Confronting the Attack on Human Nature

“Stop and think that the ‘death of God’ fatally carries within itself the ‘death of man’ too. Christ rose again so that man could find the true meaning of existence,” Pope St. John Paul II stated in his April 6, 1980 Easter address. The fatal result of the rejection of God in the devaluing and destruction of humanity was explored by Carl Trueman and Mary Eberstadt in discussing Trueman’s new book The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C. on April 7.

The Change in Consciousness about Anthropology

Trueman said that as a pastor in 2015 at an Orthodox Presbyterian church northwest of Philadelphia, he wondered why the way that he thought about sex and sexuality was very different from the way young people who were struggling to be faithful Christians thought about sexual issues. The school district that his children attended was the first one “in Pennsylvania to introduce transgender bathroom and sports policies.” He was requested by “a local Catholic lawyer whose wife worked at the school” to write a letter to the school board objecting to the policies but asked that only Trueman’s name appear on the letter. He wrote the letter and was surprised at the reaction. He got a polite response which basically told him to mind his own business. He asked a young couple to post the same letter to social media and got responses wondering why anyone would be concerned about transgenderism. He also wrote a letter to a local newspaper and got no response. He said that he thought at the time that “these people have no idea what’s coming. Gay marriage is one thing, [but the] transgender question” will “interfere with everybody’s life in a fairly direct way.”

By contrast to these responses a decade ago, an article he wrote on the same topic for the Washington Post this year resulted in a comment to the article within sixty minutes saying that he “was evil and twisted.” But the unconcern with transgenderism a decade ago ultimately prompted him to write The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Trueman’s summation of the book was reviewed by this writer here.

Trueman said that he was concerned in writing his current book about “the church historical question.” Much of his career has involved teaching church history. His faculty advisor at college had told him to try to see each side of a controversy as those people themselves saw it. In each epoch he has tried to look at the real question at issue. In the early Christian centuries, the doctrine of the Trinity was at issue, specifically so in the third and fourth centuries, then the relation of Jesus’ divine and human natures in the fifth century, the sacraments and ecclesiastical authority in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and for today, the issue is anthropology, and its question “what is man?” This current issue is the crisis of our day.

His second concern in writing his current book (The Desecration of Man) was “the ecstatic glee with which the destruction of anthropology was greeted.” As an example, he gave the difference between the 1990s pro-abortion mantra, that abortion “should be safe, legal, and rare,” and the contemporary admonition to “shout your abortion” and claims that it is “a fundamental human right.” He noted the recent “case of a man who wanted to become a woman so he could get pregnant and have an abortion.”

The Desecration of the Human

The question then is “why desecration?” Conservative commentators have recently deplored the “disenchantment” of the world (its loss of mystery and spiritual significance). But this, Trueman said, is only part of the problem. Eating, reproducing, and dying were historically surrounded with sacred rituals and significance. But today, sex has become “trivial recreation” as far as public morality is concerned, dining together and even dining rooms are less common than in the past, while funerals have for many been “replaced with celebrations of life.” Trueman said he understood that a person’s life is worth celebration, but if so, surely their “death is worth mourning.” With these three things “disenchantment has set in.”

Yet disenchantment does not fully capture the contemporary crisis. Again, the movement of abortion from the status of necessary evil to cause for celebration is not really a matter of disenchantment. The real crisis, Trueman said, was correctly identified by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche said that because God is dead, “we ourselves must rise to become gods.” The way many contemporary people know that they are “authentic,” that they are “free and autonomous” is by “transgressing.” This involves “the repudiation of traditional external authority.” Trueman said that from a Christian theological perspective “if you want to feel godlike, you have to do things that smash the image of God.” But this, he said, is ironic, because in doing that, “you make yourself nothing.” As far as sex is concerned, it is for many now “recreation,” with people left “in a permanent state of adolescence … unable to take people with the seriousness that they deserve.” The ruling “expressive individualism” of the day moves people to treat other people as merely instruments, means to our ends. The Christian maxim to treat others “as persons becomes deeply problematic to us.”

Consecration as the Answer to Human Desecration

In his new book, Trueman is particularly interested in examining what human desecration means in connection with human birth, sex, and death. At the book’s end, he returns to the theme of disenchantment. He believes it is “too vague.”

