Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - Carl Trueman - What is the modern self?

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

In this episode Jonny Ardavanis sits down with Dr. Carl Trueman. Dr. Trueman is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is a contributing editor at First Things, an esteemed church historian, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including the best seller “The Rise and Fall of the Modern Self.” In this episode, Dr. Trueman explains the evolution of thought that led us to where we are today in a highly politicized and sexualized world.Subscribe to stay up to date with each episode! Watch VideosVisit the Website Follow on InstagramFollow on Twitter

Hey guys, my name is Johnny Artavanis and this is Dial In. I wanted to thank you all for continuing to listen to the show and for sharing it with your friends and family. I'm excited about this episode as I sit down with Dr. Carl Truman. Dr. Truman is a professor of biblical and religious studies and is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant intellectuals of the modern day. He has authored over a dozen books and in particular wrote the bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Modern Self, published by Crossway. In this episode, we talk about the world we live in today, how we live in a context that is highly politicized, highly sexualized, and Dr. Truman will provide for us a level of insight that you're not going to want to miss.

Let's dial in. Dr. Truman, thank you for sitting down. You know, one of my favorite books growing up, even in the last few years, was How We Got to Now by Stephen Johnson. And what Stephen Johnson does is he traces, I believe, seven inventions and how they have a historical root and how that's impacted the world that we live in today. So for example, he takes the printing press and the printing press didn't just make it so that more people could read. He said more people needed eyeglasses because never before had people realized they can't see words on a page. And as I think about how we got to now, we live in a highly sexualized world with transgenderism, homosexuality, radical politics. The question I have for you that you

are an expert at in your writing is how did we get to where we're at now culturally? What would be your response there? Well, in many ways, there's no simple answer to that question, but we can get a handle on it by breaking it down, I think, into three distinct phases, three phases over the last few hundred years. I would argue that the first thing of importance that happens is that the self, how we think of ourselves, what makes us tick, what makes me, me, the real me, becomes something that we think of increasingly in psychological terms, in terms of what's going on in our head rather than our relationship to the outside world.

Secondly, we come to think of what's going on in our head, we come to think of our feelings, that psychological space, in profoundly sexual terms. And thirdly, we come to think of sex and sexual desire in very political terms. We come to see it as something that isn't just of private significance, but something that has public significance for the way we live and interact with people in the public sphere. So if we go back to the first, if we give them a little thought experiment, if you were growing up in Britain where I was born in the Middle Ages, your life would have been very fixed.

If somebody had said to you, who are you? You'd have talked in various terms about the fixity of the outside world. Almost certainly my ancestors were peasant farmers. Almost certainly they lived in a particular town from which they never moved. So if somebody had said to me, who are you in say 1400, the answer I'd have given would have been,

well, I live in such and such a place. I'm gonna die in such and such a place. My parents are Mr. and Mrs. Jones. I was baptized at that church over there. When I get married, I'm going to marry somebody probably that I've met by the time I was 10 or 11, because I'm always going to be living in the same place. I'm going to be married in the same church. And when I die, I'll be buried in the same church. And if somebody said to me, what are you going to do when you grow up? That's a

ridiculous question. I'm going to be a peasant farmer like my father. Everybody in my family. Everything follows suit. Everything follows suit. My life, the world is very, very fixed. That's not the answer we would give today. When you think about it, a lot has happened between the Middle Ages and today. Largely, we find this happening from the late 15th century onwards where, for example, cities start to rise. People move from the countryside to the cities.

New occupations are created. People print books. Now, I may be the son of peasant farmers, but I can move to the city and I can become a printer or I can become a merchant or I can become a basket weaver and I can sell things in the market. Notice what's happening. My world is no longer as fixed as it once was. And one of the interesting things that happens in that kind of world is as the outside world becomes more flexible, so my sense of self, my sense of identity becomes less

wrapped up with the fixed points outside of me and more and more wrapped up with my ambitions what do i my desires what do i want out of life i become king of the castle yeah i'm not born into a world that where i'm fixed i'm built born into a world where i can choose and of course you and i both know we we both grew up in a world where we could choose where to go to college we can choose where to live we have a lot more power, we might say, over who we are than our ancestors did. And a lot of that is tied up with what goes on in here, our desires. So there's this psychologizing of the self. The self becomes more to do with my feelings, my desires, my ambitions, and less to do with the fixed place where I was

born in society. Second stage in this move though is when you think about, well, what is this inner space? And here, a man called Sigmund Freud, great late 19th, early 20th century psychoanalyst becomes of great significance because Freud, he was a psychoanalyst working in Vienna. And Freud came to the conviction that what really drives human beings, that inner space, if you like, it's not just a land of sweetness and light. It's driven particularly by sexual desires. Freud saw human beings as motivated profoundly, not just by what we desire, but what we desire sexually. As the main driving force. As the main driving force.

And one would have to say that Freud's onto something there. When you look back at great world literature, or when you switch on the television today, What drives a lot of the dramas we watch? It's sexual tension. It's sexual desire. As you get older and as you go through life, tragically, you'll have friends who destroy their marriages because they can't control their sexual desires. Freud's onto something that sexual desire is something that is very powerful and shapes us. And what Freud does is very interesting. And he extends this idea that human beings are determined, defined by our sexual desire, right the way back to childhood. He says that you can look at infants, children,

kids going through puberty, older adults. You can look at their lives and see how their lives are shaped by the direction, the nature of their sexual desire. Now without going into the details of that, what Freud does there is really very radical because he says that what defines us as human beings is our sexual desire. Now that's an interesting move because if you look at the Bible or if you look at ancient Greece, for example, the Bible talks about sex a lot. But it always talks about sex in terms of behavior. Some behaviors are legitimate.

