Show Notes
On this episode of Nuance, Case is joined by Dr. Carl Trueman, author and professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Together they explore the intersections of identity, culture, and critical theory. They discuss the historical roots of modern identity debates, the impact of technology on social relationships, and the implications of critical theory and race theory in contemporary society. Trueman provides insights into how these ideas have evolved, and their relevance in today’s cultural landscape. Together they discuss the implications of CRT, transgenderism, DEI and its implications for Christians. Ultimately, they emphasize the hope found in the gospel and the potential of future generations to navigate these cultural challenges.
Episode Resources:
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1433556332/
Strange New World: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1433579308/
To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1087754399/
First Things lecture in Washington DC on March 11, 2025 at the Heritage Foundation: www.firstthings.com
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website: https://wecolabor.com/
Get to know Case: https://wecolabor.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
You’re standing on the cobblestone heart of Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt. It’s dusk. The stately French cathedral and German cathedral rise above you. You scan their facades and look up at the ornate domes glowing gold against the sky. In the center of the square stands the statue of Friedrich Schiller, as if presiding over a grand symposium where the echoes of Germany’s past mingle with the buzz of contemporary life. Street musicians fill the air with mellow saxophone notes while tourists snap photos of the classical buildings. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the murmured dialogue of historical thinkers. Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, each contributing their own perspective on the ever-evolving human self. It’s here in this tangible meeting of the old and the new that the questions of today’s professor and author, Carl Trueman, truly come alive. How have these iconic intellectuals shaped the way we see ourselves? How does their legacy shape our modern public square, our day to day at work? Well, the conversation feels urgent and pressing even among the centuries-old stones. This juxtaposition reminds us that the roots of today’s debates about identity, morality and freedom stretch back to the very foundations of European thought. DEI, critical race theory, the sexual revolution, gender ideology, all of these things that we deal with today can be traced through the intellectual movements of the 18th and 19th century. And so I’m grateful that we have Carl Trueman here to help us understand it even more. Carl, welcome. Thank you for being here.
Carl Trueman
Pleasure to be here, Case. Thanks for having me on.
Case Thorp
Well, you and I met about two years ago and you were here in Orlando to speak at the Geneva school and I have to admit I did not know until that event that you were a Brit. Perhaps it’s my America or American-centrism that I just assumed otherwise. But, how long have you been in the States and what would you say is your biggest observation about the differences in culture?
Carl Trueman
I’ve been here 24 years or just under. I moved over here, emigrated just a few weeks before 9/11. Yeah, it’s hard to put a finger on the biggest differences. Some cultural differences are interesting but comparatively trivial. Some are much more significant. I think the significant difference would be the emphasis upon the big individual that runs throughout American culture, whether it’s through sport or through politics. There’s much more of an emphasis on the individual and less on the team, I think, than I was used to back in the United Kingdom.
Case Thorp
Well, we certainly have a big individual doing big things in Washington, D.C. right now. The individual. Right. Well, to our viewers and friends, welcome to Nuance where we seek to be faithful in the public square. I’m Case Thorp and I want to encourage you to like, subscribe, share, make a comment wherever you are receiving this great podcast. Well, let me tell you a bit more about Carl Trueman. He’s a historian, theologian and author known for his incisive commentary on Western culture and Christian thought. As I mentioned, born in England, he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge and later completed his PhD at the University of Aberdeen. I’m jealous, Carl. That would be so romantic to get a PhD at Aberdeen.
Carl Trueman
It was, yeah, it was fun. I met my wife there, so it was definitely time well spent.
Case Thorp
Okay. Well, over the course of his academic career, he has served in the faculties of several institutions, including the University of Nottingham in the UK. He’s an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, reflecting his deep involvement in both scholarly and church contexts. Carl has taught at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, which Carl, I’m afraid to say is a rebel breakaway from my alma mater, Princeton Seminary. But you know, it’s okay.
