Dr. Carl Trueman delivered the Day-Higginbotham Lectures at Southwestern Seminary in October of 2024. This is the second of his two-lecture series. You can review his first lecture here.
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Dan Darling 0:00
We want to welcome all of you here to our annual Day-Higginbotham Lectures here at Southwestern Seminary, given in partnership with the Land Center for Cultural Engagement. I’m Dan Darling, director of the Land Center, and delighted to have all of you here, those of you who are students and faculty, and also those who have come to attend this lecture from the community. We’re grateful that you are here on our campus, here at Southwestern.
Dan Darling 0:25
I’d like to open with prayer, and then I’ll introduce our lecturer today, Dr Carl Trueman. So let’s bow our heads in prayer, shall we? Dear Heavenly Father, we’re so thankful and grateful for the opportunity and privilege to gather as brothers and sisters in the Lord, [to] gather as saints. We’re thankful for the good news of the gospel and for the rich heritage of the Christian tradition. We’re thankful that we can come and be encouraged and strengthened through this lecture and through the understanding and confidence that the heritage of Christian orthodoxy that has been passed down to us, generation to generation, not only will endure, but is the antidote and the hope in a very confused and chaotic world. We’re thankful for Dr. Trueman’s presence here today. We pray that you fill him with your Spirit as he speaks to us […] thankful for all those who have come to attend. We pray that you bless the food that we’re about to partake and help us to have a day that honors and glorifies you. In your name, we pray, amen.
Dan Darling 1:37
Well, our guest lecturer today for the Day-HigginbothamLlectures is Dr. Carl Trueman. Dr. Trueman is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He previously has served as the William E. Simon visiting fellow in religion and public life in the James Madison program at Princeton University. He also previously held the Paul Woolley Chair of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and has served the local church as pastor of Cornerstone Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania, Ambler, Pennsylvania. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and a master’s degree from St. Catherine’s College in Cambridge, England. Dr. Trueman, in addition to his academic work, is a contributing editor at First Things. He’s a columnist at World Magazine, and a fellow in the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Evangelicals and Civic Life program. Dr. Trueman is a church historian and theologian, known for his work on John Owen and Martin Luther, and is the best selling author of several books, including The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Crisis of Confidence (which, thanks to the generous donation of Crossway Publishers, you have a copy there for you to take home with you). And he also has a forthcoming book from B&H on critical theory. Dr. Treuman is a what I would describe as a joyful warrior. He’s a first-rate scholar and a churchman, and we’re delighted to welcome him here to the Southwestern campus. Would you give him a round of applause?
Carl Trueman 3:23
Well, it’s great to be back with you again this morning to round out the lecture series. And again, want to thank Dr. Dockery, Dr. Grace and Dr. Darling, for setting this series up for me, for inviting me to do it, and also thank Emily and Meagan and their team for the hard work behind the scenes that enables everything to flow so smoothly. I spoke last night on under the title, “Blessed Are the Transgressors.” My basic argument in the lecture, for those of you who weren’t here, is this that we live in an era where the whole concept of human nature, for various reasons, has become either extremely tenuous or has completely dissolved. Human beings, we are now a kind of construct of the technological society in which we live. And I also argued that over the last four orfive hundred years, an increasing emphasis upon the first person, upon the I, me, mine, and an increasing emphasis upon the the inner life, the will of the individual–these two things have combined to create a situation where transgression has become the norm. What does it mean to be a human being? We tilt always towards transgressing. It’s not just the case that the modern world has become a disenchanted world where there is less magic around and things seem less mysterious. It is also the case that we live in a world where we tend to think that the greatest human beings, the normative human being, in many ways, is the one who breaks the rules. And I use some specific examples. I said, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century, certainly his concept of the over man, the one who transcends himself and transcends his time, is an inherently transgressive figure. And I said, you know, Oscar Wilde would be a great example of that. Wilde has this interesting comment he makes in his great essay, “De Profundis,” where he says most people are other people. And the point that Wilde is making there is that most people just go with the flow. They’re never truly themselves. They simply follow the conventions of the day or of the crowd that they belong to. And Wilde did not do that. Wilde broke with the conventions of his day, and the British establishment, of course, severely punished him for that. But Wilde is the harbinger of the modern man, the transgressive man. I pointed to Dostoyevsky’s character, Raskolnikov. Almost any Dostoyevsky novel has a Raskolnikov kind of character, but Raskolnikov, in Crime in Punishment, is the man who murders the old money lender and her daughter. The daughter’s murdered kind of by accident, because she shows up at the scene before Raskolnikov has been able to escape. But he murders them both, and he does it in order to prove his superiority to them. He describes the old woman as a cockroach, and he’s already written an essay that actually becomes the big clue that leads the police to solve the crime, arguing that the real person is the one who breaks the rules. And lastly, I looked at Karl Marx, and I pointed out how the language of desecration is there in Karl Marx and is used as part of his revolutionary project. Ultimately, the shattering of religion, the shattering of religious taboos, becomes a revolutionary act in the hands of Karl Marx.
