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This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.
How Ancient Creeds Help to Shape Our Modern Identities
In this episode, Carl Trueman explains how historic creeds and confessions of the church can help to shape God’s people living in a culture consumed with individualism and identity.
Carl R. Trueman
Carl Trueman explains the importance of creeds and confessions today, including how they help churches navigate the modern culture of expressive individualism.
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Topics Addressed in This Interview:
Matt Tully
Carl, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.
Carl Trueman
Absolute pleasure to be here, Matt. Thanks very much for having me on.
Matt Tully
The subtitle of this new book is Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity. And we’ll get to the historic faith part of that subtitle in a bit, but anyone who’s followed your writing over the last few years likely knows that you’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the modern West and our obsession with individualism and identity. In your book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self—I’m sure many listeners have heard of that book and maybe read that book; it’s a big book—it’s all about those issues. So I wonder if you can just do some level-setting for us. What do you mean when you say that our culture today is consumed with individualism and identity?
Carl Trueman
Well, in some ways, it’s as you say. It’s a big book. It’s difficult to summarize in the space of sixty or ninety seconds. But what I would say is that essentially we’re taught to believe that we’re autonomous and free individuals today. That’s the message society sends to us. The way we find our fulfillment is in realizing that autonomy and that freedom. Well, that doesn’t come alone. That carries certain implications, or it carries certain tilts into the way we imagine the world and our relationship to the world to be. One of them, for example, would be it will tilt us towards thinking that history is somewhat oppressive because what is the origin of inequality? What are the origins of the differences between us? What are the origins of the problems we see in society around us? Well, if you think that human beings are pristine, autonomous, free individuals, you’ll tend to think that the origins of the problems of these things come from institutions, come from traditions, come from history. And that makes us more what I would describe as a kind of anti-historical culture, that we’re people who are intuitively suspicious of the external, intuitively suspicious of the old and the established, and points us away from those things towards the future, or towards self-creation. Towards those things that serve to make me feel good as opposed to those things which make me realize I’m part of a larger whole or have obligations towards a larger whole. And all of these things are profoundly inimical to traditional religion, and I think particularly inimical to traditional Christianity because Christianity articulates the ultimate historic external authority, which is God himself, as he has manifested himself through his historical acts and how he has represented himself in our world through his people and through his church. So the tilt of modern individualism really tilts us against finding traditional Christianity to be something that is desirable or plausible.
Matt Tully
It’s such a helpful way to frame that, that the modern world we live in is bent towards the inward and maybe the present time in the future, whereas Christianity—the Christian faith—would tend to push us in the other direction to the external, looking outside ourselves for salvation, and then even into the past as we look back to salvation history and even the history of the church. And so that’s what this book is about; it’s looking to the past to help shape and form who we are as Christians today. And you published the first iteration or addition of this book originally titled The Creedal Imperative in 2012. That’s over ten years ago, and that’s a long time, as you know, in the publishing world. A lot happens in ten years. And yet you say that your convictions around the core thesis of the book have only grown stronger over the past decade. It’s not like the book has become irrelevant in any sense. So two related questions: What’s the core thesis that you’re trying to communicate in this book? Why is it more relevant today than it even was a decade ago?