He’s currently a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. His scholarship focuses on the Reformation, church history, and the intersection of theology and contemporary culture. He’s authored multiple books and friends, let me tell you, these books have created a good and wonderful ripple through both churchmen and academics as his insights to our culture have been quite prescient, one being the rise and triumph of the modern self, and then it’s more accessible. So I’m holding up a copy of Strange New World to encourage folks to get one of those and his latest book, which has meant so very much to me To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. Now, Carl, I have to apologize. And if you’re listening, if you’re on a podcast, you can’t see what I’m doing, but I left the copy of To Change All Worlds that I’ve been reading at home this morning. And I thought, my goodness, what am I gonna do? So I printed out a color cover of your book just to have something.
Carl Trueman
Very affecting. I thought maybe you’d got a concise version or something when you pulled it up there.
Case Thorp
Well, he’s a frequent commentator on cultural issues and contributes to various podcast publications. So he is married to Katiana. They have two boys and one grandchild. Carl, how old is that grandchild?
Carl Trueman
Three years old. Her third birthday was two days ago.
Case Thorp
My goodness. Well, you’ve got a lot of material right there on human identity. Well, thank you for joining us. And so if you could just give folks a sense of how you came to these topics, why these particular conversations back to Marx and Kant and connect them today, why they mean so much to you.
Carl Trueman
Yeah, well the major work on the origins of the modern self, the rise and triumph of the modern self, which was abbreviated as Strange New World, really arose out of a pastoral interest. I was pastoring at the time, I was also teaching at the seminary, and I was interested in discovering why I thought there was a big generational shift in the way that young people thought about matters of sex and gender compared to how my generation had thought about them. And it was really in exploring that that I realized it was a much bigger question than just sex and gender. Actually, the sex and the gender questions rest upon a deeper understanding of what it means to be a human person. And the critical theory stuff in some ways flowed from that. 2020, of course, was the year when critical theory, in the form of critical race theory, suddenly became a big thing, burst out of university seminar rooms and took to the streets, so to speak.
Case Thorp
Well, it really did because I was at Emory University in the ‘90s and I don’t know that they used that term, but these ideas were not foreign to me. But I guess you mean they broke out of the university.
Carl Trueman
Yeah, I read critical theory, I did classics as an undergraduate in the ‘80s, but of course you’re reading Marxist historiography, you’re reading critical theory, you’re writers on culture, but I was never really connecting that to life outside of the seminar room. And the shocking thing about 2020, of course, was suddenly you find a lot of critical theoretical terminology being bandied about on what was then Twitter by people who probably never read a page of Critical Theory or sat in a seminar on Critical Theory in their lives. And that was fascinating to me. Why is it that a relatively arcane and difficult field has suddenly gripped the popular imagination? What’s going on here? So that was the origin of the book on Critical Theory. B&H approached me and said they wanted a book that would…not a red meat flame throwing polemic against critical theory…but really a book that would help non-specialists and particularly Christians understand what critical theory is claiming and what’s at stake.
Case Thorp
And that’s To Change All Worlds. Well, I’m interested in, I did not know actually until looking into, for preparing for this interview of your pastoral connection. and how, tell me where you have served and what your pastoral role has looked like.
Carl Trueman
Well, I was ordained as a, what we call in Presbyterianism, as a ruling elder, way back in about 1999, 2000, in the Free Church of Scotland in Aberdeen. I was on faculty at the University of Aberdeen at the time, so I was functioning as an elder at that point. And then when I moved to the United States, it took some time, but in 2009, was ordained initially as a teacher at Westminster Seminary. In other words, I’m a minister, I can administer the sacraments, but my pastoral call was to my students and to the institution. The church I was involved in hit some financial difficulties in, I think it was 2011, 2012, and as I was already doing some of the preaching there, I stepped in as effectively part-time pastor. Part-time as in that’s the salary you get. Of course, pastors don’t operate on a nine to five basis, so.
Case Thorp
Right.
Carl Trueman
I had a co-pastor. We did it between us. We shouldered the work between us. But I stepped down from that in 2018 when I moved to Grove City College and I was called as a teacher. Again, I’m still a minister, but called as a teacher to serve at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania.