Carl Trueman 7:19
I was reminded that, just recently, I was reading an article in some journal of queer theory written by somebody advocating for drag queen story hour in elementary schools. And what was interesting in the argument was how the person used the language of desecration. The purpose of this, the person wrote, is to desecrate, to transgress, to shatter that which the previous generation considered to be holy. Well, what I want to do today, against the background of that, is make the case for churches developing a culture of confessions or confessionalism. I want to be constructive today and say, Okay, we’ve analyzed, we’ve isolated, we’ve highlighted one of the big problems we face in contemporary society. Let’s think about how we might address that. And I want to address 2/3 questions in this lecture. First of all, I want to ask the question, why does that culture press against creeds and confessions? Secondly, how do we create a culture where confessions are honored as a basic part of life? And then I want to address a third question, which sort of lurks behind the two. The two are going to be the big organizing principles in some way. But there’s a third question to bear in mind, and that is, what do confessions do that set them in opposition to contemporary culture, which we as Christians should stand against? It’s part of the background to why I wrote the book that’s been given away at this set of lectures, Crisis of Confidence. It’s actually a second edition of a book I wrote over a decade ago. The original title was Creedal Imperative, and the burden of the book was, and remains, a desire to persuade people from non-Christian, from non-confessional traditions of the value of creeds and confessions. And when I use the term creed of confession, when I talk about creed, I’m typically thinking about the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed, early church creeds that have a fairly narrow focus in terms of what they affirm. They affirm, if you like, the very core of the Christian faith, the denial of which is impossible to maintain and also claim to be a Christian at the same time, when I say confessions, I’m talking about the more elaborate documents that emerge in the 16th and 17th centuries as Catholicism and Protestants go their separate ways. Protestantism produces more elaborate documents that cover a lot more ground. These documents both build upon the ancient creeds, but also elaborate the Christian faith in a more sophisticated way, or a more thoroughgoing way. And there are church traditions like my own, the Presbyterian tradition, that regard the 17th century confession, the Westminster Confession of Faith, as what we call the “normed norm” of our church’s theological position. What do we mean by that? They’re the basic public standard by which our church is governed and guided.
Carl Trueman 10:41
I noticed, as I was driving across campus–being driven across campus, no insurance policy was voided by my trip over here in the golf cart. Somebody qualified to drive the golf cart drove it–but I noticed that one of the statements for Southwestern Baptist Seminary is “confessionally guided.” Now what that means, of course, is you have a statement of faith somewhere that you consider a summarizing central key message of Scripture that guides and shapes everything that goes on on campus here. That’s what we mean by a normed norm. It is not something that stands above Scripture. It is something that summarizes scripture, and is, in theory, at least correctable in light of Scripture. So if you discover, for example, you are reading the Westminster Confession of Faith, and you realize that it holds to infant baptism as a Baptist, you would, no doubt, want to correct that faith confession before you adopted it in your church. You would want to norm that norm by Scripture, which is the norming norm. All of this is to say, that’s what I mean when I talk about confessionalism.
