The Desecration of Man with Dr. Carl Trueman

Carl Trueman joins Mere Fidelity to discuss his book The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. They examine why "desecration" captures something "disenchantment" misses — the frenzied, ecstatic violation of what is still recognized as sacred — and trace its implications for abortion, gender, technology, and end-of-life ethics. Trueman argues the church's answer is consecration: creed, worship, and a code of hospitality that restores genuine personhood. With Derek Rishmawy and Alastair Roberts.

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Chapters

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 01:10 - Why "Desecration" and Not Just "Disenchantment"
• 06:16 - The Pleasure of Desecration and Alternative Sacralizing
• 10:07 - Is This a Perennial Problem or Something New?
• 14:27 - Power, Impotence, and Promethean Shame
• 17:35 - Dizziness, AI, and the Nothingness of Radical Freedom
• 22:41 - Nietzsche, Nature, and the Denial of the Given
• 28:42 - Consecration as Response: Creed, Cult, and Code
• 33:14 - The Church and End-of-Life Ethics
• 39:18 - Vitalism, False Friends, and the Logic of the Cross
• 45:38 - Two Cheers for Christianity and the Opportunity Before Us
• 48:51 - Freedom, Belonging, and the Gospel

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Lexim Press, who publishes books that love the word, love the faith, and love the church. Lexin Press was recently acquired by Baker Publishing Group, and there will be more news to follow. Our May book of the month is Classical Theism, a Christian introduction by Jordan Stefaniak. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting Bakerbookhouse.com, backslash pages, backslash mere fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes and get 30% off of our book of the month from Lexum Press. Welcome to another episode of Mere Fidelity, a podcast by Mere Orthodoxy, where we think about the Word of God and the world we live in. My name is Derek Schmaui, and I'll be your host for today. As always, I'm joined by regular cast and crew member Aleister Roberts. It's good to see you, Aleister. Good to be here. And uh we this time we have a guest, an illustrious guest, Dr. Carl Truman, a professor of biblical and theological studies at Grove City College, uh author of many, many books. And I think at least this is maybe your third time on the podcast uh since its inception. I think we've had a couple of episodes since, and and you didn't learn your lesson and you came back. So it's great to see you.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

It's the triumph of hope over experience, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

So it's great to be with you guys. Glad to have you here. Well, we're having you here uh today to talk a little bit about your new book. I know that's hard to keep up with. There's so many that come out, but the most recent one is The Desecration of Man, How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. And that's out with, I think, uh Sentinel. Um and I I'll just say I loved it. It was really helpful, um, powerful book. Uh and so we wanted to have you on to talk a little bit just about that work. And I wanted to start out with um question around desecration, right? Right off the bat, let's let's go for the let's go for the for the jugular on this. Why the desecration of man? Why that particular um uh uh uh vision of things? Because we're we often talk about the disenchantment of the world, we often talk about the the the kind of demagicking of reality, and that's we're that's kind of in the in the bloodstream, and you deal with some of that, but you don't just stick with disenchantment. The problem with with humanity right now is not just that we are um is that we we we've we've lost the joie de vive, we we don't we don't see the fairies dancing around. It's actually it's far worse. We are actually desecrated uh in many ways. And so why don't you speak to the I'd I'd love to hear the basic concept layout.

SPEAKER_02 2:25

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, so that's a great way of of of posing the question, Derek. I think many listeners will be familiar with uh the disenchantment thesis. It sort of gained real traction in the 20th century uh with the work of Max Faber, and uh it's become quite popular in in religious circles over recent years. I think of, you know, for example, uh my friend Rod Dreya's most recent book on on the the problem of disenchantment. And I I think it's certainly the disenchantment thesis carries a lot of truth with it. Uh most of us experience life in a way that you could characterize key aspects of that as disenchanted. There's no longer the uh there's no longer the magic in the world that the once was. There can be a tendency to think of ourselves as as things, as numbers, not persons. Um I my accent reveals the fact that I'm an immigrant. Anybody who's been through the American immigration process knows what it's like to be treated as a number, not not a person. So phenomenologically, disenchantment I think is uh has a lot going for it, but I don't think it explains everything. And what I was trying to do in the book was get to aspects of modernity that that aren't really comprehensible purely in terms of disenchantment. And one of the examples I use is the language surrounding uh abortion. You know, 30, 35 years ago, during the Clinton administration, the the language that uh abortion advocates used was that of safe, legal, and rare. I I disagree with that that language, but it strikes me as a qualitatively different position to that which is often articulated today, where you know there's a kind of regret in safe, legal, and rare. The world is a bad place, it's not what it should be. Sometimes we have to do bad stuff. I I may disagree with the overall argument, but it seems to me that argument carries a different moral weight to the kind of argument that's often made today that abortion is something to be proud of, something to be celebrated. It's a it's a basic human right. And and so the category of desecration that I introduced in the book was an attempt to get at what I see as the uh I uh sort of ecstatic or maybe fr maybe better frenzied approach to to certain dimensions of of what it means to be human today and certain destructive dimensions of what it means to be human today that I think the the somewhat passive, bored implications of disenchantment don't really get to. So that was where I I wanted to go with that. And theologically, of course, I also play with the idea that human beings are made in the image of God. When we tinker with what it means to be human, we're tinkering with the image of the divine, and that carries with it connotations of the sacred and of desecration.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Yeah. I I I that resonated with me hugely. Obviously, I've been thinking about um I've been thinking about holiness for ten years or something uh on that order, and the violation of the sacred is more active, right? It's the profanation of taking what is actually holy, taking what is actually set apart. And going from the range of, and I think you you catalog a lot of this, going from the range of just treating what should be sacred as common, and that is that is desecrating. But you actually kind of go further. There's there's there's a there's there's treating what's sacred as common, but there's also the the active um the active violation of what is sacred precisely because it's been seen as sacred and it needs to be it needs to be brought down. It needs to be um humiliated, as it were. And I think that that that thread is a significant one.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