Carl Trueman
The core thesis is really that Christianity is an historic religion and therefore should be anchored in the great creedal statements—the great confessional statements, the great doctrines—that have been formulated by the church over time. And my burden in the original version of the book was really to try to persuade evangelicals who have a very high view of the Bible, very high view of God, very high view of Jesus, that all of the things they most valued were best preserved, transmitted, defended, taught through returning to those great confessional and creedal documents of the church. Many evangelicals have, oddly, a sort of intuitive suspicion of history as well. Not for the same reasons, perhaps, that I described in my answer to the first question. More out of a desire to make sure they’re faithful to Scripture. More out of a feeling that the Reformation liberated us from tradition and we don’t want to go back there. My argument in the first book was really that no, actually biblical thinking is best protected by respecting the great traditions and the great traditional documents of the church. And the second question, why have my convictions on this issue become even stronger in the years
since, is that I think the problem in evangelicalism now is not just the standard trajectories of evangelicalism, focusing on Scripture alone and things like that. The problem is the wider culture that is pressing in on us. And none of us in the church are immune to the wider culture. And all of those things that I talked about in my first answer—the way that individualism has really come to reshape the way we think about history, the way we think about institutions, the way we think about authority—have only become more intense in the last decade or decade and a half. And we’re fooling ourselves if we think that those things have not had some impact on the church. I happen to think that the church on the whole has done a better job than the rest of the culture in fending those things off. But we’re not entirely immune to the air that we breathe, the water in which we swim. And so what I wanted to do in the second edition of the book was, in some ways, not do a major revision or majorly disrupt the original thesis and content but reorient it and perhaps bring in a couple of other emphases to help people realize that actually, creedalism, confessionalism, this return to the creeds and confessions, it has even more benefits for us now than it did in 2012 when the first book was published.
Matt Tully
You’re a pastor, you are a professor, you teach young people every day at Grove City College. What has it looked like? Over the last decade or so, what are the changes, very practically, that you’re seeing in terms of how people, young people in particular, are expressing their thoughts about tradition and history and their identities as people? Are there any commonalities or any through lines that you would point to that you have actually experienced yourself?
Carl Trueman
It’s an interesting question, and my answer is somewhat shaped by the fact that Grove City College is not a representative slice of American youth. We tend, on the whole, to attract students either from fairly traditional Christian backgrounds or students from what I would describe as working class or lower middle class—socially conservative backgrounds. So one of the encouraging things, actually, I’ve noticed among students at a place like Grove is that history is becoming more attractive to them. I think their response to the liquidity of the culture around, their response to the excesses of expressive individualism in the culture around has actually been to readdress the historic roots of Christianity. For example, one of the thriving student churches in Grove City is Grace Anglican. The pastor’s a good friend of mine, a man called Ethan Magness, the assistant pastor there is a very good and close colleague of mine in my own department—the Reverend Don Shepson. A lot of students go to that church, and I ask them, Why do you go to Grace Anglican? You come from such and such a Baptist church, or you come from such and such an evangelical church? They’ve been well taught the Bible, the pastors love them, they’ve had good Christian friends. And typically the answer, once they’ve said pastor Ethan and pastor Don are wonderful people, the next thing in their list of priorities is, We love the liturgy. We love the rootedness in history. We love the fact that when we worship on a Sunday, we are connected not just with saints around the world at the moment but we are deeply rooted in what saints have believed and words they’ve used in praise for many, many years. So on that front, I’m encouraged that there is a reaction among some Christian youth who are finding what I would say the thinness of our world, the world that expressive individualism represents. They’re finding that thinness very unsatisfying and are looking to satisfy their urges and their instincts on this front in good places. I suspect that they’re unrepresentative of young people as a whole. And what I would love to see, I think, in the next decade is more and more of those evangelical churches that they come from—again, I want to go out of my way to say I’m actually not a pastor anymore. I’m just a minister teaching at a college. I have huge admiration for anybody in the pastorate. It is hard and often thankless work, and there are good men in the pastorate. What I really hope to see is that those guys who love Jesus will come to realize that actually they can better serve their people and especially better serve their young people by orienting their own ministry back to the great historic roots of the faith, and will make places like Grace Anglican not the exception, if you like, but will make places like Grace Anglican more and more typical of what is going on in the Christian world today.
Matt Tully
It’s interesting. I think sometimes I know I’ve heard critiques of young people, and that obviously happens all the time. As we get older we love to critique the younger generations. But there can be a little bit of, maybe from lower church contexts, a little bit of a suspicion around the way that young people—people have written about it—this draw towards liturgy, the draw towards some of these higher church liturgical traditions, often coming out of a megachurch kind of context. And sometimes we can be a little suspicious of that and think, Oh, that’s just chasing after a fad, and we can be pejorative even and say, That’s just a love for smells and bells, but it doesn’t represent anything substantial. It sounds like, though, you’re kind of saying that might reflect a deeper sense that young people even are picking up on—a thinness to our Christian faith, as experienced often in churches and in our culture, that it’s actually a true thing. Is that right?