Carl Trueman 12:00
Why is it that our culture presses against confessions? Well, in the book, where I was trying to make the case for good Christian people who aren’t confessional, adopting confessions as a way of protecting that which they consider most important. I come up with a number of reasons why Protestant evangelicals might not like the idea of confessions. One of them is already sort of alluded to it. One of them is that it seems to supplant Scripture as an authority. We are Protestants. We don’t like the idea of tradition as a separate, independent way of doing theology. Are confessions not tradition? So that would be one reason why one might reject a confession. And in the book, I argue, actually, creeds and confessions are normed norms, that we don’t see them as standing independently of Scripture. We see them as being under Scripture but conveniently summarizing scripture. Somebody comes to your church and asks what you believe. You could say to them, well, we just believe the Bible and hand them the Bible. Well, there is a Dutch phrase, “Every heretic has his text.” There isn’t a church on the face of the planet that claims to be Christian that would not say, “We just believe the Bible.” And yet, there are churches [who] claim to be churches that would deny the resurrection, for example, deny the Trinity. My Unitarian friends who “just believes the Bible.” We need something more than that when somebody comes to our church. So one of the things that I raise in the book, and counter, is that idea.
Carl Trueman 13:58
But let’s get more specific. Why have I produced a second edition? Well, one of the reasons is this, the work that I’ve done on the notion of the modern person has led me to believe that there is another reason why we don’t like creeds and confessions, that has less to do with our concern for maintaining biblical truth, and more to do with the fact that we have imbibed the intuitions of the kind of individualism I call “expressive individualism,” that percolates through our culture. One of the things we might notice today is this, in a world where I am at the center and where my feelings become authoritative for who I am and how I understand my life, we will naturally become impatient with traditional forms of external authority. Think about it.
Carl Trueman 15:03
Philip Rieff, the great American psychologist slash sociologist, makes an interesting point about expressive individualism and external authority. He says, the more that we start to think of ourselves in terms of our inner feelings, the more we will come to prioritize our happiness here and now, and the more two institutions will disappear, and two institutions will become more important. One of the institutions will disappear. Well, he says two, I’m going to say three, the three institutions I say will become weaker and start to disappear are this: the nation, the family, and the church. Why? All three of those things demand a sacrifice of the self. All three of those things require that their constituent members, at some point, sacrifice their personal happiness and comfort for the larger good of something bigger than themselves. Nation is an obvious one. Your men sign up to go to war, to fight for a country, when actually it would be a whole lot easier for them to stay at home and not do so. They do it because they realize that the demands of the whole outweigh the personal pleasures that they end up forgoing. Think of the family. You probably come across this phrase. Maybe you’ve used this phrase yourself: “No member of this family behaves in that way.” I certainly used it myself with my own sons, and I seem to remember my own parents using it to me on certain occasions. What’s being said there? To belong to the family requires a certain way of behaving that may not actually be the way I want to behave at any given point in time. But membership of the family requires that I forgo my own wishes and submit to the wishes of the whole.
Carl Trueman 15:11
Think about the church. What does the church do? Well, ideally, being a member of the church requires a sacrifice of the self in order to be part of the whole. And this, of course, is where it gets complicated. Think about that relative to the church. Think about freedom of religion. Is freedom of religion a good thing or a bad thing? I think on the whole, it’s a good thing. I do not want to live in a country where the government tells me who, whom to worship, where to worship, whether I can worship. I do want to live in a country where I am free to worship, or not to worship, the God of my choosing. But now think about that. That fundamentally transforms the nature of the church’s institution from what it was in the Middle Ages. Those of you here last night, I did this thought experiment. We traveled through time. We were back in the 13th century, and I said, you don’t get to choose where you go to church in the 13th century, there is only one church in Western Europe, and you’re going to be baptized, married, and buried in that one church in your village. Think about today. Well, we live in America. I live in Grove City, which is kind of a Western Pennsylvania Bible Belt. I suppose you live in Texas. That is Bible Belt. I’m guessing that for most of us in this room, there might be, there could be 100 churches within a 10 mile radius of here that we could, in good conscience, attend. We choose to go to one rather than the other. Religions become a choice. Now think about how that affects the way we imagine religion to be. When religion becomes a choice, something strange happens. Charles Taylor puts it this way, Charles Taylor has this very provocative saying. Charles Taylor writes terribly, generally. He’s a very clever guy. Needs a good editor, but every now and then a gem drops off the page, and one of his gems is this. It’s–I’m quoting almost exactly, I think I haven’t written it down, but I’m quoting from memory–You can believe exactly the same things that people believed in 1500 today, but you cannot believe in the same way. What does he mean by that? You choose to believe