Yeah, and it's and it it gives us a tremendous feeling of power, of course. Uh been teaching at Notre Dame this year, it's been fun having classes dominated by Catholic students. So I've I've poked them a little on the Reformation. I was, yeah, see you. How do you know that in that church down the road in Zurich, you know, there's a different god in charge in the 16th century? They smash the images. And then I say, and why was the Reformation such a success? Because smashing images is fun. You tell a bunch of young guys, go down to the local church and smash the windows, you're not going to be struggling for volunteers. There's an exhilaration that comes with that. And I think that goes to a lot of what's going on today. We actually take pleasure in desecration because it makes us feel like gods. It's the destruction of the authority of God that is stamped in our very being that makes us feel that we have Promethean power. Nothing more exhilarating than having the blood of the divine on our own hands.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

But this is why, and I'm gonna let Alistair in right after this, but this is why the desecration thing is so interesting. And we'll we'll talk to you connect so many different dots. Part of what was great about the book is just colle is connecting a million different ethical dots together with this theme. But the desecration language I think pushes us past um pushes us past disenchantment, looping back around almost a horseshoe back into an alternative sacralizing, an alternative um kind of religious impulse where, yeah, the blood of the divine is intoxicating, and you almost have, I mean, you've got like your Euripides, the Bacchae, the the the maynads like tearing apart uh people in a frenzy. There is a frenzied religiousness to the anti-uh-religious desecrating impulse, because it's really like gods drive out gods, right? There that's that's something to that, and so there's almost an undermining of the disenchantment uh in in its own way, in that only only a only a religious impulse can sustain uh that drive at bottom, even if it's like surface level. Surface level public square, this is just, you know, public liberal neutral uh square, et cetera, et cetera. But but there's there are currents underneath. Um so that Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_02 8:45

I mean, i it's interesting. I was chatting to somebody just the uh the other day about John McWater's work on on swearing, uh bad language. And it's it's very interesting that when you think about how language has shifted, you know, 300 years ago, or even when I was growing up, my parents were not Christians, but taking the Lord's name in vain was still regarded as a heinous thing to do in our family. Um language is routinely, you know, routinely desecrates the holy things of the past. And yet there are now other words that one cannot use, typically words that refer to the categories of identity, for example, identity politics. So I think you're absolutely right, Derek, that you know one set of of holy things is being desecrated, but we have placed our own man-made holy things into to replace them. And and our language sort of is the is the poker tell on that front. Uh language about race, language about sexuality, language about gender, this has now become the area of sacred talk and subject to you know analogous taboos of that which surrounded religious language two, three hundred years ago.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Yeah, I mean this is reef th this yeah, Philip Reef and all that whole analysis.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

A lot of this seems to trace back very naturally to passages like Romans 1 and Paul's analysis of the self-dishonouring that occurs when we have dishonored God and the relationship between our disordered relationship with God and our relationship with each other, with our own bodies, with our understanding of ourselves. And this has such a big theme within Paul's work makes me wonder to what extent is this a perennial, almost Christian critique that's had a number of different iterations over the centuries? To what extent are we living in a time where something that was very live and obvious within Paul's day has suddenly become timely again, but has not been to the same degree over many of the intervening centuries? Is this a theme that you see looking back through church history many different forms of the sort of critique that you're making tailored to the issues of the respective days, or is there something about the critique that suddenly has become timely now in ways that it wasn't before?