Case Thorp
Well, I appreciate that part of your biography because it roots you in the real world of relationships and current events. And I know our listeners, especially I hear, dealing in the workplace with different generational perspectives. I mean, Millennials, Gen Z, coworkers, have presented a lot of challenges to some. Now I want to connect that in your book, the rise and triumph of the modern self, you point out how personal feelings and self perception seem to take up the center stage in so many moral and cultural norms with the younger generations. What’s going on there and why?
Carl Trueman
Yeah, I think we’re living with the fruits of what you might call the age of authenticity. That for several hundred years now, you could characterize it saying traditional views of what it meant to be a fully rounded, flourishing human being, which typically involves some level of conformity to the community to which one belonged, some primary acknowledgement of obligations towards others, natural obligations, contractual obligations. That has really been superseded or attenuated by an increasing emphasis upon authenticity. You find the real you by looking within. The authentic you is the one who is able to act outwardly in accordance with their inner feelings. We might say that the trans movement represents the most dramatic expression of this where, if I feel that I’m a woman in a man’s body or if I feel that I’m a man in a woman’s body, then ultimately I must be allowed to perform that inner gender outwardly. If I’m to be, to use a modern way, if I’m to be true to myself, if I’m to be a real me, if I’m to be authentic. So we live in an era of authenticity where an unprecedented amount of authority is granted to our inner feelings compared to outward relationships and obligations.
Case Thorp
Now, you wouldn’t suggest the alternative or better or biblical way to go would be to be inauthentic or fake.
Carl Trueman
No, I think it’s a question of how one defines authenticity. First of all, one would want to acknowledge that feelings are important. You know, the psalms are full of expressions of feeling. We would be less than human if we denied the power of our feelings. But I think the question of authenticity is an interesting one. And there’s a sense in which, yes, we don’t want to be inauthentic. We have words for that. The person who acts in a way that doesn’t reflect how they feel inwardly, we might refer to them as a hypocrite in some circumstances or as two-faced. On the other hand, I think we all acknowledge that there are certain inner feelings we have that for our own good and for the good of the community need to be repressed or suppressed. If I fall out very badly with you, Case, by the end of this podcast, I think we would say, it would not be good for Trueman to jump in his car, drive down to Florida and pick a fight with Case. It is important for him to mortify, to put to death that kind of inner feeling. Now that’s an extreme example, but I would say, of reserve, which you could say are values of inauthenticity, are actually quite important in a lot of circumstances. It’s good not to tell people what we’re really thinking about them sometimes. It’s good not to act on our impulses. It’s good to learn to control our desires. Authenticity, it’s a great idea, but we have to acknowledge that it’s got to have its limits.
Case Thorp
How did we get here? How did this generation find itself with such radical candor, radical authenticity?
Carl Trueman
Yeah, think, well, I think there’s a long story behind it. There’s several hundred years of what we might describe as intellectual history, the way certain elite groups are thinking and operating and acting. What we’ve seen in the last 40, 50, 60 years is, particularly in the realm of technology, things have been delivered into the hands of every man that have allowed every man to live the kind of life that the elites were living in the past.
It’s well known that the British royal family, like royal families across… Well, but we all know that the royal family have not lived typically in accordance with the sexual mores of wider society. When Edward VII is at his coronation at the beginning of the 20th century, there’s a special box in Westminster Abbey for his mistresses. Now, you could get away with behaving like that as a king because you have the money and the power and the connections to protect you from the consequences of your actions. Once we move to the latter part of the 20th century, we now have, anybody can be promiscuous because hey, we have antibiotics that allow us to avoid those nasty diseases. We have easy contraceptives that allow us to avoid the possibility, the probable consequence of pregnancy.
So there are technological things that have transformed how we behave. The arrival of the smartphone has completely transformed how young people socially relate to each other. When I was at school in the 1980s, social relations were really physically mediated. I was a presence with my friends. If we fell out, that was costly because fists could fly. Whereas now, you can be an anonymous mean girl online and do a lot of damage to somebody very cost-free. So I think that the big generational shift we’re seeing is connected in large part with the access to technology and the way technology now mediates human relationships in an unprecedented way; the notion of authenticity has at its heart the idea that life is really something to be performed.