those things today in a way that people in 1500 did not choose to believe them. And he would also go on and elaborate, and he said, And you choose to believe them, even though it’s against the cultural flow. So your belief feels much more contested. It is a choice, and you feel that it is contested. What does this do? Well, by and large, it transforms the church, the church in a context where you have religious choice, which presupposes religious freedom, shifts from being an authoritative institution to being a consumer commodity. Think about it. Who is the most successful? Let’s use the term in the broadest sense of the word, who is the most successful pastor in the United States today? Joel Osteen. Think about it. Joel Osteen, he simply understands the game and plays it better than the rest of us. He understands that the church is now competing in a marketplace. And think about the theology (and I use that word very loosely in the case of Joel Osteen), think about the theology that he produces. What is it your best life now? mMake every day a Friday? I’ve not read that book, but that’s pretty confusing. You know, I have to work on Fridays. I have to go to church on Sunday.Saturday, that’s the day for me. I want every day to be a Saturday, because that’s the day I sit around and do what I love doing most, nothing at all. But think about what Joel Osteen is doing. He is a brilliant example of somebody who understands the consumerist nature of the religious freedom world and plays the game very effectively. Now that’s a very cynical take, but I think it is not a totally false take. We live in a world where institutions have been transformed by the kind of notion of selfhood that I was trying to articulate last night. Institutions, to use the language of the contemporary political scientist Yuval Levine, have moved from being places of formation to being places of performance. Places of formation, I think he says, to platforms of performance. Think even of social media. Isn’t it interesting that we use the language of social media “platform.” It’s a stage upon which one can perform. Well, think about that.
Carl Trueman 22:46
When you bring that model to bear in your life, when that shapes how you think about church, creeds and confessions become a problem. Creeds and confessions become a problem because they demand something of you, they don’t pander to your needs. They express a prior reality in the light of which you are to understand yourself. They impose limits upon what you believe, and they impose limits upon how you are to behave. So the whole notion of a modern individual, again, that I tried to articulate last night, that’s another death blow against creeds and confessions in the church. And that is why I think we should have them. Because if, as a church, we want to disciple our people not to be the kind of people that the world wants them to be, we need to press against that tendency. And creeds and confessions, for reasons I will put out in a minute, are important that way.
Carl Trueman 24:03
So I would add that to another reason why creeds and confessions are implausible. Let us not deceive ourselves when we say, Well, I reject creeds and confessions because I just uphold the Bible. Well, no, you don’t just uphold the Bible. You think the Bible means something. You can write that down. If I ask you, you still believe the Bible has a shape that can be articulated. Maybe the reason why you reject creeds and confessions is you don’t like the idea of something that inhibits the intuitive freedom and independence of yourself as an individual. Secondly, and building on from that, remember what I said last night, that external authorities in this modern world become sources of inauthenticity. We see ourselves as less authentic if we just follow the rules. Oscar Wilde, Most people live the lives of other people. In a world where the transgressor moves forward to being the normative ideal, any external authority becomes problematic. Could use the example of […] the remarkable, cruel crudity of political discourse, right and left. One of the my earliest memories was sitting on my mom and dad’s bed early one morning and hearing the radio. The radio was on, and hearing that Richard Nixon had resigned as President of the United States. And if you know anything about Watergate, you’ll know the terrible stuff went on there. But one of the things that sort of killed him in the public eye was that little phrase, “expletive deleted,” in the transcripts of the Watergate tapes. The idea that the President of the United States used foul language in private meetings was deeply shocking. I am hard-pressed to think of a leading politician today on either side of the political divide who does not routinely use profanity in public statements.Tthe current president, the previous president, both of them remarkable for the foulness of their language in public. One can only imagine the kind of language that they use in private. Why doesn’t this destroy them? Various reasons, but one of them, I think, is this authenticity. 50 years ago, we valued reserve, self control. I was fortunate enough to be brought up in an England where that was still the default. I remember my mom saying to me once, when we were going out, she said, You will be quiet because you are the least important and interesting person in the room. These days I would sue her for emotional damage or something like that, but that was the way children were: to be seen and not heard. Preferably, I think sometimes, not seen and not heard. […] Reserve was what was cultivated. We now live in a world where everybody knows that everybody uses worse language in private than they do in public. So when our politicians swear and use profanity in public, they’re sending a signal to us that they’re authentic. And it works. It works. It’s a sign of how the culture has changed. And again, it plays to that in our minds, the idea of being controlled by something bigger than ourselves. Standards, thinking, ethics bigger than ourselves is deeply problematic. It renders us inauthentic.