SPEAKER_02 11:16

Yeah, that's a that's a great question, uh Alistair. And in a sense, one could say that principially, desecration has always been a huge part of the fallen human condition. Um that desire to make ourselves gods, to supplant God. You know, that was the that was the serpent's temptation. You know, God knows if you eat of the fruit, you will become like him. You will become gods. Uh so it's it's always been there. I I think that what makes this so incredibly timely today really are the technological developments that now place in our hands the capacity to desecrate what it means to be human, to desecrate that image in a way that has not been accessible to us before. Um, you think of the say one of the chapters in the book is on the sexual revolution and the shattering of sexual taboos. Well, there's a sense in which you could shatter sexual taboos in the 19th century. Yeah, but unless you were the Prince of Wales, you probably couldn't get away with it. You know, that girl was going to get pregnant. Her father and brothers were gonna come after you, you were gonna catch a nasty disease that couldn't be cured. There were there were all kinds of natural consequences. Well, now we have antibiotics and we have very effective contraceptives. We can now begin to think that uh sex is pure recreation. It's not an integral part of what it means to be human in a deep and and sacred sense. And I think it's the the German philosopher Hans Jonas, in one of his essays, makes this interesting distinction in I I think he uses the term technological revolutions, but it may be industrial revolutions, I don't remember the exact term. But he says there have been two uh technological revolutions. The first is is is the revolution of the n the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, which does change things, but basically allows us to do the kind of things we did before more effectively, more efficiently. Uh it reduces the significance of human strength, etc. etc. It allows us to do external tasks. Uh but he then says, but in the middle of the twentieth century we have the second technological revolution, and that's the one that allows us to use old scholastic terminology. That's what actually allows us to tinker with the substance of what it means to be human. Uh we can start making life in test tubes, we can start editing genes. Um we develop the A-bomb, which, okay, that's external, but now we're the only creatures on the face of the planet that have to choose to continue to exist. We could wipe ourselves out, should we so choose. And I think that's where yeah, desecration it's always been a problem. But now we really do have godlike powers that allow us to challenge the the God-given limits that we have in ways that we've never been able to successfully uh persuade ourselves that we could do before.

SPEAKER_03 14:24

There is something of though of an irony in the fact that we could wipe ourselves out, but we seem to be struggling to keep ourselves going, to reproduce ourselves. Yes. There are great powers that we have unleashed, and yet maybe we felt never felt so impotent in the face of a future that feels beyond our control. What is the relationship between that grasping for power and that experience of impotence and the sort of crisis of human beings just not being able to summon the powers that formerly they would have enjoyed, the sense of agency, the sense of an ability to face the future and act towards it.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

Yeah, there's a tr there's a tremendous paradox here that only human beings, because we are made in the image of God, can develop these things that actually reduce us to nothing. I I often think of that statement of Pascal, you know, when I when I meditate upon the eternal silence and the infinite spheres, I am alone and I am afraid. Now Pascal was a Christian, but that's a very different response to the the heavenly canopy than one would find in the Psalmist or even in St. Augustine, where the feeling there is a kind of I would say a sort of a humbling in I'm so tiny, but God loves me and knows me. Isn't that amazing? With Pascal, no, he's he's staring into the abyss. And again, I think it i we can see the sort of the paradoxical nature of our brilliance leading to uh uh nothingness if we go back to uh Genesis three in the story of the uh the fool. Um Adam and Eve do what no other creature can do. They choose to break the rules and and and take the fruit. And what's the immediate response? They're ashamed. They're reduced, they're less than they were. And uh Günther Anders, the the German philosopher whose excellent book has just been translated into he was writing in the 50s, but his book, The Obsolescence of the Human, has just been translated into English. He has this concept of what he calls Promethean shame. And he says it's it's fascinating that the more technologically brilliant we are, the less we think of ourselves. Uh and you you you see that sort of language with the debates around artificial intelligence all the time. You know, we're gonna do this, so we're gonna be absolute rubbish compared to the robots we make. Uh and I think that can be given a theological, uh a theological spin, because Genesis 3 makes it clear that if you choose to break the limits that God has placed upon you, you may get an instant rush of feeling that you're like a god. But seconds later when you reflect upon what you've become, you feel ashamed. So, yes, I again I think there's a you know there's a strong theological dimension to the paradox of of human exceptionalism.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Yeah, I I think about Kierkegaard talking about the concept of anxiety and the dizziness that comes with freedom. Um when you posit like an absolute freedom of I am whatever I choose to be, whatever my inner, my my inner Promethean self, which could shift from year to year, moment to moment, depending on what the algorithm has currently shaped me to be. I mean, I I there's a dizziness that sets in, an anxiety, a paradox that shuts down choice, uh, but also that that that locks in meaninglessness and that that there's nothing you've been given to be. There's no way you can fail at being you uh on a given day. There's there's just there's just nothing riding on it. Also, um, pretty soon your uh an AI chatbot's gonna be able to do whatever might have been what it might have whatever might have seemed to be distinctive about you better than you. So just l lock in, bed rot, have chat GP2 do your homework. Sorry, I'm doing I'm thinking college. But there's there's just so much.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

