Carl Trueman's New Book

                                               Carl Trueman

I have been reading Carl Trueman’s  The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self - Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution. (Crossway. )I could hardly put it down. It is a weighty, clear, and thorough treatment of its theme, the modern understanding of one’s self. Throughout the book, the author seems to be in control of his material, and has a clear, commanding style.  He is a historian by profession, and a Conservative Protestant.  A treatment of this kind of analysis on contemporary culture makes  the book pretty unique.

This book can be thought as a study of a history  of ideas, or of human culture, and in the influence of its elements on our contemporary world , the world of human values and priorities of its culture. In theological terms, then, the book is an exercise of anthropology, the doctrine of human beings, involving an estimate of some of its current expressions. Some of these data are psychological, others from poetry, and in the arguments political philosophy. If you stick to the text, my guess is that you will learn a lot. Trueman’s style is clear, and his contents are highly organised. He is highly proficient in the mores of our non-Christian neighbours, to adolescent children, and agenda of the media. There is a welter of material, but to his diligence and clarity, his readers  will usually know where they are in any place they come to.

The sources

The key to what follows in the book is the thought of Philip Rieff (1922-2006 ), an American sociologist, whose view of the modern Western culture is  that its dominant feature is what he calls the 'plastic' view of the self, joined Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, (1931 - ) whose books Sources of the Self, and The Making of the Modern Identity, strongly concur in the character of our culture,  though not knowingly, They have arrived at different times and places of a similar outlook. 

The third influence is Alasdair Macintyre, (1929 -      )  the philosopher, who is the author of a number of books, of which After Virtue (1985). Their interest to Trueman lies in versions of psychological views of human nature…… . Each of Taylor and Macintyre are Roman Catholics. Macintyre  has argued for many years the view that  ethics in the modern world is emotive, (nothing but expressions of emotion), as a result of which moral argument and modern ethical objectivity, and the ideas of virtue and vice, have become impossible.What once views and intuitions were settled as matters of fact, and of the law, they now are matters of choice. People are free to pursue their own projects. Other influences are Romantic English poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake, Neo-Marxism and the influence of Nietzsche and Karl Marx, and Darwin.

What do this rather different trio of Rieff, Taylor and Macintyre have in common? I think it is fair to say that Trueman treats them as sources of the reimagining of the human self. The three thinkers do not concur, and certainly have not collaborated,   But their approaches overlap, each providing materials which can provide elements of the modern view of the self. In this situation argument regarding matters of sex is futile. No doubt Trueman could have given his readers other examples. What interests his interest is the LGTBQ+ community, and their birth and variety, from it.

The Introduction

It is my plan here to introduce the book through its first two chapters ‘Reimagining the Self’, and ‘Reimagining our iCulture’ set the basis of the book, its given. And chapter 2 will give the interested reader a slice of Trueman’s scope, and a brief taste of the chapters that follow, ‘Reimagining the Self’, and ‘Reimagining Our Culture." ‘Reimagining’ is Taylor’s word for the newly discovered of the human self, He sees such 'reimagination' currently having its public culmination in the ‘sexual revolution’,’the radical and on-going transformation of sexual attitudes and behaviours that has occurred in the West since the 1960’s’( 21) The self has to do with the level of self - consciousness which emphasises a level of inwardness as the criterion of who a person is, his loves and hates. So inwardness is shaped  by its territory, by fixed do’s and don’t’s basic to themselves. It is only in a situation in which the do’s and don’ts have weakened from the self’s traditional sense at vanishing point that the modern sexual revolution could occur. That revolution is not only of the sexual changes of this idea of the self, but it is at least this. Another criterion of the character of the self is what makes a person happy. So it is a paradox that two views which are different but cannot be argued for their truth or falsity may contribute centrally to the view of the self that is regarded as true, indeed, as part of a person’s view of him or herself. Gay marriage and transgenderism, for example,  are  now legitimate, deep and intuitively true, obvious to very many in our culture as a result of these cultural changes, as divorce in marriage became general in an earlier era.