Carl Trueman 28:11
Third reason, I think, why creeds and confessions may not be popular today: immanence. Charles Taylor does a great job of this. In his massive and badly written, but brilliant, book, Secular Age, where he traces really from the 17th century onwards, he notices an interesting development in Christianity. The Christians get more and more absorbed with what he calls immanent arguments about the truth of the faith. The faith is true because it makes you hard working. It makes you successful in business. It means you can have a good family. Those kind of, what we might call “practical” questions start to rise in priority in terms of cases being made for Christianity in the public square. Think about that. What are great creeds and confessions? Do they focus our minds on transcendent things? The priority of the Nicene Creed is not me and my life. The priority of the Nicene Creed is the transcendence of God. I love teaching class on the Trinity to my students, because I love that bit at the end. Well, I put that answer, but I still can’t quite, can’t quite get my head around it. I always say to him, great, that’s the point. That’s the point. That doctrine of the Trinity is actually to remind us of how little we can say about God, how little we know of him, and how our appropriate response to God is. Or, some of you asked me to sign books for you. You’ll notice that I always put a Bible chapter in that book. What is the Bible chapter? Don’t look. That’s cheating. You should have looked already. Job 28, to my mind the greatest chapter of the Old Testament, where Job is saying, You know, think of a magnificent bird of prey. And how great, how beautiful is he. How he strikes without mercy. He’s powerful, he’s wonderful. He’s beautiful. And then he says, but you can’t compare a bird of prey to a human being. No bird of prey can go down into the mines and force the earth to give up its gems. No bird of prey can produce something beautiful. And then he says, But as high as man is over birds of prey, so much higher is God over human beings. And then think of how the book of Job ends. When God comes to job, he does not come very therapeutically, does he? He comes in the whirlwind. If you’ve never checked up whirlwinds in Bible, go and do a word search on whirlwinds. Whirlwinds are generally bad news. In our neighborhood last year, we had a tornado go through, just a small one, and you could see the line of destruction it’s left behind it. I don’t want to meet a tornado, a whirlwind, when I’m out walking. The whole point is that God’s transcendence is exalted. We read the book of Job as a story of the meaning of suffering, and it is that. But more than that, it’s a book about the transcendent reality, the incomprehensible transcendence of God. Well, in a world where we’re increasingly preoccupied with imminence, in a church world where we’re increasingly preoccupied with imminence, my happiness here and now, the whole idea of the transcendence of God gets pushed to the background, and those documents that press the transcendence of God upon us get pushed to the background as well.
Carl Trueman 32:00
There is also, of course, in modern culture–and I do touch on this in the book, though I would expand it today–there is a deeply iconoclastic aspect to modern culture. I just had a little book on introduction to critical theory titled Change All Worlds. It’s come out just this week, and it’s an introduction to some early critical theory ideas. One of the things that fascinates me about critical theory is this, and it’s a very critical thing, critical theory. It’s about tearing down. What fascinated me about critical theory in say, 2020-2022, was how a relatively obscure discipline went mainstream, and there were all kinds of people who clearly did not know what they were talking about, tweeting about it online. And I would say, critical theory, it’s almost impossible to tweet because it’s rarely expressed in sentences of less than about 700 words. It’s very–you read the texts and they’re very long and convoluted. What was interesting was how critical theory struck such a resonance with people. Why? I think it was this, it’s iconoclastic. We live in a world where we tilt iconoclastic and anything, anything that tilts iconoclastic, therefore has a resonance to it. And it was striking to me how many people in the church bought into this stuff naively, I think. And I don’t question their intentions. I’m not saying they were evil people with bad intentions, but their own minds were tuned towards iconoclasm. In that kind of world, creeds and confessions–what are they? They’re oppressive. They’re documents. They’re icons that need to be torn down.