Welcome to my world. Welcome to my world, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Lock in, bed rot, have chat GP2 do your do your homework in an hour, you get an A, but it doesn't mean anything because you didn't do it, right? There was nothing writing on your agency and your action. And so, so the dizziness leads to the dizziness, the the normlessness uh leads to kind of collapsing in on yourself. Uh the the the so there's the the the nothingness of yourself um comes in. I think about even Richard Dawkins. This is the funny thing. Last week everybody was laughing at this. Rich Richard Dawkins got essentially got one-shotted by a three-day chat with with Claude AI, which he calls Claudia, um, and he's talking about his own book with it and and he's convinced Claudia Claudia is conscious. And you know, he goes, he's the guy who denies God. There's no agency, created the world, but we have created an agent that must be it It's it's it it was this amazing portrait of of that, of of denying God, reducing yourself, and then looking at something that you made and saying you are at least as good as me and possibly greater very shortly. Sorry, that was my little parable.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

That makes makes perfect sense. And again, I think w what you were saying there also touches on challenges really we face since the 19th century in many ways. I as you were talking, I was thinking about uh you know the role of work in life. Um I think it's Joe Minick's book, uh the bulwarks of uh of bil of bil of is it belief or unbelief? My mind is giving it away. I wrote the foreword for it, I should remember the title. But yeah, he makes the point there that you know work may well have been boring in the past. But there was a point. If you were digging the potatoes in the morning and eating them in the evening, there was a teleology to your work that isn't provided by working on a factory line. Uh and and I think this whole idea of divorcing ourselves from buffering ourselves between the world and ourselves by technology, particularly in the realm of work, has has facilitated this feeling of ennui and and has set the stage for the kind of challenges that that AI now presents us with. I mean, yeah, the idea of having permanent leisure is attractive to most people. But you know, I'm probably five or six years away from retiring. And I'm beginning to think, man, what am I gonna do when I retire? You know? Uh will life become just an endless floating on the ocean? That's not very attractive because something very significant is is lost at that point.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

There's uh there's always a theme in literature, and maybe in sci-fi literature, you think about like these races that live forever. And there was one series I won't name, but essentially there's this race that lives, that's just keeps living and living in like basically everybody in that society, everybody of that race who hits like, I don't know, the 10,000 year mark or something like that, goes nuts. Like they just they lose their mind because of the endlessness of experience. And then the thought of handing handing your average 18 year old, hey, by the way, you're gonna get you be you're gonna get universal basic income, uh, free chat bot, free sex bot, um, everything's gonna be there. Uh and also, by the way, we just Unlocked immortality because Brian Johnson figured it out. He won't, but still, like that that idea is trying to think about different versions of hell. And uh, well, that that that that one seems ready-made.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

Yeah. I think it's why heaven is so difficult to conceptualize as well, because the idea of eternity, it's it's tough, whether it's heaven or hell. It's difficult to understand how will I be fulfilled in my being for all eternity in heaven. I I believe I will be, but I have no idea of of what that experience will be like at this particular point.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

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SPEAKER_00 23:37

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SPEAKER_03 24:49

For instance, of atheism, think of the new atheists, people like Dawkins and Hitchens and others, who had this account of nature that was very red in tooth and claw. It was the the nature of evolution. It was the nature that tended to lead to very anti-feminist positions. It was very opposed to transgender ideology, but often have some unsettling positions on race and these sorts of things. And after that, it's been succeeded in many respects by a denial of nature. And in both of these forms, Christians feel that this is a far cry from what scripture teaches. And the more that we drift away from any sense of nature, I think, as we're experiencing unreality online, as we're experiencing the constant attempts to reform nature in our image, we're maybe in a context where part of the power of Christian witness will be giving nature to people, where people have forgotten and lost nature. What does it look like to respond to the desecration of man with uh a proper response to nature? To is it maybe blessing? Is it what exactly is it that enables us to restore to people a nature that has been forgotten or diminished or otherwise disordered?