It does not fully explicate the “moral psychology” at issue. The answer for people who are desecrated (or pursuing desecration) is for them to be “consecrated.” Desecration is worse than disenchantment, because it is an “active transgression” of “what it means to be a human being.” But consecration is “better news than re-enchantment … because we actually know how consecration should take place.” It is in “the church” where we find consecration and “the new humanity breaking into the old.”

For this consecration in the church “we need to think about the creed, we need to think about the cult, we need to think about the code.” By creed, Trueman said he means “basic Christian teachings, we need to teach orthodoxy.” Trueman is leery of arguments that Christianity is good because “it leads to these good social consequences.” Instead we must realize that the good social consequences happen “because Christianity is true – “we can’t lose sight of that.”

An example of the kind of cultural Christianity Trueman warns against was the late British philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton. He commended Scruton’s aesthetics, and his commitment to “the importance of the sacred and the importance of religion.” But Trueman said of Scruton “at best, he’s a kind of Kantian.” In response to a public encounter in which Scruton was urged that he must ground his commitment to the good and the beautiful in a full-blown Christian faith, Scruton responded “I just can’t get there.” Trueman said that this was really what Nietzsche would have considered “nihilism,” i.e., pretending that “nothing has changed,” although one has abandoned Christian faith. However, Trueman said that in just the past decade there is an improved environment for discussing Christian faith with persons not committed to it.

Secondly, the “cult” is the Christian imagination. Novels express the Christian imagination, but primarily Christian culture comes through worship. Trueman said that “the shape of that worship reflects and arises out of the creed; it shapes the way we think about ourselves, the way we think about God, [and] the way we think about other people.” He said that “communal singing” has great power, “even in a secular culture.” Through communal singing, one feels more connected to others in one’s community. He said in England, the only communal singing occurs in “sports matches, and church.”

Finally, regarding “the code,” or morality, he said that people take “great delight in destroying the image of God in others.” People are “treated as instrumental things, rather than as persons.” The way this is overcome is by “being a loving, hospitable community.” Trueman observed that in II Samuel chapter 11, Bathsheba is referred to by name with respect to her father and her husband, but only as “the woman” with respect to David. To him she was only an object. Trueman believes that David’s adultery with Bathsheba was actually sexual assault, not seduction. Her bathing, which David observed, was likely the ritual monthly purification required of Israelite women, which indicated her piety. The affair, he said, “captures in essence the desecration of humanity, treating the other as an instrumental object to be used for my satisfaction … We overcome that through the way we treat other people hospitably.” The Biblical God is “the God of the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner. You therefore should love the sojourner, for you were sojourners in Egypt (Deut. 10:18-19).” This reflection of God’s character “was the moral mandate” of the Israelite religion.

Contending with a Rapidly Developing World

The rapidity of modern life works against hospitality. To transform culture to the will of God, Christians must work slowly through obedience to the creed, obedience to the cult, and obedience to the code. He said that the answer to the modern crisis of anthropology is “the church.” It must follow the creed and follow discipline to enforce the cult and the code. But the current problem with Christianity is that “most churches will do one of the three well, one of the three OK, and one of the three not at all.” He observed that his conservative Presbyterian world does the truth well, “we occasionally do the good,” but “we can’t be bothered with the beautiful” (the cult). The problems of current culture are complex, but this slow solution is something in which “each person has a part.”

Eberstadt said that the Internet is “a game changer” for evangelism, for becoming holy, “for trying to be a Christian.” Yet much corruption is spread on the Internet. It seemed to her that “we need church driven rules, or if not church driven, laity-driven actual rules” to keep people from being corrupted by the technological revolution. Trueman referred to Nietzsche’s “Madman scene” in his Gay Science in which the atheist madman declares that his time had not yet come. Trueman suggested that with the technological revolution in communications of the early twenty-first century, a time of insanity has come. One could have an “anarchic vision” in the nineteenth century, but you couldn’t “really act on it, because the technology was not in place.” But today, he believes that it “is in place.” In view of Eberstadt’s own book about contraception (Adam and Eve after the Pill) Trueman observed that Mary Harrington has maintained that the contraceptive pill was “the first piece of transhumanist technology.” The Internet, however, is challenging humanity “in even more explosive and radical ways.” It represents an enormous challenge for modern institutions.

