The Sean McDowell Show - The Most Dangerous Idea Destroying Humanity Right Now

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

In this conversation, Carl Trueman joins me and Scott Rae for one of the most wide-ranging episodes we've recorded. We get into CS Lewis, Nietzsche's madman, the anthropological question at the heart of every cultural debate, the sexual revolution, pornography, contraception (where Trueman calls himself "a work in progress"), IVF, surrogacy, end-of-life decisions, and how Christians sometimes mirror the secular world's trivialization of death. READ: The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity by Carl Trueman (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DW3LVXQW?ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_HNU2TW9LP6RXFBSTXY5M) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [smdcertdisc] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org   Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

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We almost celebrate and revel in the mistreatment of immigrants. When I read that, I thought, is there a difference between desecration like shout your abortion? And just being cruel to people. It's one thing to be calling for sober and appropriate immigration policies. It's one thing to want strong borders. It's another thing to post pictures online. of children of immigrants being carried off by ice and taking joy in the pain and the fear in those children's eyes. I read your book, Carl, it's provocatively called the desecration of man. What do you mean by

desecration? The idea is that the world has lost its magic and has lost its depth. I think that's certainly an insight into the way we live today. We all feel the world is less mysterious. It's less magical. It's less enchanted. Our guest today, Dr. Carl Truman, is who I would consider one of the most important Christian thinkers of our time. He's written a book today called The Desecration of Man, how the rejection of God degrades our humanity. We have in studio today to have a conversation, and I read your book, Carl, three times carefully, underlined, highlighted it, and I will probably go back through it again because I think it's that important. thanks for joining us today on the Think Biblical podcast.

It's a great pleasure to be here, and you've read the book more often than I have. Fair enough. Well, we'll get into why, but I think it's eye-opening. I think it's interesting. I think it's relevant. It shifted a couple things in my mind. But let's just start with the title. It's provocatively called The Desecration of Man.

What do you mean by desecration? And can you give us some cultural examples, if you will? Well, the background to the type of desecration of man, partly it's a little homage to C.S. Lewis, who wrote famously the abolition of man. Yeah. And partly it's an attempt to supplement the current tendency among a lot of Christian thinkers to talk about the world as being disenchanted. The idea is that the world has lost its magic and has lost its depth. And I think that's certainly an insight into the way we live today.

we all feel the world is less mysterious, it's less magical, it's less enchanted. But it doesn't fully explain all of the aspects of modernity. And indeed, it doesn't explain some of what I consider to be the most important aspects of modernity. One example that I use in the book is the language that surrounds abortion. In the 1990s, the language for abortion was that it should be safe, legal and rare, which is there's a sense of sort of regret in that language. It's, okay, the world is not as it should be. Sometimes we have to do things that we would rather not do.

But if we've got to do those things, then let's make sure that they're safe, make sure that they're regulated by the law, and make sure that they're rare. They don't happen very often. In the 30, 35 years since that phrase was popular, we've seen this remarkable turnaround such that abortion is now something that people are to be proud of. They shout their abortions. They wear sweatshirts proclaiming that they've had an abortion. We had the very bizarre situation a year or two ago where there was a man who wanted to become a woman so that he could get pregnant and have an abortion.

There is an exhilaration, a celebration involved in this, well, I would say destruction of humanity. The category of disenchantment doesn't really allow us to explain. So Alachshod of desecration is a way of trying to capture the exhilarating, intentionally destructive nature of so much of what we now do as human beings. So in the very beginning part, you sort of frame the book around Friedrich Nisi's Mad Man. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about, for those that aren't familiar with Nici, what the madman represents. Yeah. And how that helps frame where you're going with the book.

Yeah. Well, Friedrich Nietzsche, for those not familiar with the name, was one of the great 19th century atheist philosophers. Not well known, really, during his own day, he's become much more significant in the century or so since his death in 1900. Nietzsche was also a great writer. He didn't write tedious philosophical tomes. He wrote with a real literary flair.

And in one of his works, the gay science, he has this parable, as he calls it, a parable of the madman where he tells this story of a madman who runs into a town square in the middle of the day, holding up a lantern, even though the sun is shining, he's holding a lantern. So he's clearly a lunatic. And he berates the people who are gathered in the town square, who happen to be atheists. He berates them with the declaration that God is dead. God does not exist anymore. The men in the town square, they're confused by this and they laugh at him. It's a sort of, of course, he's dead. What are you going on about? The madman says, no, you don't understand. God is dead because we killed him. We've intentionally got rid of him. And then the madman goes on to say, and I summarize here, essentially saying something like,

you can't carry on as if everything is the same when you've got rid of God. If you get rid of God, then you really have to get rid of everything that was once built upon God. In fact, you have to become gods yourselves. You have to decide what the values are that you live by. You have to decide what the meaning of your life is. You have to overcome the suffering that comes your way and make it serve your purpose. And that's both a terrifying responsibility because it means we have to rise to be gods. It's also exhilarating as well because we have to rise to be gods.

