• Christianity,  Culture,  Theology/Bible

    Can’t Get Enough of Carl Trueman

    I agree with Justin Taylor who feels a tad embarrassed that he posts everything Carl Trueman writes. Contrary to what you might think (given all the links I give to Dr. Trueman), I am not getting paid for this. I really do think Trueman’s stuff is just that good. His latest essay for Reformation21 is a must-read: “Why Are There Never Enough Parking Spaces at the Prostate Clinic?” It’s a wry look at evangelicals who are obsessed with cultural analysis and cultural relevance. His contention is that an obsession with culture can undermine a Christian commitment to universal truths. He writes:

  • Theology/Bible

    Carl Trueman on Being a Christian Academic

    Carl Trueman has an outstanding exhortation in the most recent issue of Themelios, and his remarks have a particular punch for academics: “The title ‘scholar’ is not one that you should ever apply to yourself, and its current profusion among the chatterati on the blogs is a sign of precisely the kind of arrogance and hubris against which we all need to guard ourselves. Call me old-fashioned, but to me the word ‘scholar’ has an honorific ring. It is something that others give to you when, and only when, you have made a consistent and outstanding contribution to a particular scholarly field (and, no, completion of a Ph.D. does not…

  • Culture,  Theology/Bible

    Carl Trueman on “The Case for Gay Marriage”

    Carl Trueman has responded briefly to last week’s Newsweek cover story by Lisa Miller, “The Case for Gay Marriage.” Trueman makes an excellent point about Miller’s article that is worth more than a moment’s reflection: “Behold the future. The piece is prophetic because, in a week where a high-ranking member of the NAE had to resign because he was `shifting’ on gay unions, at a time when the full weight of the opinion forming social media is behind the normalisation of homosexuality as acceptable, challenges such as this are clearly going to be coming thick and fast.

  • Theology/Bible

    Carl Trueman: An Ironic Catalyst to Roman Catholicism

    I have been reading Francis Beckwith’s fascinating book about his return to the Roman Catholic Church from Protestant Evangelicalism. On page 83, there is an ironic little anecdote in which Beckwith says that Carl Trueman was a “catalyst” for his conversion to Roman Catholicism. I won’t explain the whole thing here, but in short Trueman had written an essay in which he claimed that Roman Catholicism was the “default” position for the church in the West. Trueman wrote that, “Rome has a better claim to historical continuity and institutional unity than any Protestant denomination, let alone the strange hybrid that is evangelicalism; in light of these facts, therefore, we need…

  • Christianity,  Culture

    Carl Trueman on Growing Up (or not)

    Carl Trueman is a great writer. His latest article at the Reformation 21 website is a must-read (HT: Justin Taylor). Here’s the conclusion: “You are, of course, what you worship, as Psalm 115 reminds us, and thus, as long as we idolize our children and the culture of youth, we can expect to – well, be just like them: pouting, irresponsible, hormonal, unpleasant and, frankly, as creepy as those sixteenth century portraits of little children with adult faces. Trapped in Neverland with no hope of escape.”

  • Christianity

    Carl Trueman: Linguistic Soul-patches

    You gotta love Carl Trueman. He hits another homer with this short essay, “Done? You Have Been.” Here’s an excerpt, but you must go on to read the rest. “A couple of months back, I made some observations on the advent of that most ridiculous facial accoutrement, the soul patch. The size of these absurd tufts of hair is surely inversely proportional to their eloquence: any Christian man the wrong side of forty, or, to avoid sexism, any woman of any age, who sports one clearly suffers from that common Christian ailment of taking themselves far too seriously. The faux-rebellion such things express is really rather sad: along with dog…

  • SBC

    A Resolution on Opposing Gender Transitions

    One of the most astonishing developments of late modernity has been the mainstreaming of transgenderism. In retrospect, the path to our current moment is clear enough (see Carl Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self). Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing grown men in earnest behaving like a cartoonish caricature of an adolescent girl. And yet examples of this kind of thing are proliferating, and anyone refusing to go along with this risks all manner of social and perhaps even professional ostracism and recriminations. It is like Americans have gotten a really bad fever with no indication in sight that the fever will ever break.…

  • Christianity,  Homosexuality,  Theology/Bible

    Pride Month and Ezekiel 16:49

    I’ve gotten quite a bit of pushback on a thread I posted on Twitter a couple days ago to resist the abominable observance of “Pride Month.” I was inspired to post the thread in part by Carl Trueman’s excellent column marking the first day of this month-long celebration of sin. (If you haven’t read Trueman’s piece yet, I highly recommend it.) My thread was simply a list of Bible texts dealing with sexual perversion and God’s grace to sinners. You can read the entire thread here, but the push-back I’ve read focuses on the text from Ezekiel 16: “Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom… they were haughty…

  • Christianity,  Social Justice

    A Christian Podcast with a Positive Outlook on CRT

    Mike Bird alerted me over the weekend to The Two Cities Podcast dealing with Critical Theory (CT) and its offshoot Critical Race Theory (CRT). I share it not to commend its positive outlook on CT and CRT but to show how Christian defenders of Critical Theory tend to make their case. I don’t think that any of the speakers are proponents of CT/CRT per se. Rather, they seem to be defending CT/CRT against Evangelical “paranoia” about them. For them, Evangelical alarm about CT/CRT is unjustified. Below is a brief summary, which I offer without comment. Obviously, all summaries are reductive, and there is much more to the podcast than what…

  • Culture,  Politics

    Are liberals ready to live with the transgender revolution they’ve unleashed?

    Carl Trueman writes about a 52-year old transgender man who is now identifying as transaged as well. Not only is Stefonknee Wolscht no longer identifying as a male of the species. He is also claiming to be a 6-year old. This is not a joke. This 52-year old man really claims that he is now a 6-year old little girl. Thus he is both transgender and transaged. The man’s picture looks like a gag from The Onion, but it’s not. It’s for real. Many transgender advocates have been complaining that this particular transgender person is trivializing the quest for transgender rights. And it is this complaint that Carl Trueman responds…