SPEAKER_02 26:24

Yeah, I I I I think just uh to backtrack to the first part of your statement there, Alistair, I think your your analysis is absolutely correct. And of course, this is you know, this is one of the reasons why you use Nietzsche in the book as a sort of dialogue partner, because I think Nietzsche's madman in the gay science is really calling out the Dawkins kind of people. You know, they you want to have your cake and eat it. You you choose those bits of of what was provided by a Christian metaphysic metaphysic that you happen to like and approve of and is helpful to you, but you want to get rid of the God who makes demands upon you. And I think Nietzsche's making the point, you know, you can't do that. You get rid of God, you you've got to go full throttle down the we are gods and we make our own values and we treat nature as something we can we can remake in our own image. Um what does it look like to restore nature? I again I'm sort of struck by I've always been struck by the the destiny of Israel in the Old Testament, you know, when the Lord calls Israel as a light to the nations, and and he says, you know, there's that wonderful passage where he says, you know, I am the Lord your God who loves the widow and the orphan and the sojourner. You too, therefore, should love the sojourner, for you are sojourners in Egypt. And what seems to be going on there is that the Lord is saying the people of God are to be representatives of what it means to be human and what it means to be human in a fallen world. Okay, bad stuff goes on. There are going to be sojourners, there's going to be orphans, they're going to be widows. But the way you treat them in your community, that's how I want the humanity that I've made in my image to respond in these unfortunate, difficult conditions. And I think that role really now falls to the church. And in the end of the book, I, you know, I do the Anglican thing, I pull out the alliteration, you know, we we talk about creed, cult, and code, and I say, you know, we we need correct teaching. You know, Christianity, I'm fully on board with Luther that if you take away assertions, you take away Christianity. Christianity definitely has a doctrinal component. It also has a liturgical component where worship reinforces, uh drives home, shapes our imaginations in in a Christian way. Uh and I'm struck at the in the New Testament that the only account we have of an unbeliever wandering into a worship service is his mind will be blown away because he knows that something special and holy is going on there. So clearly worship plays a role. And then also I think what I call the code, the way we live, plays a role. Now, for a lot of, certainly for a lot of Christians in in the traditions that that we belong to have tended to see the code as a set of do's and don'ts. You know, you do do this, you do go to church on a Sunday, you don't sleep with your girlfriend before you marry her, those those kind of things. I think we need to understand code also as having a much richer dimension to it. That if the problem, if if I had to boil the problem in modernity down to in breaking God's laws, we end up treating other people like things who are there for our benefit, and in so doing we kind of become things ourselves. We need to treat other people as persons made in God's image, regardless of who they are or what they've done or what they struggle with. And so I I make a big play at the end of the book for hospitality. I think, you know, what was one of the things that characterized ancient Israel in its witness to the nations? Hospitality. Judges 19, one of the most terrible and terrifying chapters in in the Bible, begins with this farcical presentation of hospitality. But you know it's going wrong as soon as they arrive in the city of the people of God and nobody opens their house to them. You know that hospitality's gone and this is a bad place for them to be, and they're going to be treated like objects and things. So I I think that if you know desecration is the problem, the answer's consecration, and consecration involves teaching, it involves worship, but it also involves the way we live our lives and treat other people. Um I've often wondered, you know, why on when I'm flying on an airplane, why do I say thank you to the stewardess when she hands me a terrible bag of pretzels that American Airlines seem obsessed with? And yeah, the answer is because in expressing gratitude, I'm acknowledging her nature as another person, that she could choose to throw them at me or spit on them or something. I'm acknowledging her as a as a person when she does that. So I think the context for nature being respected has to begin with the church and the discipling of individual Christians. That will have a an overflow effect in the workplace, in how we think of the environment. It you know, it will shape how we respond to the world around, but the the core is is the local church.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Yeah, I've I've been working through with my students this year. We we did, we didn't read your book, but first, but uh I did do the Creed. I preached through the Creed, then I preached through the Ten Commandments, and now we're going through the Lord's Prayer as a bit of cult. And the one of the themes that's just emerged as I've been thinking through with my students in the in the world that they live in is that personalizing aspect of things. Um when you it has to, I mean, it starts with the doctrine of God. We have an infinite and personal and transcendent, uh, but therefore imminent God who can you have to relate to personally. He's not isn't a vibe, he's not, he's not, you know, the the stuff of the universe. He is he is him. But that and that that shapes the personality of the demands, the personality of his dealings with us, the personality of our engagement with him in prayer, in connection and those sorts of things. But that th that thread throughout is especially important uh when I think about how depersonalized just so much, and again, comes back to technology, just so much, so many of my students' lives can be. If they lock themselves in the room, if you, if you're, if you're, you know, n half your classes are online, they're asynchronous, you're listening to them while you're doing something else. And when you're in the gym, uh you've got your headphones in. I have my headphones in, but I came up in the in the gym bro phase phase where you you say hi to your bros at the gym and that kind of thing. There's like all these things where but but it but the kids walking on campus, it's it's it's locked in, it's plugged in. There's so many different ways to not have to say thank you to somebody. People go to pick up at Starbucks or go to pick up at the coffee shop, and they've got the counter with the just pickup line, the pre-made. You don't even have to say hi to anybody who made your your your little latte or whatever. You're just gonna get in, get out. So the opportunities for personalizing engagement uh are just dropping. The the bottom is dropped out on that for the for the for the um substitution of frictionless, you know, frictionless no interactions throughout the you go through throughout your entire day, shop, do a whole bunch of things and not say hi to a single soul, but you'll say thank you to your ChatGPT conversation that you just had.

SPEAKER_02 33:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

That that is that's why the lived body, I mean it when you're saying about the church, I think is so crucial for the for the the gathering of the body. It's not just it's not just a a otherworldly divorced churchly piety. It's actually just a recognition of no, you need to drag souls together into a place uh for them to for them to interact in the world. Um I I I just went off there for a minute, but I wanted to d come back to your theme of hospitality and then tie it back though to another theme. Uh you one of the one of the threads that you've pulled with desecration is um end of life and death. And I I've just been thinking a lot about issues of MAID, uh medical aid and dying, issues of how we treat um what are we gonna see, are we gonna see kids with Down syndrome in the future? Uh or are we just gonna abort them all? Like how are we dealing with you know special needs children and and those sorts of things? And so I'd I'd love to hear about that as a consec how the church acts in the relation to those people as a consecrating uh practice. Um it's probably an extension of the code, but I you know, l love to hear a little bit more on that.