And that language of, you know, God is dead because we have killed him, that's exhilarating language. what greater sense of power could a human being have than having the blood of the divine on his hands? And so Nietzsche's really throwing out a challenge there to atheists and saying essentially, you can't be a polite atheist. You can't be an atheist and then just carry on as if Christian morality, human nature, is true and unchanged by the death of God. No, now everything's up for grabs. you have to rise and become gods yourselves.

I take it this was part of the metaphor where his cut flower civilization comes from. Yeah, yes. Recognizing that you can't have the benefits of the beauty of those flowers when cut off from the roots. Absolutely. It's a sort of, Nietzsche's really calling the bluff on the Enlightenment,

but he's essentially saying, and I think he's probably got somebody like Emmanuel Kant in his crosshairs here. He's essentially saying you enlightenment philosophers can't get rid of God without fundamentally revising your understanding of morality, human value. Underlying it all is this idea that Nietzsche looks at somebody like Kant's and thinks. He's got rid of God, but he smuggled something back in to do the job that God once did. Human nature. Actually, no.

Can't even talk about human nature now. Human nature is not something objective and given to us that we have to conform to. We get to decide as individuals what our nature is, what is good for us, what is bad for us. So how does that connect? How does that also capture the cultural moment we're in at present? Well, of course, the challenge then becomes, how do I know that I am acting in an authentic way? You know, Nietzsche would say, how do you know you're not going along with herd morality? Well, the answer is transgression.

By smashing through the things that the old God put in place, we demonstrate our independence from him. We get that buzz of knowing that we ourselves are gods because we are riding a coach and horses through the things that God set up as barriers to hem us in. So it tilts strongly towards a kind of transgressive view of what it means to be human. I'm at my most authentic when I'm breaking the rules.

And you think about you don't have to read philosophy, you could just switch on the TV and watch reality television at this point. What are the set of values that reality television thrives on? It's values of transgression. It's people behaving, we would say, you know, using the old-fashioned morality, people behaving badly. That's what we like to see. Those are the people that we idolize in our culture now. So you talk about how this is kind of on the left and on the right. And I appreciate that this is not a political book.

You're trying to analyze culture. Some of the critiques you give that would maybe be categorized more in the left would be shout your abortion or drag queen story hour. And there's a great example here how this is just kind of flaunting gender. It's targeting children. There's a desecration element of it. One of the examples on the right was not just that we hold a certain view of immigration, but we almost celebrate and revel in the mistreatment. of immigrants. Now, when I read that, I thought, is there a difference between desecration, like shout your abortion and just being cruel to people? So is that the same kind of desecration?

And are there other examples on the right that make your point? Or is it more largely a phenomena that we see on the progressive left? I think we see it. Certainly, if you're a Christian, you'll tend to have seen it on the progressive left. That's where American evangelicalism tends to see the problem. But it definitely exists on the right as well. And the example I use in immigration is, you know, it's one thing to be calling for, I would say, sober and appropriate immigration policies. It's one thing to want strong borders.

It's another thing to post pictures online of children of immigrants being carried off by eyes and taking joy in the pain and the fear in those children's eyes. Now, one might turn around and say, but it's the parents' fault. that the children in that situation, okay, one could argue that case. But even so, I take no pleasure in the suffering of a child. Even if that child is the victim ultimately of the parents' misdemeanor, not the immigration services. So, and I think what's going on there is a fundamental failure

to recognize the image of God in other people. When we take pleasure in the destruction, be it emotional or physical of other people, We're taking pleasure in the destruction of the image of God. Well, what is that? That's the ultimate desecration. It's the thing that makes us feel most powerful. Dostoevsky has a very powerful passage in his book notes from the dead house. When he's reflecting, you know, he's reflecting on different prisoners there and what's got them there.

And there's one very urbane man. And he's puzzled when he discovers that this very urbane gentlemanly, well-educated, well-spoken man is actually a serial killer. blows his mind. Why did he kill so many people? Dostiaf's answer is, well, the first man he killed, perhaps he killed him for a reason.