We are not to conform with the community, we are to perform ourselves as individuals. Social media, you know, that puts performance on crack cocaine. And we even use that language, social media platforms. Well, what do you do on a platform? You perform on a platform. It’s a stage. So technology, I think, when somebody writes the big history of this, I think technology has to be or will be a very big part.
Case Thorp
And it’s only evolving ever more quickly. And how will that shape us as humans? What I find pastorally in my biblical teaching, I am trying to reinforce Christ-like identity, the Imago Dei, to fight against a number of the cultural narratives about who we are and what we are. Well, this latest of your books, To Change All Worlds, I’ve really, really enjoyed. And like you’ve mentioned, critical race theory gets so much buzz since the pandemic. Now, many of our listeners know this is the theory that examines hidden biases and historical influences in our institutions. It’s one expression that has to do with racism, gender bias, et cetera. So now help me with this because I was fascinated, well I say help me, share with our listeners this fact. In To Change All Worlds, you trace the development of critical race theory from Jewish scholars who were actually trying to push back against the Nazis. And that’s so ironic or mind blowing to think, well of course everybody wants to push back against the Nazis, but in doing so, they laid the seeds and we eventually get to critical theory. Explain that for folks.
Carl Trueman
Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, for anybody out there interested in my book, I don’t do a lot with critical race theory. It really is looking at the foundations. And mainly that’s because I think the most interesting stuff and the basic elements of critical theory, various branches of critical theory, are all in place by the 1960s. And they all track back to some extent to this group of German, predominantly German Jewish thinkers, the Frankfurt School, who were based at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Really, these are a group of men that they’re wrestling with, a very important problem and a problem I think that many of us could sympathize with. The big question for them is, why is it in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s you have this advanced industrial nation. Which just lost a catastrophic war and they’re wrestling with the fact that the working class that they would expect, they’re Marxists, they would generally expect the working class to be leaning left at this point and backing the socialist parties and the communist parties. Many of them are actually backing the rising nationalist parties, the parties of what we might call the far right. And the question for the Frankfurt School guys is this. Why are these working class people voting against their best interests? They, you know, their view is they should be voting for the Marxists. The Marxists will help them, but they’re actually voting for the Nazis. The Nazis are going to crush them under a jackboot. And they’re doing this willingly. They’re doing it freely. Nobody’s forcing them to do it. It’s not that German elections are like North Korean elections.
Case Thorp
Yeah, Hitler rose up democratically.
Carl Trueman
Yeah, you don’t have a choice. So…they’re really getting at what is it that’s shaping the consciousness of these people such that, to put it rather bluntly, they vote against their best interests. And that’s where critical theory emerges and it goes to that unconscious bias kind of question because what they’re looking at there is what’s going on in culture? What is it in the world? What is it in the air we breathe that blinds us, if you like, to the reality of situations and leads us to pursue myths? Now, jumping forward to critical race theory, the connection to critical race theory is, you know, the white guy who says, hey, I’m not a racist. Critical race theory is gonna say, well, hang on a minute, you don’t think you’re a racist. But actually, if you dig below the surface, there are a lot of things that you’ve just internalized that perpetuate the racial inequalities, inequities of society. So there is a connection between early critical theory and critical race theory in terms of this. If you like, they’re united by what they want to do is make you realize that the things you think are natural are actually not natural. They’re socially constructed and they are socially constructed for reasons of manipulation. Not simply because, hey, we have to have an idea of this in order for society to function. No, we have these ideas because society is meant to function in a particularly manipulative way.
Case Thorp
For power.
So they were Marxist scholars. Were they perhaps blinded by their assumption of what was the good and the right? Because they couldn’t possibly understand why would you vote against your best interests, but their opinion of their best interests was off or Marxist-oriented.