Carl Trueman
I think that there could certainly be some truth to that, There are fads. Twenty years ago or whatever, it was the emergent church. Then it was the young, restless, and Reformed. We know that there are fads that pick up followers. But we also know from those fads that not everybody involved was just there because it was a fad. They were there because, say in the emergent church, they realized the importance of community. Or in young, restless, and reformed, they realized that actually, doctrine was important. And there was a core of committed and sincere people. And I think in both, if you look at the emergent church and the young, restless, and Reformed movements, they were both pointing to a lack in the churches from which they’d come. So I think our first response to, if you like, the liturgical movement—that makes it more formal than it really is—but with the liturgical trend among young people, I think the first thing we need to ask is, What lack is this pointing to in our own churches? Let’s think about this. Let’s not just dismiss it as a fad but saying, What’s making this fad plausible? What makes it desirable? What’s attractive here? Is there something we can learn from this? Secondly, I do think we need, though, to keep pressing on people that the things do need to be true as well. It’s not just good enough for worship to be beautiful. It has to be true. So we can’t let that slip. But I think thirdly as well, another way of putting this, and this is something that’s been said to me a few times by Christians who’ve moved in this liturgical direction, is We like going to church on a Sunday where the worship is grown up and the worship is adult. Now that’s their words, not mine. But I think I know what they’re talking about. Recently, there was an incident I wrote briefly about it at World Magazine where a Baptist pastor and his wife led worship dressed as Woody and his girlfriend from Toy Story. Now, I don’t want to impute bad motives to the pastor in doing that, but I do want to say if I came in as an outsider to that church, it’s hard for me to think that anything serious is going on there. If I want Disney, I can get Disney on the Disney Channel. Paul is very clear in that brief comment he makes in Corinthians about what happens when an outsider wanders into a Christian worship service. He falls flat on his face. He doesn’t laugh. He isn’t amused. He’s struck because something serious and adult is happening there: the worship of a holy God. Now again, I don’t want to say that the worship of a holy God always looks the same in all times and all places. Can you worship God with a worship leader playing a guitar? Of course you can. I don’t want to impose one cultural model.
Matt Tully
Because that is the response is that too often we conflate a certain cultural standard or preference with some kind of idea of biblical worship.
Carl Trueman
Yeah and we have to be very careful about that. We have to be self-critical. I would say, though, that in no culture of which I’m aware would dressing up like Woody of Toy Story communicate that there’s something serious going on there. So all of this is to say when we look at this liturgical tilt among young people, let’s ask, What’s the serious question lying behind it? What’s making it plausible? And what can we do better? What can we learn from this? Set aside the faddish nature of some of it. What can we learn from it? And I think, connecting back to my book, which of course is what I’m trying to push in this podcast I guess, is one thing we do learn from it is that time is a great corroder of rubbish. And things that stand the test of time often do so for a good reason, and that is they capture more of the truth and they’re more serious than ephemera. And so again, to go back to the book and talk about creeds and confessions, why do I belong to a church where the Westminster Confession is still the doctrinal standard? Well, 400 years on the Westminster Standards are still speaking to people. One of the reasons for that is they’ve got to be touching on something of the truth at this point. Fifteen hundred years on, more than fifteen hundred years on, we’re still reciting the Nicene Creed on a Sunday. Why are we doing that? Because it captures something of the biblical teaching about God, and it connects to our hearts. It connects to our minds. It gives us a magnificent, great picture of God and an opportunity to express our unity in worshiping that God with other Christian believers.
Matt Tully
That’s a great segue into a number of maybe objections, or at least questions, that Christians often might have when it comes to the creeds and confessions and their role in our lives, both as individual Christians but especially our lives in the church. The first one might be, My church already has a statement of faith. It’s right there on our website. You can go read it. Why do we need this 300- or 400-year-old document written by Christians who lived in a very different time? The world was so different back during the Reformation and even in the hundreds of years after that. So what’s the need there? What are we getting out of a creed or confession that a simple doctrinal statement doesn’t provide?