It's not say we approve of him killing somebody, but maybe the other guy cheated at cards or cheated with his wife or something. You could see there's a rationale to the crime.

But having killed this other man and got such a buzz from crossing a sacred line, such a buzz of power from destroying the image of God, he had to do it. it again and again and again and again. And so there's that addictive dimension that that feeling of godlikeness, that desecration gives us. So, you know, one example on the right would be

the rejoicing in the suffering of little children at the moment. Another example might be the treating of other human beings simply as pieces of garbage. I think that look at the ex-accounts of politicians on the left and right and look at how. they talk about people with whom they disagree. They really talk about them as flesh and blood human beings. They talk about them as things as an aggregate of ideas that they happen to disagree with. That too is a form of desecration, the denial of the full humanity of somebody else. And you contend throughout the book that the question of what's a human being?

Yeah. Western anthropology are the central, not only theological, but central cultural and philosophical question of the day. Yeah. Why is that so central? And how typically do you see our culture answering that today? Yeah, I came across the what I call the anthropological problem. Really, in my earlier work, when I was exploring, how did transgenderism become so plausible? I was puzzled that the statement, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body.

would have been regarded as completely nonsensical by my grandfather. He died in the early 90s. He died fairly recently in the sweep of history. And yet today would be seen as intuitively true by a lot of people. And I came to the conclusion that you couldn't answer that question completely in isolation. It's ultimately not a question about gender. It's a question about human embodiments, how the body connects to what it means to be a human being. it's a much deeper question of what does it mean to be a human being?

And how has that question become problematic in our day? I think a number of reasons. One, as I've argued in earlier books, over the last four or five hundred years, we've increasingly come to identify ourselves with our inner feelings. Rather than seeing our identity is located in fixed social relations or localities or family callings, we tended to see the continuity in our lives as being provided by our inner life, our inner feelings. And secondly, we have the role of technology. Teleology, the idea that human beings have an end or a set of ends has been fundamental to understanding what it means to be a human being.

I'm a Presbyterian. And the first answer of the Westminster Shorter Calicator. What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. So to be a human being is to have that end. glorify God and enjoy him forever. What technology has allowed us to do is think that, like the Madman's challenge, we can invent the ends for ourselves.

I have a male body, but that need not impose any teleology upon me because technology allows me to take hormones and have surgeries that allow me to think that I'm a woman. So technology has played a huge role in scrambling teleology. and that has a deep knock-on effect on how we understand what it means to be human. One of the examples you gave in the book that I found especially helpful was to compare how over like the past 25 years, how somebody would ground their identity has changed more than probably like throughout the history of the world. So you take someone in England in the 12th century and the 13th century, and really nothing has changed that dramatically about how they grant.

around themselves. And yet with AI and other technologies, things might shift within six months or or two years or three years. Will you kind of explain and unpack that illustration a little bit for us so our viewers really grasp it? Yeah. Well, if we do a thought experiment and, you know, time travel back. Hi, everyone. If you've been injured in an accident that was not your fault, listen up. We have legal professionals standing by to answer your questions for free. Call now and find out if you have a case and how much it's potentially worth. Call 800-712-2-2-3-00. I'm here with spokesman John Wolfe. So, John, tell everyone listening who should call right now. Well, Maria, first off, thank you for having me here.

It's always nice to answer the listener's questions. Now, as far as who should call in, anyone who's been injured in an accident and think you deserve compensation, give us a call right now. 800-7-1-2-2-2-3-00. You'll find out if you have a case and how much it's potentially worth. Thanks, John. You heard it, folks. Take advantage of this opportunity and call now 800-712-2-2-2-2-3-00. Advertisement sponsored by Legal Help Center may not be available in all states, not available in California. To an English rural village in 1,200. And spend a couple of months there, get to know the people, get to know the rhythm of life. Rhythm of life would be determined by the seasons. Get to know the area. Well, people would be tied to the area. probably wouldn't travel more than 40 miles away from their place of birth during their entire life.

If you were to ask somebody in that world, who are you? They'd give a very straightforward answer. I belong to this family. We live in that part of the village. We are the local blacksmiths or we're the local farmers. We till this land here. Oh, and by the way, I was baptized. I got married and I'll be buried in that church just down the road. All of the things that are important to defining who we are are fixed. If you were to go forward to 1,300 or 1,400, the faces would have changed, but by and large, the rhythm of life would remain the same. Then you move to 1,500, 1,500, 1,500, things are starting to change. Take the invention of the printing press.