Carl Trueman 34:03
And finally, I would also add, what else do creeds and confessions do? And this again, building directly on something I said last night. I used to think that people didn’t like creeds and confessions because they were exclusionary. Soon as you commit yourself to a creed or confession, you say, this is normative. You’re saying to anybody who doesn’t conform to that, You don’t belong. And I think that’s still true. But I would go further now and say this. I think the other thing that creeds and confessions do is related to that, is they establish stable categories of discourse. What do I mean by that? They set a vocabulary for thinking about the world. And one of the points I made last night was, we live in a world where the game is not to replace one set of categories with a less oppressive set of categories. The ultimate game is to get rid of all categories in their entirety. And I use the example of the LGBTQ. It’s why the Q will ultimately triumph, unless it is checked, because what is queer theory? Queer theory is railing against all categories. When that queer theory article I was reading said the name of the game is desecration, I don’t think that that sentence was narrowly targeted at the Christian faith. I think it was a scatter gun sentence, saying it’s targeted against anything that comes to have anything approaching sacred authority. […] It’s kind of the fate of a man like Andrew Sullivan, gay journalist, in some ways. He helped pave the way for gay marriage. He wrote some of the most articulate arguments for gay marriage in the run up to 2015, and his argument was essentially, it’s a way of opening up a conservative institution that will allow other members of society, gay members of society, to belong. In other words, he didn’t want to get rid of the category. He wanted to expand it to include those who may be excluded. What’s become clear in the years since is gay marriage did not do that. What gay marriage did was ultimately press the logic, I think, of no fault divorce, to the point where the category of marriage itself is so fundamentally destabilized that it’s hard to know exactly what it means or should mean today. And interestingly enough, Andrew Sullivan now finds himself decried as a homophobe, as a transphobe. Why? Well, he’s a gay man, but he still wants to argue that the sex, the nature of the human body, is critical to sexual attraction and critical to his identity as a gay man. He wants that category to remain stable, even as other categories have been destabilized, and the problem is you just can’t do that. You just can’t do that. It is not that the world today wants to get rid of a set of oppressive categories and replace them with a set of less oppressive categories. It’s that many of the intelligences today think categories are oppressive, period, and need to be dismantled. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic and provocative statement, to the effect that we will not be free of God until we get rid of grammar. We need a major assault on the meaning of language in order to get rid of God.
Carl Trueman 37:47
So that, then, is sort of further expansion relative to what I was talking about last night, on why creeds and confessions might be rejected. Creeds and confessions, they guard the holy. You read the Westminster Confession, and it presses you pretty early on towards the transcendent reality of the incomprehensible God. It absurd. It asserts objective coherence of truth, stable categories. The world is not chaos. The world is not whatever linguistic game we care to play about it. The world has coherence and shape, and that is reflected in the elaborate coherence and shape of Christian confessions. Confessions define us in terms of a prior reality. Joel Osteen’s game, and the game of many churches, find out what they want and how they want it, and let them have it, just that way. Confessions don’t allow us to play that game. Confessions want to say no, the confession will tell you what you want, and the confession will tell you where you can find it. And also, as I mentioned last night, what are confessions? They provide content to how we think about the world. I made the comment last night that I am not convinced that the problem in the world is disenchantment. I noticed this week my friend Rod Dreyer has just published a book on how to re-enchant the world. I haven’t read it yet, so this is not a criticism of his book, but I do think that our problem is not that the world has become a less magical place. I think our problem is that we desecrate that which is holy, and that to reinstate humanity as it should be, we need to grasp the holy and be reconciled to the holy. And that’s not a feeling, that’s not an aesthetic, that’s the gospel.