Carl Trueman
Yeah, I mean from my perspective, I would say hang on a minute. I’m not sure that voting for the communists is going to be a great thing for the working classes. And in some ways we see this today when you think of the reaction to President Trump’s first, certainly his first election and even to a degree, his re-election. And I’m sure you’ll listen as there’s a variety of opinions on President Trump out there. This is neither a pro- nor an anti-Trump comment. But it’s interesting to me that the initial reaction from the progressive left that I was picking up in the days after the election was very much, how can people be so, how can the working classes be so stupid that they voted for this multi-billionaire, you know, entrepreneur? And that’s a good example of that. I want to say the sort of the condescension that the early Frankfurt School have because they have, they see what’s really going on. And if you don’t see what’s really going on, you’re either stupid, benighted, or evil, or some combination of the three. And I think we see that repeating itself today to a large extent. It’s very interesting that the Frankfurt School, again, like a lot of the critical race people, when you try to tie them down, nail down what they actually want, it’s very hard. Frankfurt School thinking, by and large, wants to tear down what is on the assumption that the good utopia will just emerge out of the ruins. And if you look at some of the Black Lives Matter stuff that came out in 2020, it was very clear on what it wanted to get rid of. It wanted to defund the police, et cetera, et cetera. You could see some very clear destructive but very clear policies there. Yeah, we’re against this. We want to dismantle that. When you move to, so what do you want to replace it with? The language headed off in what I would describe as a poetic direction. Well, it’ll be a village or something like this. Well, yeah, I grew up in a village. We actually had a policeman to make sure that law and order was maintained. What exactly does this village look like? And you know, on the grounds that we may still need something fulfilling the equivalent of law and order. What’s that going to look like and who’s going to implement it? But all utopian thinkers suffer from the fact that you can’t really visualize utopia from the position of a dystopia.
Case Thorp
Yeah, there’s still sin in those villagers. So as Christians, how should we respond to CRT? Where is that tension and fundamental run-in with our biblical perspective?
Carl Trueman
Yeah, it’s a complicated question. I think I’m very, very skeptical of those who talk about critical race theory as a useful tool, because critical theory is not a tool. The various branches of critical theory, I would say, are comprehensive ways of transforming the world. If you want to use them just for a bit of descriptive analysis, then that’s really not critical theory. Merely saying, actually such and such is socially constructed. That’s not critical theory. Critical theory is revolutionary at its core. It has revolution at its very methodological core.
Case Thorp
So it’s not wrong to see, racist policies by the government like redlining to be at work. It’s just, we see that from different philosophical lenses than CRT.
Carl Trueman
Yeah, I would say, you know, very clearly you could produce a racist philosophy. You could say, OK, all people of color have to sit at the back of a bus. That’s a racist policy. The difference between myself and a critical race theorist would be, well, I think the system can be reformed. What we need is to pass a law that says, no, people, whatever race, can sit anywhere on the bus. We’re not going to segregate our buses. We can legislate that. If you’re a critical theorist, the individual laws are merely functions of a hopelessly irredeemably corrupt system that has to be demolished in its entirety. And that’s where I think that Christians can’t go along with it because for various reasons, not least that there are appeals in scripture for the Christians to honor the civil magistrate. Certainly an attitude to the civil magistrate, would say that Christian political philosophy should always be more reformist than revolutionary on that front. So I would want to avoid it. On the other hand, I would say that the thing that where critical theory should not be ignored, critical race theory should not be ignored is it raises some important questions. In the book, I draw an analogy with Arianism, fourth century heresy, wrestling with the relationship between the father and the son in eternity. No way am I ever going to say Arianism is a useful tool for orthodoxy. But what I am going to acknowledge is, wow, the question they’re asking is an important one. And I need to have an answer for it, not an answer on their terms. But I have to, I can’t ignore that question. And I would say critical race theory does raise important questions that need to be answered. Do we have unconscious biases? Was Brown v. Board of Education the end or the beginning of the end of racism in America? There are all kinds of questions that I think critical race theory forces us to confront, but I’m not going to address on the terms that critical race theory sets out. And that’s where the real problem in 2020-2021 came out in that if you don’t simply accept the questions, but also the premises, vocabulary, the conceptual framework of critical race theory, then you’re a racist. And that’s the problem. Yeah, yeah.
Case Thorp
Yeah, it’s a circular trap just by arguing against something or raising an objection.
