metaphysical cobweb, because cobwebs, they catch things, so the spiders can kill them. They’re lethal, but you can also brush them away with the back of your hand. And his problem with Kant is this, Kant gets rid of God, but then he smuggles him back in in the form of a human nature, to which we have to conform in order to be truly existent beings. And Nietzsche’s response to that is, No, we must transgress in order to demonstrate vitality as individuals. Nietzsche understands that the modern self, if you like, is a theological self that must rebel against the moral codes that were established by the God upon which society was once built. Nietzsche’s great fear is herd instinct. How do you know that you are you? How do you know that you are you? Nietzsche would say, Do you just go with the flow when you’re with your friends? Do you just behave in the way they expect you to behave when with your parents? Do you behave in the way your parents expect you to behave? Do you just behave in general, in society, in the way that society expects you to behave? How do you know that you even exist? How do you know that you’re not just going with the flow? Well, here is how you know you exist. You create yourself by breaking the rules, by transgressing the rules. It is only by breaking with the herd, by transgressing the rules that shape the instinct of the herd, that the individual can be truly authentic. This is why I favor the idea of Oscar Wilde as being the closest thing to a Nietzschean Superman in the 19th century. Here is how Modres Eckstein, the social historian, describes Wilde, the sexual rebel. Eckstein says, Particularly the homosexual became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Sexual rebellion, the breaking of the old religious taboos sexually, becomes a normative way of being a true human being in our world. And when you think of the connection, typically, between sexual codes and sacred codes, this isn’t just transgression, it’s also desecration.
Carl Trueman 40:04
We see a similar thing, too, in Karl Marx. Marx, interestingly enough, promotes the necessity of transgression and desecration for modern man. He and Engels draw explicitly on the language of desecration in the Communist Manifesto, where he declares that, thanks the advent of industrial capitalism, all that is holy is profaned. There it is, the impersonal process of capitalism in view, causing the disruption of the social order, as a matter of course. But elsewhere in his work, Marx makes the active criticism, and hence destruction, of religion a foundational part of the revolutionary project. Its most famous statement, of course, is, you know, “Religion is the opium of the people.” That quotation is often given in isolation. It comes, it’s extracted from a passage in his contribution to the critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law, that is much more interesting than that single quotation would suggest. Marx begins that section with the comment that religion is, quote, The self consciousness and self esteem of man who has not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.” Religion […] is that which prevents man from being man. Religion is therefore a symptom that human beings are not what they could and should be. He then proceeds to declare that the struggle for human liberation is the struggle against the alienating illusions that religion represents the world, he says, of which religion is the spiritual aroma. And then he sets the stage for his most famous statement of religion. Here, I quote the whole paragraph:”Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress.” That sentence tells me that Marx has, I think, sympathy for poor religious people. He looks at the poor religious people in the Industrial Revolution in England, and he sees them worshiping their God, and he sees their religion as a symptom of the fact that they are really suffering. He knows that they are really suffering. And then he puts it rather poetically. He says, This religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world […] the spirit of spiritless conditions, quite a moving statement, that, actually, and then he concludes, It is the opium of the people. The point he’s making is that the very existence of religion indicates that not all is well with the world. Poor people are hungry and oppressed. They know that this is not right, and they seize upon religion as offering the answer. In the case of Christianity, an aftelife of eternal bliss, in comparison to which, in the words of St. Paul, the sufferings and injustices of this life will appear to be but light momentary afflictions. For this reason, the destruction of false religious hopes becomes a foundational part of revolutionary action. And here is where he makes that point. To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo, the criticism of the veil of tears, the halo of which is religion. Criticism had torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain, he continues, not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain, but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will resolve revolve around himself and therefore around his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man, as long as he does not revolve around himself. End, quote. Religion is a major part of the problem, because it holds human beings in bondage and obscures from them the reality of their enslavement. Transgression for Marx, then, is an important part of the project of liberation. God must die for human beings to be free, all that is sacred must be profaned. It is the transgressors who will be blessed, whether you’re looking at it from the lens of Nietzsche or Marx.
Carl Trueman 45:08
Why do I lay all this out? Well, in some ways, I’m setting up the play for tomorrow’s lectures. So what I want to do tomorrow is think about how creeds and confessions might help address this. But what I want to alert you to this evening is that I think, at the heart of modernity, at the heart of the world we now live, in transgression, is the dynamo. It is a war– modernity, or the modernity in which we live now– is a war against all categories. It’s why the Q will ultimately triumph in the LGBTQ. The LGBTQ alliance is already fragmenting. The transgender movement is breaking it down the middle. Why? Transgenderism denies the categories of male and female, that the L, the G and the B affirm. That which is holy to the one must be transgressed by the next. It’s a war against all categories. Elsewhere, Nietzsche has a fascinating statement. I think it’s in the Antichrist. He says, We will not be rid of God until we are rid of grammar. Think about that. We will not be rid of God until we are rid of grammar. We will not be rid of God until even language itself is completely destabilized. Completely destabilized. And that’s a theological issue. What I’m trying to do here, I suppose, is this. There’s a lot of talk today about the need to re-enchant the world. Modernity is seen as disenchantment, and the answer is seen as re-enchantment. I think that underestimates the problem. The problem is not disenchantment. The problem is transgression and desecration. The problem is not that the world is a less magical place. And the answer is, read lots of Tolkien, believe in UFOs, and everything will be solved. No, the problem is transgression and desecration. And so the answer is not re-enchantment. The answer is consecration. The answer is consecration. And consecration–I have a fear that re-enchantment is a bit of an aesthetic category. It’s a category we feel, and nothing more. Consecration is not an aesthetic category. Consecration is on one level, it’s a theological category. But I will also suggest, and here I’m setting up the play for tomorrow, it’s an ecclesiastical category. To be consecrated requires doctrine, worship, and way of life. To be consecrated to something involves creeds and confessions, and that’s where I want to go tomorrow.
Carl Trueman 48:32
We live in a world where transgression is blessed. We even see this among so-called conservative politicians today, who use language in public that kind of destroyed Richard Nixon when he used it in private only 50 years ago. Transgression is everywhere. It desecrates us as human beings. The answer is consecration, and it’s to that that I wish to address myself tomorrow. Thank you for listening so patiently.
W. Madison Grace II 49:14
I want to thank you all for coming out this evening and hope that you can join us again tomorrow at noon for this next lecture. We thank you for coming here at Southwestern. Let me close this in a word of prayer, and you’ll be dismissed for the evening. Most Gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have indeed created us and that you have redeemed us through your Son. And Father, we live in a world that does rebel against you, and we pray that we can be light in this darkness and that we can live in a way that shows the glory of who you are. We thank you for this evening, and we thank you for the words that we have heard, and may we go out of this place more conformed to your image and living for you in your name we pray, amen.