Suddenly, you're living in this village, but you hear word that, man, you can make good money by moving to the city and learning how to print, becoming part of a printer's setup. Well, over the next few centuries, of course, the printing press is only one of the technological innovations. You get to the 19th century, the industrial revolution. Everything's changing. People are moving from the countryside into the cities.

Families are getting the network of family connections is getting smaller. The ability to move around is getting more and more possible. Everything that once fixed your identity is now up for grabs. And now move into the 21st century. And as you pointed out, Shaw, in the last 10 or 15 years, we haven't just had the invention of the printing press. We're getting the equivalence of the printing press being invented every three or four months. I was sitting in the airport yesterday, on the day before,

and looked around and everybody in the departure lounge was staring at a tiny little screen. And I'm thinking, wow, this scene would have been impossible to imagine 15 years ago. And yet now it's quite normal. 15 years ago people might have been talking to each other the departure lounge might have been animated by the buzz of conversation now it's this silent scrolling that's taking place that's not incidental to who we are how we think about life is increasingly mediated through a tiny

handheld screen and who knows what's coming next who knows what's coming next so one thing I appreciate about the book is you move you move from the general to the specific in the second half, and you apply some of these, some of the anthropology that you lay out in the sexual revolution to end of life and other controversial areas. So let's look at the sexual revolution for a moment.

How is, how is this, the sexual revolution rooted in this more contemporary understanding of human nature? and you've talked about technology already, but technology has a lot to do with that in this regard too. Yeah. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on sort of both those things. Yeah, well, first of all, if we think about the nature of sexual desire, it's a hardy perennial of human existence.

There's a reason why, you know, when I talk to students of Grove City College, we talk about the Iliad, let's say. We can understand the Iliad. It's, you know, it's from many centuries before Christ, but it's dealing with a basic perennial story of one man sexually desires another man's wife runs off with her the jilted guy gets together with his brother heads overseas to get his wife back we can understand the basic dynamics of the story why because sexual desire and sex is powerful that's a perennial of human existence and that tells me that when our thinking about

what sex is and how it works changes something very fundamental is going on in how we think about what it means to be a human being. Now, there's always been sexual transgression. The Bible is full of examples of sexual transgression and is full of laws against sexual transgression. If there was no sexual transgression in the Bible times, there'd be no need for those laws, no basis for those stories. But certain kinds of sexual behavior were always regarded as transgressive.

The norm was one man, one man leaves his, Mother and father becomes one body with a woman, they have children. That was the norm. Think about how that's changed in recent years. Sexual revolution, I would say, doesn't just represent a shift in sexual behavior. It represents a fundamental shift in sexual attitudes. Sex has ceased to be a seal on a unique relationship between one man and one woman, primarily for the purpose of reinforcing that union

and the production of children and has moved to being thought of as recreation. Now again, sex is recreation. That's not a new thing. The difference between now and say 200 years ago is 200 years ago, you had to be wealthy to get away with sex as recreation. The English royal family, they could do it and get away with it.

The average man or woman in the street, they might like to have thought of sex as recreation, but they couldn't act on that thought because she's going to get pregnant. He's going to get a nasty disease. There are going to be serious biological, social consequences. But now we have technology. We have easy access to contraception, plenty of antibiotics out there to deal with those unpleasant diseases. Abortion, if you do get pregnant. That's allowed us not only to think that sex is mere recreation, it allows us to act as if sex is mere recreation. And that involves a fundamental transformation of what it means to be human. And one of the interesting statistics that I'm told by friends who work in the pro-life

area is this when the pill was legalized. You would have expected the number of abortions to drop. Actually, the number of abortions goes up. Ask yourself, why is that the case? I would say because the social imagination of what sex is shifts. So that pregnancy comes to be seen as an unfortunate accidental byproduct, a problem and not the actual end or purpose. So sexual revolution involves fundamental revision of what sex means, not simply an expansion of what you can do sexually. And in the process involves a fundamental revision of what it means to be a human being.

Let me follow up on that. Yeah, do it. Briefly. If I heard you correctly yesterday with our faculty, you seem to have some guarded allowance for some forms of contraception. I take it. What you meant by that was the ones that are aboard a thought. are problematic and the ones that are genuinely contraceptive would be acceptable. Did I hear you correctly on that?

Yes. I mean, what I would say about my own position at this point in time is one. I would certainly say abortifacients are wrong. In terms of non-aboardifacient forms of contraception, I think I'm a work in progress. What I would say is that I don't think Protestantism wrestled with the issue at the depth it should do. that the issue of contraception sort of passed almost by accident into Protestant culture after the Lambeth Conference of 1930, I think it was. And very few of us Protestants, and I include myself in that, have thought very deeply about the issue at all.

