Carl R. Trueman > Quotes

“Every age has had its darkness and its dangers. The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.”
― Carl R Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“drinking beer with friends is perhaps the most underestimated of all Reformation insights and essential to ongoing reform; and wasting time with a choice friend or two on a regular basis might be the best investment of time you ever make.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Fools Rush In Where Monkeys Fear to Tread: Taking Aim at Everyone

“While earlier generations might have seen damage to body or property as the most serious categories of crime, a highly psychologized era will accord increasing importance to words as means of oppression. And this represents a serious challenge to one of the foundations of liberal democracy: freedom of speech. Once harm and oppression are regarded as being primarily psychological categories, freedom of speech then becomes part of the problem, not the solution, because words become potential weapons.”
― Carl R Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.”
― Carl Trueman

“The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good.... If God can take the greatest of evils and turn them for the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well.”
― Carl R. Trueman

“The task of the preacher, therefore, is to take the Bible and to do two things in every sermon: destroy self-righteousness and point hearers toward the alien, external righteousness of Christ.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom

“A second useful element in Taylor’s work that connects to the social imaginary and to which we will have recourse is the relationship between mimesis and poiesis. Put simply, these terms refer to two different ways of thinking about the world. A mimetic view regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it. Poiesis, by way of contrast, sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.”
― Carl R Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“Cultural relevance can be a cruel mistress.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence. All these things play into legitimizing and strengthening those groups that can define themselves in such terms. They capture, one might say, the spirit of the age.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“The collapse in evangelical doctrinal consensus is intimately related to the collapse in the understanding of, and role assigned to, Scripture as God's Word spoken within the church.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

“If the church as a whole is losing its ability to be “salt and light” in the culture, it is not because its members have no opinion of the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, no appreciation for the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and no regular slot on The Charlie Rose Show. More likely, it is because they do not have a solid grasp of the basic elements of the faith, as taught in Scripture and affirmed by the confessions and catechisms of the church.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“The theology of the cross is not a cerebral thing; it profoundly affects our Christian experience and existence, making demands upon our whole lives and turning theology into something which controls not just our thoughts, but the very way in which we experience the world around and taste the blessing and fellowship of God himself.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

“[I]n the work of the New Left one finds philosophical justification for what are now intuitive commonplaces of our culture: to be free is to be sexually liberated; to be happy is to be affirmed in that liberation.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“Theology masters the man; the man is never to master the theology.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom

“The law says, ‘do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘believe in this,’ and everything is already done.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom

“Luther’s doctrine of justification depends upon two things: the constant preaching of the wrath of God in the face of sin; and the realization that every Christian is at once righteous and a sinner, thus needing the hammer of the law to terrify and break the sinful conscience.”
― Carl Trueman

“In his 1983 Templeton Prize address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered this summary explanation for why all the horrors of Soviet communism came to pass: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”1”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“Ironically, it is not the confessionalists but the “no creed but the Bible” people who exalt their creeds above Scripture.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity

“Of course, that a sentence is utterly fallacious has never prevented it from being believed by large numbers of people and, on occasion, used as a foundational principle for a comprehensive philosophy of life.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution

“The stories the modern world tells us are powerful: the future-oriented promise of science, the technology that privileges the young, the materialistic paradise offered by consumerism, which is always just around the next corner, the dying of confidence in words, the fragmentation of human nature, the distrust of traditional structures and notions of authority, and the wicked results of saying that somebody else is wrong and does not belong. All of these in their different ways make the idea of doctrinal Christianity, expressed in creeds and confessions, both implausible and distasteful; and all of them are part of the cultural air we all breathe.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative

“A movement that cannot or will not draw boundaries, or that allows the modern cultural fear of exclusion to set its theological agenda, is doomed to lose its doctrinal identity. Once it does, it will drift from whatever moorings it may have had in historic Christianity.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

“In biblical times or in ancient Greece, sex was regarded as something that human beings did; today it is considered to be something vital to who human beings are.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution

“Good confessions properly applied by appropriately qualified and ordained elders do actually hinder despotic church power and protect the members; they do not facilitate it.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity

“We must hold firmly to the conviction that God gives no one his Spirit or grace except through or with the external Word.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom

“The light may well be dying, but we will rage, rage against it; and be assured, we will never go gentle into that good night.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Minority Report: Unpopular Thoughts on Everything from Ancient Christianity to Zen Calvinism

“The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“Had it been uttered by a patient to a doctor in the mid-twentieth century, the doctor would almost certainly have responded that the patient had a psychiatric problem and that his mind needed to be treated so as to bring its feelings into line with his physical body. Today, the doctor is more likely to respond that the problem is such that the patient’s body needs to be brought into alignment with those inner feelings. Indeed, were a doctor to respond in the earlier fashion today, he might well find himself subject to legal action. What has changed in our society and in the social imaginary to bring this new situation about?”
― Carl R. Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution

“The expressive individual is now the sexually expressive individual. And education and socialization are to be marked not by the cultivation of traditional sexual interdicts and taboos but rather by the abolition of such and the enabling of pansexual expression even among children. One might regard this change as obnoxious, but it reflects the logic of expressive individualism in the sexualized world that is the progeny of the consummation of the Marx-Freud nuptials. . . .

At the same time, the psychologizing of oppression by the New Left massively expanded the potential number of victims. One did not need to be in a concentration camp or a gulag or to be subject to segregation or even to have experience of serious poverty to claim such status. Now one could point to other forms of nonrecognition as constituting victimization - not having one's sexual preferences positively affirmed by wider society, for example, or not being allowed to marry a same-sex partner. And merely tolerating certain sexual proclivities and activities would not be enough, for tolerance is not the same as recognition. Indeed, it actually implies a degree of disapproval, or nonrecognition by society. Only full equality before the law and in the culture at large can provide that. When the political struggle became a psychological struggle, it also became a therapeutic struggle.”
― Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

“Membership is not a reward for achieving a high level of doctrinal knowledge any more than a high level of personal holiness. It is the gateway to the means by which these things can become possible via the ordinary means of grace.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity

“We may live in an age when everything has to be “radical” and “revolutionary.” For Luther the most radical thing one could do was to learn the basics of the faith with the simple trust of a little child.”
― Carl R. Trueman, Luther on the Christian Life: Cross and Freedom