One possible response to the challenge of living in a society driven by high technology, the Internet, and social media is to “take church discipline more seriously” Trueman said. In the church where he was pastor, three people were effectively “excommunicated … for particularly horrific attitudes and behaviors.” He said that “I got huge heat each time I did it.” People do say that church discipline is pointless today, since anyone can go to another church. But Trueman cited three reasons for church discipline:

1. “reclaiming the offender” (bringing him or her to repentance),
2. “sending a signal to the rest of the congregation” that the offense is completely unacceptable in the church, and most importantly,
3. “the vindication of the name of Christ in public.” In this regard, he referred to the clerical abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, in which the tragedy to the victims is often highlighted as most important, yet what is truly most important is that it “dragged Christ’s name through the mud.”

People must be held to account. He referred to the opinion of Pope Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) in the 1960s, which Trueman said was that “the church has got to get smaller.” The world must have a signal that the church is off-limits to heinously sinful behaviors, even if “the church is a community of sinners … [and] grace.”

Eberstadt referred to the subtitle of Trueman’s new book (“How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity”) to observe that the cultural rejection of God in fact immiserates people. As a result, people “can’t figure out marriage and children,” young women are told that “career is everything”, young men “are addicted to pornography, and gambling, and gaming,” etc. She said that she does see revival of a certain sort in the appearance of homeschooling, classical academies and Christian student groups on campus that didn’t exist ten years ago. While she thinks that reasonably a Christian leadership class will be fostered, she worries that this will result in many ordinary “people left behind,” resulting in an even more polarized society.

Trueman agreed that there is something of a revival among college students who come to Christianity for “metaphysical reasons,” i.e., to ground their understanding of life. But other students are coming as well, and whether they are intellectual or not, it is important, that they establish local churches to advance the Kingdom of God in our day. Vital local congregations will help ground social stability. Some people will choose to join the church for social rather than religious reasons. Eberstadt noted that it is not unusual to find a significant number of Catholic converts on college campuses, which would not have been the case even a decade ago. But she said that despite this, we must remember that the social effect of Christianity is not the decisive reason it should be embraced, but rather that it is true. Yet the consequences of trying to become gods, as Nietzsche recommended, “speak for themselves.”

Parallels to the Past and Looking to the Future

Eberstadt asked how a small group of Christians in the first century A.D. advanced a faith that ended generations later taking over the Roman Empire. She finds Eusebius’ claim that the early Christians not only took care of “their own, but of others” to be persuasive. But she asked, how do we do that now that we live in an era of Christian tribalism, when Christians are circling the wagons around their tribe. Trueman responded that conservative Christians too often in our day consider power decisive in advancing the gospel, when the cross of Christ directs us to charitable work and sacrifice. We have a much greater possibility of influencing people next to us in the pews, than we do on the Internet. We need to be “reconfiguring ourselves to think locally,” he said.

A questioner asked what impact artificial intelligence would have on the Christian future. Trueman said that while AI can be beneficial, it becomes a danger when “it starts to take away human agency, and it starts to take away human interaction.” Notably, it takes away human labor to a considerable degree (e.g., human research), and “there is a dignity that comes with labor.” We lose this by relying on AI.

Another questioner asked if it is “the time not to be quiet,” since so much of what Christians believe in is “being encroached upon.” Trueman emphasized that we should speak up but should always be gracious in our statements. We also should, if possible, engage people in person, rather than online. Online discourse “disembodies” people. It might be added than in online discourse, at least psychologically, one is responding to ideas rather than people. Hence it is easier to be confrontational and polemical. Trueman said that dehumanizing others also dehumanizes us.

The pace of change in the modern world, and the unexpected turns of events make Trueman’s prescription of fidelity to creed, cult, and code seem frustratingly slow, if not hopeless. But as faithful followers of Christ, we must be confident that God has all things in his hands, will turn them to his glory and our good, and cause justice and mercy both to prevail in eternity.

More from IRD :

Mere Anglicanism in an Age of Expressive Individualism

Facing the Adversary World of the Sexual Revolution

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