I think Catholics are able to knock us from Pillar to post on that because we haven't thought about it deeply enough. Certainly abortifacients are wrong. whether non-aboard effacient forms of contraception or wrong. I'm a work in progress on that, but I would still say they're only ever legitimate within the context of a marriage. Of course. So still would not legitimate sex as pure recreation.

For the record. I'll come back to that in a minute. I would love to have that conversation with you separately. I'm a work in progress too, and I've not seen good Protestant answers to some of the Catholic theology of the body, not to mention you only have the effects of contraception like the pill, et cetera, but the imprincipal argument itself.

But that's a separate issue that would take us aside for now. You also talk about pornography and how that revolution, the accessibility of pornography. Now, AI with pornography and through social media is changing so many things. You criticize pornography and sexual activity outside of marriage, partly because they deny the unitive and procreative. functions of sex and thus turn sex into a solely or primarily recreational activity, which turns people into objects and commodities. That's kind of the heart of the case you make. Everyone would agree with it.

How and why do you marshal a similar criticism against IVF? What's the root of your concern with IVF? Yeah, a number of concerns with IVF. One, there is a definite connection between IVF and eugenics. that IVF encourages us to think about children as things that we design and purchase. IVF must ultimately press society towards thinking about what lives are worth living and which, what lives are not worth living. As soon as we take control of conception at that level,

when we're effectively tinkering with what it means to be a human being, The tendency will be towards a sort of master race thinking about children. And we already see that to some extent in a place like Iceland, where Iceland famously boasts that it has eliminated Down syndrome. Whereas what Iceland has actually done is decided that babies in the womb with Down syndrome are unworthy of life and therefore should be eliminated. I would say a more honest approach is to say we've eliminated persons with Down syndrome, not we've eliminated Down syndrome.

So my concern about IVF is, again, the commodification of children, the eugenics that lie behind it. Now, when I wrote that chapter, I thought, this is the chapter that I get most hate now from. You wrote that in there. Yeah, it's the one that I'll get into trouble for because it's easy for a man who found it easy to have children with his wife to say the things I said. Couples who are childless and are desperate for children, heartbreaking situation. and I can see the pull the attraction of IVF there. And the way I look at it is this. It's the couple desire a good thing.

That's right. What they need to do is reflect upon the wider implications of how society thinks about children concerning the specific line of or course of action that they are attempting to approach. And I would recommend, you know, don't listen to somebody like me on it. get hold of the work of Elizabeth Kirk, a wonderful professor of Catholic University of America, wonderful person who herself, she and her husband struggled for many years with infertility. She's very opposed to IVF, and she can write with authority on that issue in a way that a man like myself lacks that personal authority to speak to it.

That's great, super helpful. Can I push in on one thing here? So the concern tied to eugenics, I think all people would share that it turns, individuals into commodities that are human beings. There's also the concern tied to a theology of the body, like what is the body, what is the purpose of the body? And is there a built-in design and intention for fertilization? And IVF, the term test two baby,

I think you say in the book, is not entirely false, where fertilization takes place. So it's also your concern that there's an in-principle, reimagining what fertilization is supposed to look like sexual reproduction ties to eugenics aside. Yes, I think so. And I would go to the, I think the very provocative and helpful title of Oliver O'Donovan's little book, A Begotten or Made. And he makes a distinction there between, you know, do we think of children as begotten or do we think of them as made?

I would say, in other words, do we think of them as mysterious creations that we mysteriously, beget or do we think of them as products that we make? That I think touches on something really very, very important there. Let me. Yeah, go for it. Pursue that a little bit further. Yeah, sure. You describe dehumanizing as essentially treating a person as a thing.

Yeah. And treating them as a means to an end and out of themselves. So take this, for example, and full disclosure here, this is one of the areas that Sean and I have a We don't have too many significant differences, but this is one of them. It is, yeah. So let's take the IVF situation. You've got an infertile couple. Yeah.

My wife and I didn't go down the IVF road, but we definitely went down the infertility road. Yeah, yeah. And the, you know, the angst and, you describe, is very real. But, you know, a couple wrestling with infertility for whom IVF is the indicated treatment. Yeah. And just to be clear, have huge problems with the standard of practice. Right. In IV, but I'm looking at more of the idea of conceiving a child outside the womb intrinsically.