Carl Trueman 40:12
Okay, as I bring things to a close, then how do we move our churches, then, in a confessional direction? Many things could be said here, and I’m conscious that, as I lay out some general principles, they may look different in different cultures. And I’m when I say different cultures, I’m not necessarily thinking, you know, America versus Brazil versus India versus England. I’m thinking, could be different in rural Pennsylvania to Manhattan. But one of the things that I think we need to do is this, if the rejection of creeds and confessions or the suspicion of them is, in part, an imaginative thing that we just come from a world where we intuitively find these historical documents to be implausible, then we need to create a culture within our church where they become plausible once more. How do we do that? I would say first of all, don’t underestimate the power of liturgy. Many things one could say about liturgy. Now, many of you Baptists might say, well, we don’t have liturgy in our church. Well, you do. You have orders of worship. I’m sure it isn’t anarchy on a Sunday. When you say we don’t have liturgy, you mean there aren’t things that we say together, except there probably are. Of course, it’s just that you put music to them and call them hymns. You do say things together corporately. I remember once making a case for the Nicene Creed in church, and a guy came up to me afterwards and said, Well, we don’t believe in saying things corporately together that aren’t in the Bible. And I said, but you do that every Sunday, don’t you? And he said, No. And I said, Do you sing hymns? And he said, Yes. I said, well, here, why don’t you try this? I said, Why don’t you put the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed to music and sing it? He got the point. He wasn’t very happy, but he did get the point. At that point, the liturgical culture shapes us, not simply in ways of what it teaches directly, but in the way it shapes their intuitions. If you want a church culture that respects the historical documents of the church, then you should have a worship culture, a liturgy that respects the historic worship of the church. Now that’s not a hit against contemporary worship. That’s not saying don’t sing anything after 1900 or don’t sing it anything after 2015, but it is to say the way we worship needs to connect us to the past in some realistic way. And if we do that on a regular basis, guess what? People will start out more in a peace, of an appreciation for the church’s past.
Carl Trueman 43:09
I would also say that, you know, one of the great things about singing hymns from the past is this–and it’s why I sometimes get impatient with arguments against contemporary worship–You know, people say, Oh people write so much rubbish today. Well, people have always written rubbish. Actually, it’s just that time is a great corroder of rubbish. The Wesleys wrote an awful lot of hymns. Very few of them are still sung today. A comparatively small proportion of Wesley’s hymns, the good ones, I think. John and Charles Wesley wrote a hymn. I remember reading it years ago in a collection, “A Hymn to Be Sung by a Man on His Way to Be Hanged.” You know, not particularly relevant for most of us in our congregations these days, that. You know, that one has disappeared. It may have been really good in its time, but its time has passed. But the hymns that we have inherited from the past, and the psalmody, is important in attuning people to think about the past as an important source of wisdom and thinking for the present. I would also add that, because time is a great corona, you know what will be in 200 years time? There will be some, there’ll be maybe half a dozen to a dozen great hymns written in our time that are still sung. Why? Because they focus on the transcendent truths of the gospel, and not on the immediate needs of the present.
Carl Trueman 44:38
I would say preaching. I made this comment to the faculty yesterday in a slightly different context, but I am a huge believer in the fact that ministers and elders set the tone of a congregation, and I made the comments here: Angry minister, angry elders, will equal an angry congregation. Ministers have a duty to exemplify Christian virtues in the way they comport themselves, I would say particularly online. Actually, I sit on the Candidates Credentials Committee for the presbytery of Ohio in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I’m starting to take great interest in what candidates for the ministry do online in terms of, how do they express themselves? If I was to read this person’s Twitter account, would I get any impression at all that they are joyous Christians, or would I just think that they are nasty, angry curmudgeons, ministers? How do ministers create a historically respectful environment? I would say, in preaching, do not be afraid to cite the great historic confessions of the church in preaching. Strategically, I would say it’s typically not good to say, I’m going to preach on this passage in the confession. But, I think what is good in preaching is this: to lay out what the Bible passage teaches, and then to say, and a great summary of this is Westminster Confession, chapter 11, or 1689 Baptist Confession, chapter three, to accustom people to thinking about confessions as normed norms within the church. It’s amazing what the statements, the habits, the attitude, and the approach of a pastor can do in transforming the culture of a congregation.