The Central Argument

The central argument of the book in Part 2, chapters 3, 4 and 5, takes the reader into the eighteenth century, to Rousseau and into English poets such as…William Blake and Percy Miss Shelley, who as part of their Romantic outlook had an antipathy of the straitjacket necessarily imposed by Christian Holy Matrimony.  Trueman shows this by reviewing developments associated in Romanticism  in poets including William Blake and Percy Bysse Shelley who inveighed against society’s ‘Christian sexual codes and particularly with the normative status of lifelong, monogamous marriage’. (27) To this mix is to added Macintyre’s advocacy of emotive ethics, which makes rational argument about a moral issue difficult if not impossible.

So, there three identifiable elements, foundations of in Trueman’s account: (1) the appearance of new general descriptions of the self, and generalisations over the new caste and activity of human consciousness:, and the impossibility of ethical argument, due to emotivism and subjectivism: (2) facts about changing behaviour, and particular over sex; especially of cohabiting, homosexuality and transgender: and (3)  The disparagement of monogamous life-time marriage between the sexes, which presents fundamental  problems for Christians.

In these chapters Trueman shows himself to be at home in various relevant historical epochs bearing on his topic, and then to their contemporary bearing in  Nietzsche, Marx and Darwin. At the end of the book, Trueman, has some comments of a general kind to Christians. In this vein, In this, the climax of the book,  I shall add a little to what he says. 

The attractiveness of the Sexual Revolution is its lawfulness. Homosexuality and  Christian matrimony law. As views of gender and sexuality have widened  the law was changed, because certain acts were illegal. Now it is the novel views that have the preservation of the law. So, you might say, this leaves the Christian in a position of what the law permits. If that were so it may live and live and let live. But it is not so easy. So, increasingly, the orthodox Christian views are outlawed. They are not exclusive. In the days when Christian orthodoxy had the preserve of the law, the church, particularly the church established by law. The privileged position of the Church of England was taken for granted, and non - conforrmity trailed in its wake. How were the rising generations treated? Was the newly-dawning  libertinism avoided?  For example, were the children of Christians warned and instructed? It was taken for granted that Christian orthodoxy was the view of everyone. Anything other life-style was not even talked about. The idea that Christians have a unique mode of life was forgotten. 

The times had changed or were changing. As for the New Testament, the times were changing. Jesus warned the Pharisees and Sadducees ‘You know how to interpret  the appearance  of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times’. (Matt. 16.4) But now  there are groups riding a coach and horses through Christian teaching, and we did not seem to care.

This reference to such a text as ‘endure hardness’, (Paul’s advice to Timothy)    reminds me that the American conservative Christian and author Rod Dreher was invited  to write the Foreword of Trueman’s book. The theme of Dreher’s   own book might be said convey the apostolic advice  to  Christians, to  ‘endure hardness’ (or to ‘get real’). It is hoped to review Dreher's book Live Not By Lies: A Manuel for Christian Dissidents, (Sentinel)  in our the next blog.  

JIP and WCF

 Here we consider J.I.Packer.’s work on the troubles that may attend the life of a Christian, an important factor in connection with the false promises  of perfectionism, and on guidance, and of evil and the character of evangelism. Not only in divine providence, but also in the lifelong antagonism between the flesh and the spirit, the old man and the new. As he said more than once, ‘I, James Packer, am a man under reconstruction’.

J, I, Packer has an interesting brief piece ‘Westminster and the Roller Coaster Ride’  (to be found in Volume 2 of his Shorter Writings’ (301-304)),  on the connection between the Westminster Confession of Faith’s chapter on Providence,  and the ups and downs of our lives. His point is that our lives as Christians resemble ‘a roller-coaster ride – up, . down, jolts, drop. lurch sideways , swing away, never steady’. And he might have added that these movements can not only describe physical states and changes, bodily states, but also psychological changes as well.

God’s providence in ch. V of the Westminster Confession, and those confessions it spawned for Independents and Baptists, does in what he calls ‘masterly’ fashion. So in paragraph 1 the chapter in providence shows that God exercises management and ‘controls over’ everything everywhere all the time, and nothing happens without his being involved’.