It seems to me if the child, or the embryo, which they would, which they regard as a child, yeah. And as they rightly should. And the child is desperately wanted. Spring is full of special days. Easter, Mother's Day, graduation, and Father's Day. and Crosswalk has made it easier than ever to find the perfect faith-filled gift for every one of them. The Crosswalk's Spring Gift Guide is your one-stop destination for meaningful gifts your loved ones will treasure.

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And I think the interesting aspect to that is I've had this response when I've spoken on this. Somebody come up to me afterwards and said, you know, we had a child by IVF. Are you saying my child's not a human being? And absolutely not. I'm not talking about dehumanization in that way. I'm thinking about the general way in which society imagine. children to be, that they start to become products. They start to become a thing. That's not to

deny the very real love that the couple who've conceived a child through IVF have for that child. Not at all, is it to deny that? It's to look at the broader social framework that's being developed that could lead to very bad consequences on a broader front. So that's what I'm thinking about. I would certainly agree that, you know, the eugenic temptation is one that we should have done away with back in the, around the turn of the 20th century when it really got started. Yeah. I'm not convinced that that's a necessary part of what IVF involved. And, you know, if I could, I wouldn't say put the case against me, but if I were to alter the terms of debate, I would say, you know, no fault divorce does a similar thing to children, actually. Yeah.

Because no fault divorce treats children as a problem. to be solved after the parents are separated. No fault divorce has to treat them in the same way that, you know, who gets the dog after we get divorced? Well, it's more emotionally intense, perhaps, but who gets the children? You are reducing children in no-fault divorce. So I certainly don't want to be read as saying IVF is unique in the way it tilts the culture to think about children.

There are many aspects of our culture. And I would admit, it does open that. door. Yeah. I think to the eugenic temptation. A more dramatic example, of course, provided by surrogacy. And I use the example in the book of Baby Gammy, who was conceived by surrogate for an Australian couple.

And then it was discovered that baby Gammy, I think, had Down syndrome. And it led to this on long-running legal debate about who the parents were, those who'd provided the genetic material or the woman who was carrying the child. And ultimately, the courts decided it was the woman carrying the child. The parents had wanted her to have an abortion, and she refused and brought the child into the world and is bringing the child up. And that's, you know, if you're looking for a modern handmaid's tale that objectifies woman and objectifies children, it's not the handmaid's tale. It's surrogacy. Let me pursue one more thing. I know. I've got some questions too but go for it you're the boss this is fun i'm enjoying this only for only for a short

time do it do it this is to go back to your contraception yeah it seems to me that one of the things the acceptance of contraception does and i admit if you're still a work in progress i'll give you some grace on that but uh the contraception does separate the unitive and procreative aspects of sex or it makes the it makes the bringing those having to have those always be together. It makes that less of an absolute. Right. And so that there would be situations where it would be justifiable to separate the unitive and procreated aspects of sex. So if that's the case for contraception, why wouldn't that be also the case on the other side of the coin?

when it comes to separating procreation from normal sexual relations. Because I think it separates procreation dramatically from the unitive. That's what I would say, that the purpose of sex is, you know, the man and one become one flesh. The unitive, I suppose in my thinking, has priority at that point. And procreation becomes a function of the unitive, but not always a function of the unitive. Now, a Catholic would push back and say, you separate them to two. I would say they're not parallel instances. I wonder what you would make of this,

because it seems to me that God has ordained a natural separation of the unitive and procreative aspects of sex with the phenomenon of menopause. And I take it that, for example, in Genesis, Abraham's wife Sarah was shocked and thought it preposterous that she could conceive that her advantage. They were still making love. advanced age.

Yes. Yeah. So what that suggests to me is that menopause is something that is part of the natural order of things and not a result of the general entrance of sin. Right. So if menopause is a God-ordained separation of that, and why would contraception be problematic as long as it's not abortifacient? I think that's a good argument, and that's certainly something I'd want to take into account.

thinking about that contraception. As I said, I'm not willing to concede as yet to my Catholic friends that the Unitive and the Procreative have to always be held together. I think that's in the same way that I think, you know, we can eat food, but eating food is not just about replacing calories. There are all kinds of other things that flow from a good meal. So yeah, that would probably be the strongest. I've actually tried that out on a handful of my Catholic friends. Did it work? No. Yes. They had no, they had no answer for it. Oh, that's good. I'll have to remember that next time in conversation. I think I'm going to take the win here. No, no, I want to circle back on that food, that last one you made later. The Catholic response would be just because

there's a God-ordained separation. It doesn't mean we can choose to add a separation for desires and times that we want. That would be the Catholic response to that. And there is a Protestant response to that, too. So just putting it out there. Yeah, I understand. The one before, your question about how does it dehumanize the unborn, in conceived by science, Stephanie Gray-Connor says, part of being human is that we are designed to be conceived inside our mom and our dad. And kids have the moral right to be the result of a lovemaking between mom and dad and conceived naturally through that process to remove it in a test tube that we control rather than mystery is a kind of dehumanization.