SPEAKER_02 35:12

Yeah, I I think you're you're really touching on something that is going to be very it's gonna press in on us all. I mean Canada is in the vanguard of this, but I've no confidence that you know what starts in Canada will stay in Canada. Uh and for any listeners out there wondering what's the case. Sorry. It's uh I I mean I uh i i if you add up the number of war de Canadian war dead from the first and second world wars, it's only slightly more than the number of Canadians who've died by maid in the last few years. In other words, you know, the Canadian government has killed almost as many Canadian citizens as the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler combined. Um it it's it's very disturbing. Um how does the church respond? The church has to be a counterculture. And again, I think of the you know, one of the texts I teach when I do church history at Grove is the Didickey. And the Didickey uh we don't know exactly when it was written, might have been written before the last text of the New Testament, you know, it's sort of AD 70 to 120, it's that sort of period. But there's a reference in there to, you know, we don't abort children. We we we we don't kill children. Well, if you move towards the end of the second, I think it's the second century, and you look at the criticisms of a man like Kelsus about the early church, Kelsus accuses the early church of being effeminate, so many women there. And I always use this uh in class to say, you know, wh why am I inclined to believe Kelsus at that point? That he's this isn't propaganda. And the answer, of course, is if you have a society that disproportionately engages in infanticide towards female babies, uh and you have a subculture within that society that eschews that practice, over a period of time that subculture will have proportionately more women in terms of its overall numbers than the wider society. And anyone looking in from outside will think it's uh it's an effeminate woman-dominated club. Uh that was powerful in the early church. And I think uh you know don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing here for passivity in the public square. Certainly, Christians, it's great to be involved in pro-life things, it's great to be using our votes in appropriate ways. Uh we should take the rights we have as citizens seriously and use them to try to push for uh standards in society that protect the innocent, that that press on the wicked and oppress the wicked. But as a as a culture, I think the church needs to practically stand against these things. Um be a be a community where the elderly are not allowed to be desperate and alone and think that death is preferable to life. Um be a culture where respect for the elderly is taught, where respect and love for those born with uh difficulties. You mentioned Down syndrome. Well, of course, in in Iceland, I believe, you you don't really have people with Down syndrome anymore because they're all eliminated in the womb. Uh we as a church need to be a society that that reflects to the world around, particularly how we treat the weakest and the most vulnerable and the most dependent in our society, um, as well as it being engaged in in public action. No problem with that whatsoever. But as a church, we need to make sure that that we are not a society that has a an implicit eugenicist approach to uh to its community.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

There's a there's a Nietzscheanism that probably needs to be issued on in in several different ways. Alistair was pointing this out in terms of you know, we we're looking at the madman, and there there's a couple of different ways you can be Nietzschean, right? Uh and one of the ways he was talking about was the more earlier atheist kind of evo-syc, um racialized, so on and so forth. I was thinking about the the the valorization of the cult of health and the cult of virility and the cult of strength. Um now I I'm a I'm a pro-natalist guy. I think we we need we need more babies. All the absolutely that's not necessarily what's happening there is is is i the the the desecration of the weak is happening when we abort them in the womb. You know, the the classic more left-wing kinds of of social causes. But sometimes I look at some of the rhetoric on the right that's opposed to it, um, and again I'm I I lean conservative by a lot, but you can't oppose left-wing Nietzschean eugenicist or you know, Marxist eugenicists with kind of right-wing um vitalism that also ends up saying, well, uh yeah, but most babies, but that one's kind of weak and it's kind of deformed, and I'm not sure we really want the people from that kind. Like the impulse to to uh degrade, to reject God is is ubiquitous right now. Uh and it it looks it it looks like all sorts it it comes in all different sorts of forms, is is the shocking thing. It's kind of like it's kind of like the horseshoe theory with anti-Semitism. You get it on the right and you get it on the left, and and they they have their different reasons, but it but it's still there, right?

SPEAKER_02 40:39

Yeah. Yeah, desec desecration doesn't favor, you know, it's not exclusive to one political party or one part of the political spectrum. It's uh it's a universal human problem. And it's it's alive and well in circles that would describe themselves as Christian. Um I've noticed over the last couple of years the the sort of the the cult of power, if we might put it, is alive and well in in in many Christian and I you know if you can hear the scare quotes, then you're hearing me correctly in many Christian circles.

SPEAKER_03 41:10

Yeah. You talked about consecration as the response to desecration, and maybe getting at some of the vitalist debates, there can often be a sort of valorization of man above other things, and as you discussed earlier on, that as we push that value, we end up actually diminishing ourselves. How is it that the church can put human beings in their proper place in a way that lifts us up without um creating the sorts of problems that that sort of vitalist impulse that ends up diminishing our humanity can result in? And what are some of the ways also in which we can navigate not just the opponents that we face within our culture, very clear opponents of a Christian understanding of human humanity, but the sort of false friends as well who might have visions that are um for which Christian statements can be useful, an affirmation of nature, but yet we'll exploit that and distort it for purposes that are quite unchristian.