Carl Trueman
There are numerous things one could say in response to that. First of all, the age thing, as I already said, if something stood the test of time, there’s probably a reason for that. I don’t trust the Westminster Confession of Faith because it’s 400 years old; I trust the Westminster Confession of Faith because it seems to me to make sense of what the Bible is saying. And it seems to have made sense to an awful lot of people in the 400 years since it was written. So there’s that element to it. Secondly, if your church has a statement of faith, well, first of all, let me say that’s a great thing. I think it’s better for a church to have a statement of faith than to have nothing at all. If you have nothing at all, then the pastor really can reinvent the faith every Sunday and there’s no way you can hold him to account. It’s difficult for you to communicate to people outside the church what you believe or when visitors come. So it’s great to have a statement of faith. I do think, though, it’s helpful to have an elaborate statement of faith, such as a confession. Why? Well, there are many reasons, but I’ll just give two. One of them is pedagogically, if you only have ten points in your statement of faith, it’s going to be very hard to convince people that the eleventh point is important. You’re making a statement about what is and is not important. You’re saying, These ten things are important; everything else is negotiable. And I think that’s unfortunate. It doesn’t mean you can’t be a church with a good statement. Of course you can. But it could lead to complications. And the second reason is one of the complications it might lead to. Take, for example, one of the big pressing issues of—it’s sort of been decided by the culture now, but it’s still a pressing issue for churches—gay marriage. If you have a ten-point statement of faith that was written in 2005, I bet it doesn’t address marriage. I bet it doesn’t address gay marriage. Well, that puts you in a very difficult position now because either you have to say, Well, our church has a position on it but we’ve not written it down, or you have to now write it down and it looks as if you’re simply picking on gay people. If you subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith, what you have in that confession is a fairly elaborate anthropology—teaching about what men and women are and how they are to connect to each other. And secondly, you have a statement on what marriage is. Now, the Westminster Confession of Faith does not address gay marriage directly, but what it does is it tells you what marriage is. And therefore, by implication, it excludes everything else that marriage isn’t. Well, that allows me, let’s say when a gay couple comes to my church and asks What’s your position on marriage? I can point into my statement of faith and say, Look, this is our position on marriage, and this is how it works into the whole doctrinal framework that we have. And it’s not designed to exclude gay people; it’s designed to affirm what marriage truly is. And by the way, it was written in 1647, so it certainly wasn’t a homophobic document, if you like. Now, that’s just one example where I think that if you have an elaborate statement of faith, you are better equipped to deal with the kind of cultural challenges that are getting thrown up by the world around. I remember being asked several times in teaching at the seminary in the run up to the gay marriage decision at the Supreme Court in 2015, Do we need to add a chapter on gay marriage to the Westminster Confession of Faith? My answer was always no, because actually the issue is dealt with. We may need, as a denomination, to produce a report on gay marriage to help pastors think about the pastoral implications through more thoroughly. But actually, because we have an elaborate statement of what the truth is, an awful lot of falsehood is excluded by implication. So those are the two reasons I would say that are helpful.
Matt Tully
One response to that could be that sort of presupposes a perspective on the church that is maybe one of almost putting up—this could be the critique: you’re trying to establish all these walls to protect against false doctrine. And someone could say, Well, my aim with my church is more to be a missional church. I want to establish the core—the basic mere Christianity, so to speak—that we believe that is essential. And I want to allow a little more flexibility on a lot of these other things so as to reach more people, bring more people in, help them to worship God together. I want to focus on the core. Is that a valid way to think about this?