The problems we find ourself in most of the time arise because we don’t recognise that God is in control,  but we are soured by when what we planned and counted on goes wrong, say the death of a loved one, or we are beset by illness.  These happenings constitute a problem for our faith. ‘Can God be real and good when such things happen? We ask and we found ourself doubting it’.

This is because our outlook as Christians is that it is God’s purpose is to provide us with a good life in conventional terms - health, wealth, friends, holidays, promotion, successful children and so on. And our faith is snugly kept in a separate container. This is what is at the base of ‘the problem of evil’ which  dominates discussion of theism in the media etc.

The chapter on providence goes on to assert, however, that the natures of things is kept in operation. ‘He ordereth them (i.e. ‘things’) to fall out, according to the nature of second causes (that is, according to the varied created powers of things). A rock does not behave like a sheep, nor a sheep like a human being. Besides this upholding of the natures of created things, God, the first cause of everything , can assert his sovereignty, as it pleases him. The bush can burn, the waters of the Red Sea can be parted, in extraordinary, miraculous ways.

In paragraph IV, we see that God’s overriding power can extend to his creatures who have free will, who are responsible, even though God orders and governs them, including  all other sins. God s in charge  while God remains ‘the author or approver of sin’.

In paragraph V, God’s meticulous sovereignty extends to his fatherly leaving for a while ‘his own children to manifold temptations, and the corruption and deceitfulness of his people’s hearts’ for chastising them for their sins, or to disclose to them the otherwise hidden strength of their corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, to humble them and cause them to depend more closely on God, and to increase their future watchfulness.

As JIP says , We might call our lives to be ‘God’s Upward Bound course, whereby he licks us into shape for future joys’. He cites Psalm 119, 67: ‘Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word.’(See also v. 71) And his relation to the wicked, he blinds and harden these, and leaves to them to their own evil ways. Finally he shows that in these two ways, God ‘takes care of his church, and disposeth all things to the good thereof’, As Isaac Watts put it ‘The whole creation is Thy charge, But saints are Thy peculiar care’.

The author ends by asserting ‘Such is Westminster wisdom on providence – concentrated biblical insight tat will never go out of date, What a mercy it will be if it never any more falls out of our own minds and hearts!’

More from the WCF

In fact, most of what we learn from Chapter IV ‘Of Providence’ in the Confession ch V about the framework of the Christian’s life is repeated in Chapters XI ‘Of Justification' and Chapter XVIII ‘Of Assurance of Grace and Salvation, as follows:

Chapter XI ‘Of Justification’ V ‘God doth continue to forgive the sins of those that are justified: and although they can never fall from the state of justification, yet they  may by their sins fall under God’s fatherly displeasure, and not have the light of his countenance restored unto them, until they humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance

Chapter XII ‘Of Adoption’ ‘All that are justified are enabled to cry ‘Abba, Father’, are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him as a Father’

Chapter XIV ‘Of Saving Faith’ ‘ III This faith is different in degrees, weak or strong; may be often and many ways assailed and weakened, but gets the victory ……through Christ, who is both the author  and finisher of our faith’.

Ch. XVI ‘Of Good Works,  VI ‘God…is pleased to accept and reward that which is sincere, although accompanied with many weaknesses and imperfections.

Ch. XVII ‘Of the Perseverance of the Saints’, III ‘Nevertheless they may, through the temptations of Satan and of the world, the prevalency of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of the means of their preservation, fall into grievous sins: and for a time continue therein: whereby they incur God’s displeasure and grieve his Holy Spirit…..’

We see from these extracts of several chapters of the Confession that they confirm JIP’s view of the Christian life, that it often is characterised, from a variety of sources, by fits and starts, setbacks and difficulties, temptations and failures, and not by a steady upward progress, as by God’s grace,  in Christ we are enabled come to our heavenly rest.

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'In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart, I have overcome the world/. (John 16.33)

J I. Packer 1926-2020

J.I.Packer, 1926 - 2020

By now the news of the death of Jim Packer has circled the globe. He was a Christian gentleman, and a great theological figure. Striking to look at, softly spoken, with every word worth attention, he was remarkable. In a class by himself. He seemed to have boundless knowledge, an appreciation of Christian theological resources and of its wisdom. For much of his time in England, his influence spanned evangelicalism, both Anglicanism and Dissent.