Carl Trueman 46:46
Thirdly, I would suggest think about time. What do I mean by that? How do you grip the imagination of a culture? I used to give a lecture in my ancient church classes at Westminster Seminary when I taught there […] and the lecture was entitled, “How to Take Over an Empire.” And what we did was, we looked, in that class, at fourth-century Christianity. The fourth century opens with the last great persecutions of the church. It ends with Christianity being the official religion of the Roman Empire, and subsidies being stripped from pagan temples. How do you get there in 100 years? Well, the answer is, the church comes to grip the imagination through time and space. Territory gets sanctified. We would not particularly approve it, many of us in this room, but territory gets sanctified by the use of relics. Man, if I’ve got relics of martyr in my church, that’s holy ground for Christianity. The other way it was done was the emergence of liturgical calendars. And over the years, I’ve significantly changed my opinion of liturgical calendars. I don’t think it’s sinful not to have a liturgical calendar, but I think having a rhythm of the year that is shaped by the great events of redemptive history, and even connected to some of the great figures of post biblical church history, is a very helpful way of cultivating respect for history that would create the culture where confessions become more plausible. Now don’t get me wrong, I would not want the kind of lectionary approach to the liturgical calendar, where the text you are preaching on every Sunday is driven by a rigid pattern. But I don’t think it hurts for time to have a shape. Think about you Americans. I’m an American now, but I still I was very old when I became an American. So my imagination is not an American imagination. But even now, if you ask me, you know, when did that thing happen? I might say it happened around about Thanksgiving, or it was just after July 4, or, I think it was on Labor Day. Think about how my mind is intuitively thinking. It’s intuitively thinking historically, relative to the great history of the American nation. The battle over Columbus Day or Indigenous People Day. Wherever you come down on that debate, that’s not a trivial debate to question how you mark time. And the marking of time is very important thing, because it connects you and your identity today with great figures of the past.
Carl Trueman 49:44
In the same way, I’ve seen a battle over statues. Go back to my “space” comment, wherever you come down on the statues issue, that’s not a trivial thing. It’s a battle over space. And those who control time and space control the popular imagination. And I want to suggest that we need to do that in our church. If you want to create a culture in your church where confessions are honored, you can’t do it by simply telling people we’re going to be confessional. You’ve got to work at transforming the culture as a whole. I made the point last night that people don’t think really in terms of arguments, the imagination is much more complicated than that. We have to win the battle for the imagination. You have to create a world where historic documents intuitively make sense to our imaginations. So confessions, I think they should be part of our church life.
Carl Trueman 50:48
I think another great advantage of them is that they were written, by and large, at a time before the radical modern individualism had come to grip the religious imagination. So I’m not inclined to say, just because they’re old, they’re better. But I might go as far as to say, because they’re old, they offer us a potentially better understanding of the human relationship to God. But in order to bring our churches to the point where these things will become part of the culture, we need to transform the cultures of our churches.
Carl Trueman 51:23
And then, as a final thing–and I haven’t really had time to talk about this–I would say, and I think this is going to be critical in coming years. Why? Because the challenge is coming at the church now, particularly the challenge of what does it mean to be a human, and the challenge posed by technology are so complex that a 10-point statement of faith–praise God for those churches that have 10 point statements of faith, rather than nothing–a 10 point statement of faith is not going to be sufficient to provide us with a framework for addressing the kind of challenges we are likely to face in the next year. We’ve already seen a taste of that. 10-point statements of faith were next to useless in thinking about gay marriage, whereas the great confessions of the 17th century had positive statements about marriage that were extremely useful in being able to say, This is why we don’t agree with gay marriage, okay? I think I’ve spoken for long enough I’ll call it quits there, and I think it’s now Q&A. Thank you for listening so patiently.
