By Carl R. Trueman
The Lord answered Job out of the storm. He said: Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Job 38:1, 2 NIV
Introduction
Carl Trueman is described on the book cover as “an esteemed church historian…Fellow in Religion and Public Life…professor of biblical and religious studies” and as ”a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church”. In his latest book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, he attempts “to explain how the revolution of the self came to take the form it has in the West and why that is so culturally significant”. (382)
In the Forward, Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option, quotes Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of the rise of Soviet Communism: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this happened.” Dreher adds, “This answer is also a valid explanation for the crises enveloping the West today.” These crises (faith, family, purpose, gender, abortion, erotomania, and the modern concept of the self) are Trueman’s concerns. His book addresses “expressive individualism”, how and why it developed, and how the modern sexual revolution has emerged from it.
Dreher’s Forward concludes;
“We have to understand how and why they have forgotten God if we are to diagnose this sickness and to produce a vaccination, even a cure” (11) (italics his).
What does Trueman Say?
The book itself neither mentions nor alludes to this forgetting of God. Trueman instead focuses on how the current crises developed over time as if that explains the why. The adoption of this method by a Reformed theologian is somewhat shocking. A man educated in history and having wisdom from the Lord can trace something of the how but should acknowledge that how cannot tell us why. (Isaiah 55:8, 9). It is not for man to “truly understand the dynamics of the sexual politics that now dominate our culture.” (20) The why (the dynamics) is solely God’s prerogative. In claiming this kind of understanding, this analyzing author comes to think and sound like the very men (Rousseau, Freud, Reich, Marcuse) that he sees as forming “the idea of the self” (20) (italics his).
In his Introduction, Trueman says that “the origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body”. (19) He became convinced that such a statement does not simply stand alone; it “is set within the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood”. (20) In an interview, Trueman says this book was written to explain what he calls a “revolution of what it means to be a self and how human flourishing is understood”. His hope is that the reader might “understand the immediate phenomena…and the depth of the problems we face…with greater accuracy”. (MR23, 24) Elsewhere, Trueman says, “My specific purpose in my work was to establish why we are facing the specific forms with which we are confronted at this moment” (personal communication, 3-11-21). He concludes his Introduction in the book:
“Understanding the times is a precondition of responding appropriately to the times. And understanding the times requires a knowledge of history that has led up to the present” (31).
Toward this goal, he embarks on a history of ideas “to demonstrate how many of the ideas now informing both the conscious thinking and the instinctive intuitions of Western men and women have deep historical roots and a coherent genealogy that helps explain why society thinks and behaves the way it does”. (29) Accordingly, he explicates the philosophical contributions of Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse. Along the way he mentions the influence of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley as well as Gramsci, Freud, Fromm, and Horkheimer. From the ideas of largely atheistic men, Trueman derives his understanding of how and why we have come to our current position as denoted in the book’s subtitle: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution.
Concerning his accounts of these contributors, he says, “I have tried to be as careful and dispassionate as possible” so that “were they to read this book, they might demur to my conclusions but at least recognize themselves in my account of their thought”. (30) In response to these contributors and their influential ideas, he alludes to “my personal dissent” but provides nothing of content to this dissent. Trueman offers neither a biblically based critique nor any correction of their ideas, thereby implying acceptance if not agreement.
Taking Freud as an example, he says, “It is Freud more than any other figure who made plausible the idea that humans, from infancy onward, are at core, sexual, beings”. (28) He fails to critique this from Scripture and goes on to employ the derivative modern psychological concept of self to explain and judge human behavior. In so doing, Trueman comes to Christianize psychology and to psychologize Christianity. He calls Confessions by Augustine a “psychological autobiography” and describes Luther’s agonizing spiritual struggle as “introspective angst.”(45). He goes on to describe the Apostle Paul’s New Testament letters as “his psychological account of the Christian’s inner struggle.” (106)
Rather than seeing the modern concept of self, expressive individualism, and an inward focus as marks of man’s fallen nature in every period of time, Trueman describes them as the hallmarks of a “modern person”. Trueman seems to agree with Rieff that “the creedal phrase ‘Know thyself’” was a good and helpful creed by which to live because it supposedly “encouraged obedience to communal purposes”. (49) Nowhere does he challenge that doctrine of Greek philosophy though Scripture clearly teaches that Christian sanctification will always produce increasing knowledge of God and decreasing focus on the self. Only God knows the heart (I Kings 8:39, Jeremiah 17:9, 10), and Jesus clearly directed the believer away from any claim to know the heart (Matthew 7:1,2).