Throughout his life Packer was a convinced Anglican, and the strength of his adherence to the Church of England was routinely underestimated. Early on he wrote,

’I am an Evangelical Christian. I hold that Prayer Book Evangelicalism expresses the authentic Anglican outlook, and that the task of Evangelicals in the Church of England is no more – and no less – than to present to one Church its true self’.(Discipulus, the student magazine of Tyndale Hall.)

Even the great Martyn Lloyd-Jones thought it was possible to turn him, and when the Puritan Conference, an annual gathering of ministers which was originally founded by Packer and his friend Raymond Johnston, was abruptly terminated, it was as much because of exasperation from non-Anglican ministers as on any other factor. They cold not comprehend Packer’s efforts in the conversations of the Church of England and Methodist churches to unite. In his chapter on Lloyd-Jones, his fellow Welshman and a sometime deacon of Westminster Chapel, Gaius Davies, says

Dr Lloyd Jones wrote to Packer to say there would be no Puritan Conference at Westminster Chapel in December 1970. It was effectively rather klike being sent a Papal Bull, even though it did not excommunicate Packer. Thankfully Packer survived what many of us still feel was very scurvy treatment by Lloyd-Jones and his like-minded colleagues. (Gaius Davies, Genius, Grief and Grace, Second edition, 2001, 366)

There are two papers of Packer on Dr Lloyd – Jones, each of them laudatory. The second shorter than the first, ends with these words

To  have known him was a supreme privilege, for which I shall always be thankful…..He embodied and expressed ‘the glory’ – the glory of God, of Christ, of grace, of the gospel, of the Christian ministry, of humanness according to the new creation – more richly than any man I have ever known. No man can give another aa greater gift than a vision of such glory as this. I am forever in his debt. (David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in Honouring the People of God, Volume 2 of Collected Shorter Writings of J.I.Packer, 1985,  (Paternoster 1990), 87.

 Not a sour grape.

In his student years he had encountered 'by chance' a set of the writings of John Owen in the basement of the Northgate Hall, where the Oxford Christian met.. He was attracted by Owen's writings on indwelling sin and temptation in volume 6 chimed with Packer's self=knowledge as a new Christian, rather than that of  the Keswick preachers and their followers which were useless in the face of his own failings. This was one impetus in the beginning of the Puritans at that time.

 An early paper of Packer’s showed his desire to keep the Reformed faith in front of his fellow Christians was in his article ‘“Keswick” and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification’, The Evangelical Quarterly, 1955, showing that the view of the Christian life sponsored by the Keswick Convention was a form of perfectionism,  of sanctification by faith. ‘Keswick teaching is Pelagian through and through', he said,  (author’s italics). and it was not that of the Reformed view of lifelong of indwelling sin and progressive sanctification. It is strange that Packer has never re-produced this powerful piece, though it was later reprinted in the Free Grace Record (now defunct), a Particular Baptist magazine edited by John Doggett. Maybe because Packer later thought that the Keswick movement has moved away from adherence to this perfectionism. His paper certainly alarmed some of his contemporaries. At the time he taught in Tyndale Hall.

He was of course instrumental in beginning educating his generation in the Reformed faith, not only to fellow-Anglicans, but what might be called Protestant Dissenters. Many of them relished his preaching to them and his writings. This was from the time he published a new translation of Luther’s Bondage of the Will with his friend Raymond Johnston in 1957. In it he was not shy to mention that

These things need to be pondered by Protestants to-day. With what right may we call ourselves children of the Reformation? Much modern Protestantism would be neither owned or even recognized by the pioneer Reformers.The Bondage of the Will fairly sets before us what they believed about the salvation of lost mankind . In the light of it, we are forced to ask whether Protestant Christendom has tragically sold its birthright between Luther’s day and our own. Has not Protestantism today become more Erasmian than Lutheran? Do we not too often try to minimise and gloss over doctrinal differences for the sake of inter-party peace? (59-60)