Carl Trueman
Yeah, and I think that’s a very important question. How welcoming is your church to outsiders, for example? I would say the answer to that question, partly I would want to step outside the specific issue of creeds and confessions and say actually, the welcoming nature of the church is as much part of the ethos, or the culture, as it is the doctrinal documents. Every church believes something, and therefore by definition does not believe the opposite of that thing. So every church has a creed somewhere that’s going to exclude somebody. Even your mere Christianity church excludes Unitarians. So the very nature of Christianity as a core, doctrinal thing, not just a doctrinal thing, but a doctrinal thing means there are boundaries and barriers there. The second thing I would say is it’s important to think about how confessions particularly function in the church, and I actually deal with this at a little bit of length in the book. I say one of the great things I think about having a church where you have elders and you also have lay people is this: we require more of elders than we do of lay people. So if you were to come to my church and say, Truman, I’m a Christian. I affirm Jesus has died for my sins, that Jesus is God as Trinity, the Scriptures are authoritative, and I believe that the elders have pastoral oversight and authority over me. I’d say to you, Great! You can join my church. You don’t have to sign up to the Westminster Confession of Faith to be a member of my church. The Westminster Confession of Faith is a church document. What does that mean by that? Well, two things really. The Westminster Confession of Faith reflects the faith of the church, not necessarily of every single individual in every detail who belongs to that church. Secondly, it’s a church document because it’s something that has to be affirmed and maintained by the eldership. The eldership of the church. What I’m really saying there is we demand more doctrinally of the elders than we do of congregants. And again, I think this is actually one of the ways in which confessions, oddly, we think of them as keeping people out, but actually they’re liberating and they allow people in because I’m saying you and I can disagree on a heap of stuff, but I can’t disagree with the Confession as an elder. But your disagreement with me on some things does not necessarily mean you can’t be a member of my church.
Matt Tully
And it allows me as a member to know, with a lot of confidence, what you as the pastor or elder believe. I can kind of hold you to account, as you said before. Maybe another possible objection or question. You were emphasizing a minute ago the comprehensiveness, the exhaustive nature, of some of these creeds and confessions for Christian doctrine, helping us to answer questions that might be coming up, whether about marriage or what it means to be a human. One response to that could be, Well, doesn’t the Bible already do that? Why do I need another human-created document? Why wouldn’t we just point people to Scripture and let Scripture be that authority? Why introduce almost a middleman between Scripture and us as Christians today?
Carl Trueman
Well, there are many answers to that question, one of which is why don’t you Google what people think the Bible means or teaches about marriage, and let me know the response. When you drive down the road and you see that United Methodist Church with the rainbow flag outside, you could chat to the pastor and he’ll tell you he’s taking the Bible seriously.
Matt Tully
Yeah, they’re preaching from the Bible.
Carl Trueman
Yeah, and he’s flying the rainbow flag. So first of all, we all know that appeals to the Bible are not quite as simple as we like to think they are. The Bible is interpreted. We all interpret the Bible. And I want to suggest that some of us interpret the Bible more truly and better than others do. Obviously, the Bible doesn’t simply mean whatever anybody wants it to mean. So there’s that aspect to it. And then I would go on to say okay, if you go to the church—and this I think is the scenario I start the book with—you go to a church where somebody says, Okay, we have no creed but the Bible. The problem is they do have a creed beyond the Bible. The pastor does not just stand up and read the Bible on a Sunday. The pastor tells you what the Bible means. The Pastor interprets it. The pastor, if you like, synthesizes coherent teaching out of the very disparate documents that are the Bible. When I say disparate I don’t mean contradictory, but I’m saying the Bible contains history. It contains poetry; it’s varied. There are various literary genres. What the Westminster Confession, for example, does is try to pull together, from all of those different genres, key unifying themes, key unifying ideas in the Bible. It’s impossible to interpret the Bible without having a set of key unifying ideas. What the Confession does is it provides you with those. Now, the Confession itself, of course, the Westminster Confession, states right at the start that it is itself subordinate to Scripture. So you might say to me, Truman, I completely disagree with you on this statement in the Confession. And at that point we can get into a discussion. I’m not going to say, But the confession says it, so it must absolutely be true. I’m going to say to you, Well, I have no vested interest in believing something the Bible doesn’t teach. So please show me the passages in the Bible and show me how you interpret the Bible in a way that renders this paragraph, this sentence, this claim to be one that is not sustainable on the basis of biblical teaching. Another strand to my response would be to remember that confessionalism is not supposed to be setting up the Confession as an independent authority from Scripture or over Scripture. It presents itself as a synthesis of Scripture, and therefore is susceptible to critique in the light of Scripture.