Carl Trueman
Yeah. Well, I wrote a piece for the magazine First Things on evangelicals and race theory and the response was, you know, totally predictable. Trueman criticizes critical race theory because he’s a racist. I’m actually an immigrant. So I have and I’m also a first generation college grad. So I got a couple of intersectional things going in my favor. But somebody, a couple of people said, you know, and he tries to connect it to the Frankfurt School who are white guys. Actually, they were Jewish. Don’t impose your American categories on Jews in Germany in the 1920s. I think they knew a little bit about I don’t agree with Frankfurt School thinking. But I think they knew a little bit about prejudice, bias, political persecution. These were not. These were men who, many of them were from wealthy backgrounds, but they had to flee the country, ultimately.
Case Thorp
Well, that was my next question. Were any of them victims of the Holocaust and how did their views change after the war?
Carl Trueman
The key figures are not victims of the Holocaust in terms of perishing in the labor camps or the death camps. But Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, two of the most important thinkers of the early Frankfurt School, come to the United States during the war. In fact, Marcuse, I think, works in American intelligence of all things. So it’s odd in that these are men who’ve spent their lives absolutely trashing American capitalism, but they were, you know, rather fortunate to have the American capitalists keep their necks out of the noose during the Second World War. So, but they would, but like all Jews in Germany, they would have experienced the, you know, the routine humiliations of being Jewish.
Case Thorp
Did that journey lead them to change their views or shift from what they had seen prior to the war?
Carl Trueman
It’s hard to generalize. I think Mark Huser, who is in some ways a sort of apostle of what becomes the sexual revolution, dies in the early 70s, but I think he lives long enough to be optimistic that his project might bear fruit. Theodore Adorno, on the other hand, becomes an increasingly pessimistic thinker. And I think for Adorno, the rise of Nazism and the fact that you could have a country like Germany that produced some of the most sophisticated, if not the most sophisticated, high art culture could descend so quickly and rapidly into such utter barbarism. I think that permanently shattered Theodore Adorno. One of his most interesting books is, it’s a little book called Minima Moralia. He wrote it over quite a period of time.
And it’s sort of fragmentary paragraphs. It’s quite difficult to get your head around because it seems shattered and disjointed. And I think the reason it shattered and disjointed is the very form of the book is attempting to capture what he thought had become of Western culture. That Western culture had been modernity, it shattered culture. And whether it could ever be put back together again, I think was a question for Adore.
Case Thorp
This is so helpful. It’s so enlightening to get a sense of the greater philosophical underpinnings, the narrative behind all this. But then of course, you throw this into America during the pandemic, and now everybody’s an expert because they’re on Facebook, or they’re listening to cable news. And you’ve got all this CRT intersectionality running around. Help us think about now, when we’re at work, and we come across someone who is very amped up with some of these ideas, whether they’re on point or not. They’re seeing everything through power structures or this racial lens, the issues of gender and sexuality. How can a Christian constructively ask pointed questions or respond in a way that’s winsome?
Carl Trueman
Yeah, well, I think one of the things about critical theory that makes it so plausible is that it does touch on points of truth. We do know that the way we think about the world, much of it is socially constructed. We are aware that we’re all, as a Calvinist would say, we’re all totally depraved. All of our actions are to some extent sinful and to some extent manipulative. Yes, I give money to charity, but there’s a reason why Jesus warns in the Bible, when you give to the poor, don’t tell people about it, because he’s aware of what’s in the heart of man that we might do it in order just to big ourselves up over the person we’ve given the money to or the people we meet at the weekend that we’re bragging about our good deeds to. So I think the first thing to do when you meet somebody who’s very enamored with critical theoretical ideas is understand that probably the things that are enamoring them are not entirely wrong. Where I would want to go with that and where I try to go with students is say, yes, but life is ultimately more complicated. Actually, you cannot explain the world simply in terms of power structures. There’s more complicated things going on there and I might go to something like gratitude. Being grateful for something. That’s not a power play. Now Nietzsche tries to make it into a power play and some of the most unpersuasive parts of Nietzsche I think when he deals with gratitude, that gratitude is a way of evening the score with somebody who’s done a kind thing for you. I don’t think, well that might work on paper, but that is not how we experience the phenomenon of gratitude in daily life. It’s a joy. So I would want to try to get to acknowledge, if you like, the aspects of reality that perhaps can be neglected if we’re not facing some of the critical theoretical questions, but also to press in on, life’s more complicated than that. My marriage to my wife cannot be reduced to a manipulative power relationship. That simply doesn’t work as an explanation. I would also want to press, I mean, think underlying the real problem with critical theories is ultimately they have no stable conception of what it means to be human. They have no idea ultimately of what human beings are for, what our telos, what our end is. So I want to try to get people thinking teleologically. So, for example, the question, what is a woman, only becomes problematic when you find the teleology of a woman’s body to be burdensome and oppressive.