Now, again, whether there's a response to that or not, we're somewhat getting, we're getting the side. That's a tough one to get your, to get my arms around. So fair enough. But I think I've, both of us want to keep going down this. Okay, so fair enough. This is fun seeing the two. Thank you.

Oh, man. We had a whole conversation about IVF back and forth. I'm still in process on some of these things, leaning more towards a Catholic position because I think they're far more consistent as a whole, but still in process. Let's move to something totally different. You also talk about how Christian approaches to death sometimes mirror the secular world. So what is the secular world's approach? And how do Christians sometimes mirror this?

And I realize this is a complicated question. You got this. But what's the secular world's approach? How do we mirror it? How should we actually deal with death? I think the secular world, a response to death in various ways, but we might say primarily by trivializing it or marginalizing it, pretending it doesn't happen.

And I think in the Christian circles, the rise of the phenomenon of celebrations of life as funerals would be one good example. Now, again, I certainly don't want to be implying that somebody who had a celebration of life for their, their dear beloved late father is sinning in that. But I would ask the question of why use the language celebration of life? If the life was worth celebrating, surely the death is worth mourning.

We need to understand that death is catastrophic. Death leaves those left behind reduced. I mentioned in, I think it was in chapel this morning at Biola, the first account we have of weeping in the Bible is Abraham. Abraham going in and weeping for his wife, Sarah. And I made the comment there that of all people on the face of the planet at that moment in time, Abraham knows the answer. He knows the covenant God and he knows that God is going to be bringing things to a satisfactory conclusion.

And yet he weeps for the loss of his wife. And the application I drew this morning was it's okay to weep and lament when a loved one dies. And I think we as Christians need to, we need to face up today. death as the horror that it is and not take the temptation of the therapeutic temptation of trying to make it something other than that. That's great. That's really helpful. And I think we can see Ernest Becker, who talked about the way we don't take death seriously,

is even the language we have passing away. No longer with us is a reflection of trivializing it, but not really coming to grips with the weight of what death is. Right. How do you balance that with the biblical notion that death is a conquered enemy? Yeah. Well, I think we mourn but not as those without hope. I think when my father died, I was reduced. I'm still reduced. I'm still less of a person than I was when he was alive. And it's right to mourn and lament that, even though I know that that could well be put right at the end of time the interim, I mourn and lament him.

Think of a more trivial example. When you're traveling and you're away from your wife, if you were to say to your wife, well, I was away from you, but frankly, they didn't care. They didn't have any effect on me. Your wife would say, wow, our relationship is dysfunctional in some pretty deep and profound way. And I would want to say, if you can simply shrug your shoulders at the death of a loved one, then they weren't really a loved one because our loved ones make us who.

we are when they're torn from us we're reduced by that so we mourn as abraham mourned but abraham had he had a resurrection hope christ himself says Abraham saw my day and rejoiced Abraham knew what was coming but even so the remaining days of his earthly life he was a less of a person because his beloved serre had been taken from him one one thing i've noticed i spent about 15 years consulting at the bedside for hospitals on ethics. And one thing I saw, particularly among believing families, was this tenacious desire to hold on to their loved one when the prognosis was very bleak.

Right, right. And what they were really doing was just delaying an inevitable and sort of semi-eminent homecoming. Yeah, yeah. And I often wanted to say to them, do you actually believe this stuff that you say you believe about eternity and resurrection? and, you know, in the hope of the gospel.

And I wonder if there's some sort of dehumanizing of our loved ones at the end of life when we make decisions based on what's best for us because we don't want to let them go as opposed to what might be best for them. Yeah, that's a very interesting comment. And my mind immediately went to something that I used to wrestle with when I was a pastor

and we'd have times of prayer in the evening where congruents were allowed to make prayer requests and then whoever's leading in worship would offer those prayers to God and you would get that occasionally get that question or that prayer request you know my 98-year-old grandmother has had a fall can we pray that the surgeons put her back together

and she's okay and I'm thinking that's a legitimate prayer but at what point do we also pray but if it's not your will for her to be put back together Lord may she have a safe and as comfortable are passing as possible into the next world. We're unwilling to make those prayers. And I think whether I'd use the language of dehumanizing about that, I'm not sure I'd have to think about that.