Matt Tully
And then that’s the response to someone who would be concerned that this would push against the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, that Scripture is the highest authority but not the only authority. One of the things you get into, some of the language that you use in the book—and others have used this as well—that I thought was helpful was the idea of a normed norm and a norming norm. It sounds a little bit abstract, a little bit like a tongue twister. What do those two terms mean and how do they apply to this?
Carl Trueman
Well, first of all, just to touch on that you mentioned people worry that confessions compromise the Scripture alone principle of the Reformation. It’s interesting that every great Reformer is involved in the writing of a confession. Some of them have been lost to history, but all Reformers are involved in producing these great synthetic documents, summarizing Scripture in confessional form.
Matt Tully
So they didn’t see the contradiction there?
Carl Trueman
No, no. They saw the confessions they wrote as conveniently and helpfully summarizing the teaching of Scripture, both for the good governance of the church and for the pedagogy, for the education of the people. And the terms normed, norm, and norming norm, well, the norming norm is the ultimate authority. Scripture is the norming norm. In other words, every statement that a preacher makes, every statement that a Christian makes, every statement we find in a hymn, every statement we might make when we’re explaining the gospel or explaining some doctrinal point to a friend, every statement contained in a Protestant confession is under the authority of the norming norm. The normative thing, the normative criteria are provided by Scripture. Having said that, in practical terms in the life of the church, we have what we call the normed norm, and that is the Confession. The Confession is taken as a summary of what Scripture says. So to give a very practical example of this, if there was a very unfortunate circumstance in my congregation where let’s say somebody had committed a serious sin that rose to the level of church discipline and that the elders had got to rebuke this person, either publicly or privately or worse still, had to suspend this person from the Lord’s Supper, or even worse, excommunicate them, the process for doing that would involve specifying which parts of the Confession this person had contravened in their belief, their teaching, or their life. Now think about that. If you like, you’re saying the person has cheated on his wife. And therefore he’s contradicted the teaching and the Confession’s explanation of the commandment “thou shalt not commit adultery.” The Confessional document there is functioning, if you like, as a summary of biblical teaching. So in practical terms, the norm norm is the Confession. When we operate in the church, when I preach, for example, sometimes I might refer people to Westminster Confession chapter 3, paragraph 1. Or I might say, The larger catechism summarizes this biblical teaching beautifully as follows, and I quote the larger catechism. What I’m doing there is pointing to the normed norm. I’m not granting it independent or absolute authority. I’m saying it is the norm I’m operating within the pulpit that has already been normed by the norming norm, by Scripture.
Matt Tully
To keep going with this situation, if you were in an excommunication situation and you were actually about to do that, you would cite Scripture as the authoritative basis for that action, not one of these normed norms, which doesn’t actually have the authority in and of itself.
Carl Trueman
Well, typically what we’d do in that situation is you read out the summary statement from the Confessional, from the catechism, and then you would point people to the Scripture passages that underlie the teaching of that. I don’t like the word proof text because it sounds too much as if sometimes proof text indicates you just grab the one verse and there it is—bingo! Well, “thou shalt not commit adultery”—yes, it’s there. Denial of the Trinity, that’s a trickier one to grab a single proof text on. But you would certainly point people towards the underlying Scripture passages. So you might, for example, in an adultery case, quote the passage from the Confession or the catechism. Then, you’d quote the commandment. And then you might also point to other instances in Scripture—the woman caught in adultery, for example, or something like that—in order to say to the people, What the Confession of the catechism is doing here is pulling together in a single sentence, or maybe two sentences, what we actually find taught in a dozen, fifty, a hundred scriptural passages of which the following two or three are the best representatives.
Matt Tully
A couple more objections or questions people might have.
Carl Trueman
I love objections. Keep firing them at me.