Case Thorp
Now teleology, I know what you mean, define that for our listeners.
Carl Trueman
It’s the end. It’s what philosophers will sometimes use the term final causality. What’s the final cause? And the final cause, it’s odd in that the final cause is always the first thing you think about. You know, take an example. If I were to drive to Pittsburgh this evening, I have to jump in my car. The last place I’m going to arrive is Pittsburgh. But the first thing I think about when I get in the car is where is Pittsburgh and how do I get there? And every move of the wheel.
Case Thorp
What’s the purpose? Left or Right?
Carl Trueman
Therefore, every move of the steering wheel is determined by the final course. If I were to say, you know, what is a human being? I might give the answer of the Shorter Catechism. You know, what is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. So what does it mean to be a human being? It means to be that creature that has been put on this earth to glorify God and enjoy him forever. So this notion of end, of us having ends that shape and determine everything. That’s something we’ve lost. Because we often think of ends, critical thinking of ends as oppressive. You know, that the end of a woman, part of the end of a woman might be to have a baby? Well that could damage her career. Why shouldn’t we use technology to overcome that end? Well when you think, when you start using technology to transform ends, you’re actually transforming natures at that point.
Case Thorp
Wow, there’s a gem. When you begin to use technology to transform ends. Is that what you said?
Carl Trueman
Yep, you’re transforming natures.
Case Thorp
Go back and unpack again what you were starting to say before I interrupted you on teleology…when the question, what is a woman arises? So then the thinking is, help us with that and how her ends interrupts your, your thinking or, or comes into play with other people today.
Carl Trueman
Yeah, I had the privilege of interviewing the Catholic gender theorist Abigail Favalle, teacher at the University of Notre Dame a couple of years ago. I began the interview with the question, okay, Abigail, what is a woman? And her answer was: a woman is a human being, I’m paraphrasing, but a human being whose body is tailored towards gestation, normatively tailored towards gestation. Normative is important there because some women are born without wombs, some are born without ovaries, some are born with blocked tubes.
Not all women get married. We don’t want to say that the woman born without a womb isn’t a woman any more than we want to say that the person born without two legs isn’t a human being. But normatively human beings have two legs. Normatively women are fully equipped for gestation reproduction. When you think about that answer, what has she done then? She’s basically accepted the normative authority of the biology of the human body in its female instantiation and seen that as having a purpose. Now we live, why is it so problematic to define what a woman is today? We live at the end of almost a century where it has been hammered into women that pregnancy is a problem. Simone de Beauvoir says, women will never have true equality until we break motherhood. We have to abolish the notion of motherhood in order to have true equality of the sexes. So the reason why it’s so difficult to define what a woman is today is we don’t want to be seen to be implying that human bodies have a telos, an end that is given and over which our brains have no control.
Case Thorp
Mm-hmm. And that’s why when and I, we at the Collaborative emphasize faith and work and vocational calling and I am very mindful to include the call as a parent, to include one’s vocational calling in raising the next generation. We’ve lost, I believe, in telling our young people that having a family and bringing life into this world and forming it well under God’s glory is probably even more important than your career, that for which you get paid. So your Catholic or your scholar friend at University of Notre Dame, how would she answer the question, what is a man?