But I do think there is a serious pastoral issue there that we, and when you think about the majority of prayers, my experience, and I'm as guilty this as anybody, majority of prayers at times of open prayer or prayer meetings, they're often focused on bodily health issues. Right. You know, young and old, we tend to be praying for broken arms and bruises and headaches and nosebleeds. Paul doesn't, in his letters, have a lot to say about those things by and large.

He's praying more about the joy and the grace that the same. Spring is full of special days. Easter, Mother's Day, graduation and Father's Day. And Crosswalk has made it easier than ever to find the perfect faith-filled gift for every one of them. The Crosswalk's spring gift guide is your one-stop destination for meaningful gifts your loved ones will treasure. From Bibles and Devotionals to books that inspire, it's all right there at crosswalk.com. Visit crosswalk.com today and find a gift that speaks to the heart. Yeah, but they do, when it gets serious, like with the 98-year-old grandmother, they do pray for a miracle.

Yeah. And I've often been, I've often been tempted to say, well, if we're going to go, if we're going to, and hope for a miracle, then let's really go for it and turn off everything. Yeah. And trust God for that and essentially turn the person back over to God. And the great miracle is the resurrection. Of course. That is the great miracle.

Yeah. Yeah. Carl, your book before this was on critical theory. Yeah. But critical theory is a little bit like kind of a golden thread that runs through this that you interact with. Is critical theory the kind of thing that we can take, I think it was phrase yesterday in the staff meeting in a question to you, kind of chew the meat and spit out the bones?

Right. Or is it something that should be completely rejected and we should just be interested in the questions that motivate people to consider and believe in critical theory? I think there are certain aspects of critical theory that are interesting. Critical theory will tend, for example, to challenge other people, you know, has your philosophy delivered on its own terms? And I think that's a useful approach for Christians. We look at the sexual revolution and say, okay, sexual revolution promised to liberate women.

Has it liberated women? No. So I think there are things we can learn from critical theory on that front. I would never use the language of describing it as a useful tool or saying, you know, we can chew on the meat and spit out the bones. Because for critical theory, purists, of course, it stands or falls as a whole. It's not a descriptive or analytic thing. It's a revolutionary thing. The idea is not to describe and explain reality.

The idea is to change or transform reality. What intrigued me about, and this connects to the theme of this, but what intrigued me about critical theory is in 2020, 2021, what I'd always regard is as pretty complicated and obscure branch of the humanities, suddenly became the stock in trade of the internet. It did. Among people who probably never read any critical theory in their lives,

so critical theory must really. So critical theory must resonate pretty deeply. Some of its ideas or some of its slogans resonate with ordinary people out there on the Internet. And I came to the conclusion that what resonated was the, it's negation. It loves smashing up that which is. And that, of course, ties in beautifully. It does. With the idea of modernity is committed to desecration.

That's why in queer theory you will find the language of, desecration popping up because that's what they think they're doing. They're tearing down that which previous generations have considered to be holy and sacrosanct. We get to go? Any last questions? I mean, I'm sure we could go for hours. We'd go for quite a long time, but I think we should probably, this is probably a good place to stop. Yeah, good stuff. Carl, I'll say it again, thoroughly enjoyed your book. I've got a highlight and underline, I could show you all through here. I would recommend it to our listeners and our viewers as much as any book.

I've not read it three times, but I have underlined. Shame on you. I have underrated thoroughly. Well, he only needs to read once he gets it. I'm a little slower. It takes me a few times. I don't think my wife has read anything I've ever written, even once. So she'll read the four word of this to make sure that I thank her.

But other than that, that'll be her interesting. Well, Carl Truman, appreciate you being on campus, meeting with the staff, meeting with the students, join us in studio. we'll do it again for sure. Thanks very much. It's been lovely to be here in the flesh. Yeah, this has been part of the Think Biblically podcast, conversations on faith and culture. We'd love to have you join us on campus.

We have Master's programs and Apologetics, Worldview, Theology, Ethics, Marriage and Family, Doctoral Programs. If you have questions for us, you can send them in to Think Biblically at biola.edu. Thanks so much for listening. And remember to check out our Friday weekly cultural update. We'll see you then. Hey friends, if you enjoyed this show, please hit that follow button on your podcast app. Most of you tuning in haven't done this yet. And it makes a huge difference in helping us reach and equip more people and build community.

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