Matt Tully
You used the example of marriage and how the Westminster Confession does speak about marriage. It doesn’t address gay marriage in particular. The Westminster Confession addresses what it means to be made in the image of God and male and female, but it doesn’t address transgenderism in particular. One question people could have is, Do the Creeds and confessions of church history really address all of the issues facing us today? Is that kind of giving them a little bit too much credit if there are all these papers that need to be written in addition to that and more conversation around things like maybe AI and other technology type of questions that we might have today? How do you think about that?
Carl Trueman
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s a very legitimate question. My response would be that the creeds and confessions don’t address all of the issues that pop up today any more than they addressed all of the issues that popped up in the 18th century, or when the document, the Westminster Confession for example, was written in the 17th century. What they do do, I think, is sufficiently summarize the whole counsel of God in such a way that they provide you with a framework for addressing such things. And of course, even in saying that, what I don’t want to say is the creeds and confessions don’t make Scripture redundant; they give us a scriptural framework for thinking about these things. So if I had somebody come to me and say, My son thinks he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body. How am I going to handle that? Well, I’m not simply going to say, Go away and read the Westminster Confession. What I would probably do is I’d want to get them to think about the doctrine of creation. Let’s think about the implications of that for how God has made men and women. Let’s think about what Scripture teaches about the connection of our bodies to who we are. Adam, when he sees the embodiment of Eve and he makes that declaration, “This is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones.” He’s not making a distinction there between Eve as Eve and Eve as a body. So I would want to use biblical teaching, as summarized in the confessions, to address those topics. But let me put it this way: I would not want to hypothetically say that I could not imagine that a situation could not arise where maybe I’d be forced to say, Okay, we may need another paragraph in the Confession. I don’t believe in confessional sufficiency in quite the same way I believe in biblical sufficiency. But I’m not going to go there until I’ve tried really, really, really hard to answer the question or the problem or the challenge I’m faced with without having to alter the Confession. And then again, I also think a lot of problems that pop up can be fairly ephemeral and not necessarily ones that are going to stand the test of time and require an additional paragraph to the confession. Think, for example, a hundred years ago—lobotomies. It might be a bizarre example, but what should the Christian position on lobotomies be? When we look at that now, we’re glad we didn’t add a paragraph to the Westminster Confession on lobotomies because it would be entirely useless. And you can actually go back and dig up some of the many, many confessions produced in the Reformation era. Some of them have paragraphs on some pretty weird stuff. The confessions that have survived the test of time have by and large been the confessions where everything was—this may sound paradoxical—but everything was both fully elaborated and pretty bare bones at the same time. We don’t have paragraphs dealing with weird issues that were distinctives in the 17th century. I’m trying to think of an example but I can’t think of one. I’m sure if you dig deep enough you’re probably going to find a confession that has a section on horoscopes or something like that, or astrology, which was a much bigger challenge for the church in the early modern era than it is today. So I would say there are also issues that present themselves to us as very, very urgent and immediate, but which may pass away in twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five years time. And I would actually think that my own belief is that I think transgenderism could well be one of those. Already there are cracks appearing in the transgender edifice. We may well get through that without having to think about any alteration to the confession at all.
Matt Tully
Last objection or concern that people might have. Most of the confessions that many Protestant denominations would cite today kind of originated in the Reformation era, or at least somewhere around that time. And if anyone has studied history at all of that time, we would know that that was a fractious time—a lot of splitting around, a lot of of new denominations cropping up all over the place, a lot of strongly worded denunciations of others often along these doctrinal division lines. Even with relatively small doctrines that today we would be able to keep fellowship despite differences, in the Protestant generation that wasn’t necessarily the case. And so I think one concern could be that a re-emphasis on recovering some of these classic creeds and confessions will only encourage more doctrinal divisiveness. And maybe that strikes some people as pretty odd in a day when right now, from the prevailing secular culture, the church is, as you’ve said, it’s kind of under attack on some of these moral and ethical and even just basic Christian worldview issues, where many, many Christians across denominational lines could link arms on these core ideas. And yet, would an emphasis on these robust doctrinal creeds and confessions hinder that kind of unity that we actually need right now?