Carl Trueman
I think she would say that a man is somebody whose body is normatively tailored towards impregnating a woman. And I think she would want to go beyond that as well and then talk about the natural moral obligations that the woman and the man who created this new life have towards the new life that has been created. Not only the obligation of the nine months of pregnancy but then the obligations to protect that child, to nurture that child, to prepare that child for launching into the adult world when the child is able to care for themselves and begin the process all over again.
Case Thorp
So we’re recording this in early February of ‘25, just after the presidential election and inauguration. It’s been quite surprising, I think, to see the House of Cards fall on CRT and DEI and such a swing politically and socially. And I see this locally even more so than on the national media noise and chaos. And granted, it’s a little soon, a little close. I don’t know where we’ll be in a year. But are you surprised that the cards would fall apart so quickly?
Carl Trueman
Yeah, I mean, I always thought that the trans issue was going to collapse. Originally, I thought within 50 years, then within maybe 20 or 30, then a decade, suddenly it’s starting to fall apart all over the place. So very, very pleased with that. I think on the DEI issue, et cetera, there are a number of issues there. One, I don’t think you can legislate away the way people imagine the world. Legislation can help reshape the way people imagine the world, but that takes time. So I’m not willing to jump up and down in celebration and say that this craziness is dead and gone at this point. I think cultural imagination takes time to change. Hopefully that is in process of changing. I’m also concerned that what we’re seeing at the moment is definitely a response to four years of very, you know, Biden was elected on the idea that he was going to be the moderate Democrat. He proved to be very, very radical. We’re seeing a useful and necessary reaction and corrective taking place. But I wouldn’t want a new form of radicalism on the other side to precipitate yet another reaction in four years time. I think that the question of finding sanity is not simply a question of looking at what the other side was doing and doing the exact extreme opposite. The opposite of a lie is the truth, but doesn’t necessarily mean that the one lie can’t be met by an equal and opposite lie on the other side. I think, particularly from a Christian perspective, we need to keep our independent, critical bearings about us and think very carefully about the issues.
Case Thorp
So in closing, I’m curious what you would say, Carl, what gives you hope? We’ve looked across our culture and seen a lot of these concerns, particularly challenges for Christians. Where do you have any hope?
Carl Trueman
Ultimately, hope is in the gospel, of course. That doesn’t change. That’s a bit trite, I suppose. Well, yeah, we know it’s all going to be OK in the end, but what about the next 100, 150 years? But definitely see hope in the gospel. I see some hope in some of the legislation that is being passed, even as we’re talking here and now. I see particular hope among the young people that I teach at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania.
Now Grove is a small conservative liberal arts school. I don’t assume that they represent a cross section of American youth, but I think a lot of people talk negatively about the rising generation of young people. And I think there are some great young people there who will be hardworking, constructive members of society. So I consider it a great privilege to teach them and I have tremendous hope relative to I think what they’re going to do in later life, whether that is at a local level or let’s hope but on a more national, a grander stage.
Case Thorp
Fantastic. Well, Carl, thank you. You’ve given us a lot to think about and to chew on. And I really appreciate your time.
Carl Trueman
Thanks very much for having me on, Case.
Case Thorp
Well, friends, let me encourage you if you would like to know more about Carl and his writings, go check out the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. And then there’s the more accessible version called Strange New World. In fact, that’s more for the masses and the lay person. And then this latest book that I’m enjoying, To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. Carl will be giving a First Things Lecture in Washington DC on March 11th at the Heritage Foundation, which is an honor, but it also is an opportunity to see his thoughts platformed and reach even greater audiences. You can learn more about the details of that event at firstthings.com. Well friends, thank you for joining us. Again, like and share, leave a comment. It helps us to get the word out. You can visit us at wecolabor.com for all sorts of content. Throw in your email address and I’ll send you a 31 day faith and work prompt journal. You can find us also on the social media platforms. Don’t forget our Formed for Faithfulness podcast is a weekly 10 minute devotional for the working Christian that follows the liturgical calendar. I want to thank our sponsor for today, Michael and Shandy Kelly. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