The Bondage of the Will was quickly followed by his ’Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God in 1958. (The inverted commas were an essential  part of the title , he used to say.) The book was not a defence of Fundamentalism, but a defence of the classic view of Scripture, that it Is God’s inspired and infallible word. This was the first of many publications of the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture throughout his life. But in his 1958 book, beside this, there were chapters on the theme of faith and reason, with chapters on ‘Fundamentalism’, Authority, Scripture, Faith, Reason,  and Liberalism. But more than this, a treatment of the classical ‘faith seeks understanding’ position of the place of the human mind in the articulation of revealed divine wisdom and grace. I have often wondered that non-Anglicans who devoured the pages, (as I did, aged 18) without noting  his Anglicanism. The book displayed the virtues of his theological writing, clear, succinct, identifying one argument after another in defence of his view, and careful application to the readers. If, noting  the number of references to J.G.Machen in it, readers assumed that the author was in favour of ecclesiastical separatism from the influences of liberalism, as was Machen. But that was far from being Packer’s position. Packer the Anglican shows through.

In the course of writing positively about Calvin’s view that confidence in the Bible was a gift of the Holy Spirit he has this to say

The evangelical certainty of the trustworthiness and authority of Scripture is of exactly the same basis as the Church’s  certainty of the Trinity, or the incarnation  or any other Catholic doctrine. God has declared it; Scripture embodies it; the Spirit  exhibits it to believers; and they humbly receive it, as they are bound to do..... continued Unscriptural ideas in our theology are like germs in our system. They tend only to  weaken and destroy life, and their effect is always damaging, more or less. But they provoke resistance. Heretical notions may occupy Christian men’s heads, leading to error of thought and practice and spiritual impoverishment; but these notions cannot wholly control their hearts….in this case Christians in the liberal camp have adopted a position which logically makes reason, and not Scripture, their final authority. But,just because they are regenerate and have the witness of the Spirit. It is not in their nature to follow this anti-Christian principle to its logical conclusion…..' (passages taken from 122-4)

Here is a difference from separatism, an important one, that expressed itself in differences in the level of the toleration of other people. A separatist, such as J.G.Machen or Dr Lloyd-Jones, hah less toleration of others labeled Christian than had current Anglicanism, whose limits of toleration are wider. The limit of Packer’s toleration can be seen later. Packer’s and Lloyd Jones’s differences could have been foretold from these passages, first published in 1958.

Packer set out his view of Scripture at greater length in God Has Spoken (enlarged, 1979), and  later in Volume 3 of his Shorter Writings, Honouring the Written Word of God. It has 23 chapters of papers and lectures devoted to that theme. 

During  these years, the Banner of Truth Trust began producing Puritan reprints, including such as Thomas Watson, and in 1959 published the Puritan John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. Packer wrote an Introductory Essay. This could be said to be quite a risk, rather like his 1955 article on Keswick. It defends and upholds Owen’s and the majority Reformed view, that the death of Christ secured the salvation of only his elect people, (This, retitled as ‘Saved by his Precious Blood’ and two other major writings on the efficacy of the blood of Christ, ‘The heart of the Gospel’,  Chapter 12 of Knowing God,   and ‘What did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution’” the 1973 Tyndale Lecture in Biblical Theology, and one by Mark Dever, ‘Nothing but the Blood’, comprise In My Place Condemned He Stood, (Crossway, 2007). This book is a good example of the extent of Packer's later standing in  North America.

So much for his Anglicanism and the doctrine of Scripture. He in turn put evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, as his influence in work among students  led to the charge that belief in divine sovereignty  hampered evangelism. Packer argued that this  was the reverse. See his Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, (IVP, 1961)

ooO00

What I have tried to do is to recall in a few words the theological energy and ability and courage  of this young, talented Reformed theologian, uncommon amongst his current Anglicans, the most talented man that I ever met, and the context in which he worked, with its tensions and opportunities. And in doing this, to celebrate and to thank God for him, whose earthly life ended on 17^th July. For him

‘To be with Christ, which is far better’.

‘To live is Christ, and to die is gain’.