Carl Trueman
Yeah, that’s a good question. Though, when you were talking about the sort of fractious and splitting over minor doctrine, I thought you were describing Twitter. I didn’t think you were describing the 16th and 17th century. It could have been Christian Twitter today.
Matt Tully
Can you imagine Martin Luther on Twitter today? It would have been quite the sight to behold.
Carl Trueman
The only two people in history who should have ever been allowed a Twitter account are I think Martin Luther and Friedrich Nietzsche. I think they would have been hilarious. It would have been fun to have seen them go backwards and forwards.
Matt Tully
It would have been dark. Really dark.
Carl Trueman
Yes. So it’s a good question. And I think some of that depends on how you use the confessions. In my own personal experience, I spend a lot of time and I do a lot of work for First Things. I do a lot of work for the Ethics and Public Policy Center where most of my colleagues are not of the same confessional commitment as myself. At First Things, most of my colleagues are actually fairly traditional conservative Catholics. I have my wonderful editor, Ramona; she’s a confessional Lutheran. The Ethics and Public Policy Center is very similar. And I’ve developed some great friendships across party lines in both of those organizations. And I’ve actually found that my confessional stance has been helpful. It’s been helpful on two fronts. It’s been helpful, one, on setting out the fact that there are important differences between us that my Catholic friends know. Trueman’s not a Catholic, and we can see where we differ with him. And my good friend, Fred Mayer, actually said one of the things that he most appreciates about (he says) confessional Presbyterians is they take Presbyterianism seriously. They don’t pretend to be Catholics. They know they’re not Catholics, he said. And I found that’s quite liberating, because it frees you up then, actually, to engage in what I would call honest dialogue and honest interaction. We’re already saying there are certain things that are important that we don’t agree on. Secondly, I think confessions do provide us with a kind of hierarchy of doctrines as well. So in the Westminster Confession of Faith, I’m going to say to you, Yep, there are certain doctrines there, like the Trinity, that are far more important, ultimately, than statements about the relationship of church and state. Confessions themselves allow you to see the great architectonic structure of Christian doctrine, which allows you to see, in many ways, what things lie at the center and what things lie on the outside; what things are non-negotiable on what things are almost entirely negotiable; what things are necessary for what I would describe as the very existence of the church and what things are there for the well-ordering of the church. And I think that’s an important distinction. There are churches where I would disagree with some of the things they believe but I still want to say the gospel is preached there. My good friend Mark Dever, Capitol Hill Baptist Church. Absolutely recognize Mark as a brother in the gospel, a gospel minister. But Capitol Hill as a church—completely wrong on baptism. Okay, his church is not properly ordered from my perspective in the way that my church is not properly ordered from his perspective. But we can see, because we know where we stand on a whole variety of differences, we can see where the core important things are and where the things get less and less core as you move out from the center. That’s not to say that confessions can’t be used in a way to split. The history of my own tradition, Presbyterianism, is a great example of the way the confession is used as an instrument of division, not unity. The fact that I could probably be ordained with good and good conscience in at least five different Presbyterian denominations that have churches within a thirty-five mile radius of where I’m sitting now indicates that the Confession can be used as a source of disunity. But I would put it this way, if you don’t mind me sort of misquoting the National Rifle Association and one of their old slogans. Confessions don’t kill people. People kill people. And I think that’s an important thing to grasp. And that’s always how I try to use the Confession these days. The Confession is my place to stand, whereby I can engage thoughtfully, charitably, and ecumenically with others who disagree with me. It’s not my machine gun for blowing other people away with.
Matt Tully
Carl, thank you so much. You have done such a service to so many people, helping us to understand the moment in which we live right now in the prevailing culture. But I think this book in particular helps to also point us back to see that the heritage that we have—all of us have, no matter where we’re at on the Christian family tree, so to speak—we have this heritage that we can draw from and appreciate perhaps more than we currently do. So we appreciate you taking the time today.
Carl Trueman
Thanks very much for having me on.