Some are illegitimate. In ancient Greece, there was a lot of homosexuality. But it was a behavior. Nobody in ancient Greece identified as gay or bi. It wasn't who I was. It wasn't who they were. After Freud, sexual desire becomes something you are. So you could have a situation today where a teenager goes to their parents and says,

Dad, I think I'm gay or I think I'm bi. And that teenager may not actually be making any statement about any experience or activity in which they've ever engaged. They're talking about the nature and direction of their sexual desires. It's who they are, not so much what they've done. Which goes back to what you're saying first and foremost about just becoming who we are as a self inside of our own thinking.

It's an extension of that psychological self but now made profoundly sexual. And that leads to the third development, and that's how does this become political? Well think about it if you have a view of sex as activity and you have law codes That say some activities are legitimate and some are illegitimate Those law codes essentially say some actions are right and some actions are wrong

But if you identify yourself in terms of your sexual desire and you look at those law codes, what you see is not so much a law code saying this action is okay and this action is not okay. What you see is a law code that says this kind of person is a legitimate person. You don't want me to be me. Yeah, this kind of person is not.

That you are, to use the sort of the modern balance, is a legitimate person. You don't want me to be me. Yeah, this kind of person is not. That you are, to use the sort of the modern violence, you are erasing certain people. You are saying that some people are criminal simply because of their very identity. So that's how we've reached a situation in our culture where 100 years ago, sex was a very private activity. Now it's a very public issue because it's not about activity anymore.

It's about what kind of person society considers to be legitimate. Yeah, it's synonymous with our identity. Yeah, yeah. So, Dr. Truman, I'm interested, you know, Christians, we live in the world, we're called to be different than it. How does a Christian begin to actually think biblically, but also just shrewdly as they navigate this world, it'd be totally unbiblical for Christians to withdraw and privatize their faith in the face of opposition against maybe what the Bible teaches and what a Christian stands for. So how does a Christian, whether a student who's at a public school or an adult in the workplace, be able to respond to everything

you just said and live for Christ boldly and yet shrewdly and winsomely? Yeah, well, it's a good question. I think the general principle in all of these things is, you know, not every hill is worth dying on. So you need to use discernment as to which battles to fight in whatever context you find yourself. I would say, though, there are some specific things that I would remember relative to this kind of issue. The first is I would always want to make a distinction between what I would regard as the political movement or the ideology of LGBTQ stuff that is something that is out there driving public policy, shaping

public policy. And I think that Christians in responding to that are perfectly correct, and I would say indeed obliged, to use the civil rights and the responsibilities we have as members of civic society to try to make sure that such policies are not formulated and applied in a way that's going to harm children, for example. A lot of this comes down to protecting children. So I would say as citizens of the United States, use the civil rights you have, the vote, the freedom of speech you have, the power you have in your local context to speak against the kind of policies that can do terrible harm to children on this front.

But in saying that, I would say you need to make a distinction with the individuals for whom this is their personal struggle. And we need to realize that a lot of young people are growing up in a world where it's difficult to know who they are. Families are often broken down. Society itself is in a state of change a lot of the time. The kind of things that you and I grew up with that gave us a strong sense of identity, stable families, for example, these are no longer as common as they once were. And that means we have a generation of students and young people rising up who don't know

who they are, looking for an identity. And in that kind of context, strong communities, such as the LGBTQ community, offer very attractive ways of knowing who you are. And so I think we need to realize that the way people often feel the power of these identities is very, very real. We shouldn't trivialize that. And in dealing with such people,

we need to, one, I think, remember everybody's made in the image of God. And so we need to treat everybody with respect and care. We do not desire to see anybody physically harmed by anybody else. We need to stand as Christians for the protection of all people made in the image of God. Secondly, we need to model in our own lives a better way.

It's one thing to say to the LGBTQ person, you're wrong, and the way of life that you are pursuing is going to do you harm. It's another thing to provide them with an obvious alternative to that. And I think the Christians need to focus on showing what the good life really looks like, showing what good community really looks like, presenting the church as a place where all people made in the image of God can flourish. You know, I think what you just distinguished is so important as far as between the political and the personal, because sometimes even you look at social media and you see Christians talking about the transgender community and you see what a bunch of clowns or what a bunch of fools.

And it kind of describes for us that sadly, many Christians have maybe never even interacted with someone that's confused sexually or contemplating transforming their own gender. And so we do need to distinguish between that political way in which we use those civil rights, but also from a personal way, being able to have a compassion on people, a love for people, a heart to see them win to Christ, instead of just trying to potentially come at them and say they're so wrong. I just, I appreciate that distinguishing element. Where can people read more just on your work regarding this subject? You wrote a book on it. What else would you, you recommend your book? What else would you recommend? Yes, I think there are a number of websites that one can look at. I think there's some good social commentary on a website called First Things. Public Discourse, which is the daily briefing produced by the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton,

you find that online. The Ethics and Public Policy Center is very good for finding articles and papers produced designed to shape public policy. And I think to a general internet search, there are some great websites out there for helping families struggling with the transgender question, helping families struggling with LGBTQ children or relatives. There's plenty of material out there. And I think the key is, as you pointed out,

try to avoid labels. We need to remember that for all of the power of these broad movements, there are always individuals. We can talk about statistics, but we need to remember that every statistic is just a collection of individuals made in the image of God to whom we need to be compassionate and we need as Christians

to resist the kind of blanket labels that both the political right and the political left try to impose upon people. That's super helpful Dr. Truman thank you for your time and for your wisdom on this subject. Thanks.