In addition to his acceptance of the modern concept of self, Trueman also advocates the psychological doctrine of environmental determinism. He is “deeply indebted” (22) to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity) who sees human life as “fundamentally dialogical.” He favorably quotes Taylor, “One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it”. (57) Applying this understanding to the church, Trueman concludes that church discipline maintains “community identity…by denying practical membership to the transgressor” while the identity of that transgressor “is effectively erased” since “individual identity is truly a dialogue” (58). As is the case throughout the book, this understanding has no relationship to Scripture’s teaching on church discipline.
Trueman offers no opposition to Taylor’s conclusion that “the individual finds her self-consciousness in being recognized by…society.” (62) He sees time as having “broken down the old hierarchical structures of society” (64) where the relationship of the individual Christian to his church was supposedly placed in the same position as the ancient Athenian to the assembly and the twentieth-century factory worker to his trade union. He sees the loss of this psychological relationship as regrettable (48) leaving the reader to question the Reformation which applied Luther’s concept of an alien righteousness to the individual Christian rather than to the community.
Trueman thus presents “the collapse of traditional hierarchies” (the social- moral environment) as the problem (67) and fails to present the biblical view of personal rebellion as the source of the ‘crisis’. He finds useful to his purpose Taylor’s concept of “the social imaginary”: “the common understanding which makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy”. (37) Based on this, Trueman concludes that “we generally operate on the basis of intuitions that we have often unconsciously absorbed from the culture around us.” (70) This is the language and the understanding of psychology, of environmental determinism; it is not a biblical view of man.
This reviewer will not rehearse Trueman’s account of what he considers to be the influential contributions of those he considers responsible for the rise and triumph of the modern self. The tragedy of this book lies in the non-critical manner of these accounts by which he aims to demonstrate why “society thinks and behaves the way it does” (29).
What Does Trueman Not Say
By grounding his analysis exclusively in psychological-sociological-philosophical categories, Trueman presents explanations that appear intellectually plausible but are contradictory to the teaching of Scripture (Colossians 2:4) He claims the “need for the community to agree on its conventions in order for meaningful moral discussion and decision making to take place” (405) though this need is foreign to Scripture. Agreed-upon convention is the law of man and is not the Law of God. He describes Charles Darwin as highly influential with vast numbers of people “simply assuming” that evolution “is true” (188). However, Trueman fails to confront Darwin’s religious theory and uses the excuse: “Few of us are qualified to opine on the science”. (189)
This author accurately observes and describes the moral problems rampant in society associated with the so-called triumph of the modern self. But he sees “the underlying causes [as] deeply embedded within our culture” (386) rather than deeply embedded within the fallen heart of man in the line of Adam. In spite of claiming that “understanding the times is a precondition of responding appropriately to the times” (31), he offers no more than “some preliminary suggestions” after four hundred pages of supposed explanation. Although Scripture contains significant portions of prophecy, this member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church claims to have “no privileged access to the shape of the future”(384). Worse yet, his suggestions are thoroughly reflective of the ideas and influences of the philosophers and influencers he so “dispassionately” relays in the book. He limps to his conclusions: that “who we are is a dialogue between our self-consciousness and the world around us”, that “external environment is critical”, and that “our desires and our deep sense of self are, in fact, shaped in profound ways by the society in which we live.” (392) Surely the “groups and individuals” whose ideas are represented in this book would not only “recognize themselves in [his] account” (31) but would be pleased to recognize their conclusions thoroughly incorporated into his own.
Rather than calling the church to speak from Scripture against the modern concept and resultant mores of the therapeutic self, he calls on the church to “be a community” because, as Hegel said, “selves are socially constructed”. (404) He wants the church to have “a high view of the physical body” claiming that Protestantism, “with its emphasis on the preached word” is vulnerable “to downplaying the importance of the physical.” (405) Trueman calls the church to recognize its complicity in the ‘anticulture’ in terms of its adoption of popular secular stances on matters such as race and sexuality (389). There is no suggestion that he recognizes that his book is a part of that complicity.
He warns, “The task of the church in cultivating a different understanding of the self is, humanly speaking, likely to provoke despair” (404). Nowhere in the book is the reader pointed to the gospel and/or to the clear biblical teaching that no one will enter the Kingdom of Heaven without this despair of the Self (Matthew 5:3) .
Conclusion
The book has the potential to be widely used in seminaries and Christian colleges of all types. Thus it is likely to further promote “the rise and triumph of the modern self” by failing to provide any clear biblical answer to “cultural amnesia, expressive individualism, and …[the] sexual revolution.”
The problems of society, of the church, and of individual men are truly, in the final analysis, a forgetting of God.
Then Job replied to the Lord: Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know, and I repent in dust and ashes. Job 42:1,3,6 NIV
References
The Rise and Triumph of the modern Self, Carl R. Trueman, Crossway, Wheaton, Illinois, 2020
(MR) “Whatever I Think, Therefore I Am: An Interview with Carl Trueman, Timon Cline, Modern Reformation, Vol. 30, No. 2, March-April, 2021