SPEAKER_02 42:23

Yeah, good questions, Alistair. And I you know I I think there's probably a one-size-fits-all answer here, but I would say some of the things that that pastors, for example, should be thinking about is make sure that when you you teach, you give uh adequate place to the cross. Um, Paul's teaching in 1st and 2nd Corinthians is is extremely important. There's a sense in which w with a a uh with a little exaggeration, you could say he's responding to vitalists there. You know, he's responding to those who feel that his outward weakness and the fact that everywhere he goes he gets beaten up, imprisoned, shipwrecked, or suffers, and he lies awake at night worrying about the church, these are all signs that his ministry is somehow mediocre or even invalid. And his response, of course, is you don't understand the logic of the cross. You need to understand uh the cross. Uh and and I think that also points us then towards the you know, the expectation of of resurrection. You might say, well, resurrection is very triumphant, isn't it? Yes. But think about the second thief on the cross. When the second thief on the cross says to Christ, you know, Remember me when you come into your kingdom. He's the one person shouting at Christ that day who isn't demanding, save me from the cross. He's acknowledging, hey, I gotta die, I deserve to die, but death, my death, your death, they will be the entry into your kingdom. So I think a a good focus on the resurrection in context of the cross is important. Thirdly, I would say that the uh a proper approach to the resurrection. Resurrection should also bring out the fact that the body is important in Christian thinking. I love that little passage in Thomas Aquinas' lectures on 1 Corinthians 15, where he makes the comment to the effect that, you know, when you die, you've got to be with God, but it is not you until the day of resurrection. Because you are body and soul, form and matter. And I think a lot of, particularly Protestants, we tend to think the gospel is forgiveness of sin. No, the gospel is actually resurrection. Forgiveness of sin is a is a staging post on the way to the resurrection. So I think a good emphasis upon the resurrection helps us reinstate a healthy understanding of what it means to be human, but also in that context acknowledging the contradiction of life that ends in death in this in this fallen realm. So that's where I would say teaching uh applies. Practically uh again go back to uh to what I talked about earlier. I think practically the way we live in our communities, the way we make space for those who are weak. And let's face it, if we live long enough, we're all gonna be weak. You know, I'm at a stage, I'm a little bit older than you guys, I'm at a stage in my life where, okay, I'm I'm just probably moving out of the independent stage back to the slowly but surely becoming more dependent stage. And it's not gonna get any better in the next 20, 25 years. I think churches that that acknowledge that in the way they practically operate uh will be very important. How we address uh the those who who who among uh visible number who disagree with us on this, well, it depends. Some people I think have just been badly taught and and and teaching them better will bring them to a better place. Some people are wolves in sheep's clothing. They need to be called to repentance. Uh we know that the gospel, you know, Corinth has these vitalists within its visible number, who, in their attacks on Paul, as Paul points out, are really contradicting the gospel. So I think there are those that we need to call on to repent and and turn to the Lord Jesus Christ. Uh again, those are pastoral questions, I think, that need to be dealt with in specific contexts. But it goes from better teaching through to, hey, you actually need to come to Jesus. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:29

I I I thought you actually did that. It was it was uh it was fun to see your your kind of come to Jesus, maybe a little late for Roger Scruton, but but still time for Richard Dawkins. Um but but that that element, because uh what you're touching on is also it's related to the recent kind of renaissance of of folks recognizing, hey, um you know, the madman had a point, and we we we we functionally killed God, and maybe we need some Christianity back, and maybe let's not bash in the Anglican churches and and um and and we need uh some way of getting most people to respect human rights. Uh and so maybe let's, you know, two cheers for Christianity, you know, the Elon Musk move, the recent Dawkins move. And you had a really good section on on that. I think the preaching of the cross is also the the the the kind of the solution there um in a lot of ways, because you don't want to turn those people away. I was telling my students this last night it doesn't matter if you came for the wrong reasons or or not the best reasons. There they might be fine reasons to get you in the door. But at the end of the day, the Yeah. So you'll hear more on that.

SPEAKER_02 47:38

Yeah, I I think you're absolutely correct. I think that the tendency I always think of the way that Aion Hershey Ali in her first testimony was treated by people, and it was this sort of you know, Christians very dismissive of her because, oh, she's just doing it for social reasons. Well, then of course it emerged that there was much more personal depth to what was going on. But even before the the later, the later testimony, I was thinking, we don't want to bash th this woman's moving in the right direction.

SPEAKER_01 48:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:07

If she's going to ch if she's going to an Anglican church, she's getting a lot of scripture every Sunday. Uh and the Lord uses his word in miraculous and amazing ways. Uh I think of Mary Harrington. Uh Mary Harrington became interested really in Christianity, I would say, from a one could say from a strictly metaphysical perspective, perhaps to begin with. But she wrote this thing at Christmas on the nativity that uh you know only a Christian could write. I remember f sort of funny side story. Mary did a nice commendation for the book, uh, and she was my secular commander. Because I I gotta have one non-Christian commend, but and I read that thing Christmas. I said, Katrina, I got some sort of good and bad news here. The good news is Mary's, I think she became a Christian. The bad news is she was my secular commander. Maybe she could have waited two years, you know, so I could have got some mileage out of it. But no, I rejoice in I rejoice in the direction Mary's gone in. And um, I think you're absolutely correct, Eric. These are great times, great opportunities presenting themselves to Christians. Let's not blow them by demanding too much too soon.

SPEAKER_01 49:16

Yeah, I think I think the demanding too much too soon is important. And then but what you were saying earlier about nevertheless pressing the cross at the same time, because you don't want you know, our our friend James has talked about reality respecters and and you want them coming in the church because they're scared by, you know, the wild, crazy uh cultural demands. And nevertheless, you still have to call them to repent when they walk through the door.

SPEAKER_00 49:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:40

Um you know, it we're not just operating on, well, hey, you got the right vibes and the right votes, so you you're good, just hang out. You they're they're pagans like anybody else. It's just it's what kind of paganism are you calling them to repent of and and and and join in uh the faith to? So um no, that's really helpful. Alistair?

SPEAKER_03 50:01

What are some of the ways in which the fact that arguably the Christian faith has at its very heart, its vocal center and a symbol of the desecration of man in the cross? What are some of the ways that that enables us to speak into the current situation in a way that enables us to find Christ within the um within the the social crisis that we face and the general anthropological crisis and in that situation to articulate his presence and his victory?

SPEAKER_02 50:39

Yeah, I think that's a good question, Alistair. Um uh number of things come to mind. Uh it it seems to me that suffering remains a perennial problem for humans. And again, Nietzsche's great on this, he says, you know, it's not suffering that's the problem, it's meaningless suffering. It seems to me that in in the world we live in at the moment, which is where there's so much suffering so obviously around us, uh, the cross allows us to to provide a redemptive framework for that. So apologetically, I think that might be uh very useful. Um I think the again going to the resurrection, though, if you look after the resurrection from the resurrection to the constitution of the church as the New Testament community in the spirit. Um one of the things I find with I I teach this course at Grove, Grove City each year. It's really a sort of survey of modern thought up to the present era. And uh first couple of times I taught it, I was looking for what's the handle that will get the students engaged with the material. And I the way I pitch it these days is this look, every human being has two impulses or two desires. They want to be free. We're free agents. We experience the world as free agents. We hate it when that's restricted. And two, we want to belong. It's not good for man to be alone. We want to be part of a team, part of a group. But it's hard to tie those two things together. Because to be free is to risk not belonging. To belong is to sacrifice some freedom. And I then I look at the various modern thinkers really through that lens and say, hey, Nietzsche, maybe Nietzsche really gets freedom, but gosh, it's a lonely life as a Nietzsche and Ubermensch. Uh what about Marx? Well, Marx really gets belonging, but look at look at how Marxism played out sociologically in history. Not a lot of freedom in Marxist societies. Go to the church. If the sun sets you free, you'll be free indeed. But how does the sun set you free? By incorporating you into the body of Christ. You become part of a larger whole where maybe you're a hand, not an eye, or maybe you're an ear, not a nose. You retain your individuality, you retain your distinctive personality, but your significance now lies in the greater whole. So I I found that the you know the chaos of the modern world that as we were talking about earlier on, the disembodiment leads to this free-floating who am I, who cares for me, what's the purpose of life. That I think is resolved, is resolved in the church. And if we you know think about pitching the gospel in terms of freedom and belonging, that's the kind of language that I certainly I'm finding is resonating with the young people that I'm engaging with uh in the classroom today.

SPEAKER_01 53:26

You know, I I wish we could keep going here because it feels freeing and belong to belong to such a wonderful conversation. Sorry, I can't avoid doing that. It's it's Pastor Hat. But um we're gonna we're gonna bring this show to a close and land the plane and let Carl go. Uh, Carl, thank you so much for joining. This was a great conversation.

SPEAKER_02 53:47

It's a pleasure to be with you guys. Love the work you're doing, by the way, and it's a uh a pleasure and an honor to be on with you.

SPEAKER_01 53:53

Well, I I know it's bl your your work has blessed us, and um, I wanted to just highlight again the desecration of man, how the rejection of God degrades our humanity. Pick it up. It's it's it's I will just say is the last plug here. It is not an overwhelmingly large book. It's maybe 220 pages, and they're they're not like densely printed, but there's um there's an astonishing amount within them. The the writing is the writing is is concise to the point where like you're it's an astonishing amount of threads that you're you're pulling together in the book. So it's really well worth your time if you haven't already loaded it into your Amazon cart or Westminster or whatever whatever bookstore you use. So please pick it up. If you've listened this far, also feel free to rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, all that sort of thing. But for now, this has been Mere Fidelity.