Book Spotlight - Carl Trueman, The Rise And Triumph Of The Modern Self

Thoughts about the most important book of the year for Christians.

Full disclosure: Much of the following thoughts are derived from other people’s reviews and summaries and my preliminary skimming of the text. I have only just begun properly reading the actual 400-page work. 

Every era of the Church’s history has come with an attendant theological crisis. In the 4th-6th century, various heresies about Jesus Christ and the Trinity forced the Church to clarify its doctrine of God. In the 11th-14th centuries, St Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics challenged us to sharpen our understanding of reason and revelation. Martin Luther and the Reformers in the 16th century brought about a reckoning in our doctrine of salvation and Church authority.

The era we live in will be known as the era of anthropology. A millennium and a half ago, we sorted out the biggest questions of who God was, and now, several significant historical trends have collided to make us question, “Who am I?” Enter Carl Trueman’s book, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution” (Crossway 2020).

You might be aware that in mainstream Western society, “transgenderism”, or the doctrine that one is both free to and responsible for choosing whether they are a man or woman, is becoming more and more widely accepted. Some Christians (and non-Christians!) find this notion absurd on its face, because it defies both science and common sense. Some find the ideology alarming, especially as more and more news comes in about how the battleground has now shifted downward from adults to youth. The most disturbing thing I’ve read recently is this article in a well-respected medical journal giving guidance to how medical professionals can legally sidestep parental objections if a child wants to begin medical procedures to change sex. From the abstract (italics added):

“We discuss three potential avenues for providing gender-affirming care over parental disagreement: legal carve-outs to parental consent, the mature minor doctrine and state intervention for neglect... Our discussion approaches this parent–child disagreement in a manner that prioritises the developing autonomy of transgender youth...” Holy crap, is this for real?

What I’ve noticed is that among most Christians there are two prevailing attitudes towards transgenderism: 

1. Intense alarm and worry: “Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children??”

2. Dismissive contempt: “So now I can identify as a girl or a boy? What’s next, identifying as cats and dogs, plants, inanimate objects?”

While I sympathize with both attitudes, I think by themselves they are not helpful for either Christian witness or Christian apologetics. In other words, if the only thing you know about transgenderism is that it's dangerous or that it’s stupid, or that it’s dangerously stupid, you’re not going to be very useful in either evangelism or defending the Christian faith. I think that there is a crucial attitude that is sorely lacking in our churches today: Humble, empathetic curiosity: “Where are we and how did we get here?” 

American professor of Church history and theology Carl Trueman seeks to tackle this very question. Trueman argues that transgenderism and the modern sexual revolution are not THE problems, merely symptoms of the real problem, which is identity. Our crisis of sexual identity and ethics are the logical end of a road that we’ve been travelling down for centuries. He draws on his background in theology, history, and philosophy to take us on the journey that our society has been going down since before the Enlightenment. 

Something I found striking was the role that the Protestant Reformation played in our “inward turn to self”. When the Catholic Church put Martin Luther on trial and demanded that he take back his heretical teachings, he famously said “I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” Here’s a man who is standing on his convictions, who searched his heart, and decided that he couldn’t go against what he believed to be true deep down. Luther couldn’t possibly have known it, but his action was a precursor to our modern “atomized” notion of self, where each of us is viewed primarily as an autonomous individual rather than a member of a tribe or community. 

(If you want to read more about the Reformation's unintentional contributions to secular modernity, check out this brilliant essay by American journalist Elizabeth Breunig)

Trueman’s central thesis, as expressed by reviewer Andrew Walker, is that “modern-day formulations of identity—the “Self”—have yielded a paradigm of personhood that is often weaponized for psychological, sexual, and therapeutic triumph. Any claim, then, that would threaten one’s self-chosen sense of self-conception, sexual freedom, and therapeutic needs is not only improper, but possibly criminal.”

“No longer does a person understand himself as made in God’s image, but rather as someone whose identity is endlessly pliable according to his own desires and felt needs. The current zenith is the sexual revolution, whose anthropology ties human dignity and personhood to one’s ability to live unencumbered from any tradition or moral restraint that would limit the fulfillment of desire or will.”

What does this mean for ordinary people and where do we see evidence of this happening? How about calls to “live your truth” or “be true to your heart”?

Oh, though you're unsure, why fight the tide

Don't think so much, let your heart decide

The Triumph of the Self takes on two different cultural attitudes. One is that of victory: 

Staring at the blank page before you

Open up the dirty window

Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find

But there is also a dark, sordid underbelly as well. Lostness and anonymity. To be unknown and insignificant.

This isn't happening

I'm not here

I'm not here

In a little while

I'll be gone

The moment's already passed

Yeah it's gone

And I'm not here

What does this mean and how do we experience this crisis concretely in our lives? It’s so hard to express, where do you begin? It’s like asking a fish what the ocean is like. It’s all around us. It’s the root of our mental health crises. It’s the animus behind alternative facts and the post-truth age. It has a chicken-and-egg relationship with reckless technological progress. Scientific innovation allows us to push the boundaries of what humans should get up to, which in turn pushes us to create even more thoughtless tools of dehumanization. In one way or another, its informs and drives all sides of the Culture war. And as already mentioned, it’s how and why we ended up with transgender ideology.

The difficulty of this book is that its message is SO IMPORTANT, not just to nerds or academics, but to every Christian who is serious about reaching out to our world with the gospel. I always like to say that a good preacher understands the Bible text, but an excellent preacher understands the Bible text AND the people he’s preaching to. You need to exegete Scripture and your audience. This is what this book is about, it is an extremely proficient exegesis of the ideas and beliefs of our world today.

But it’s so important that Trueman couldn’t keep it down to less than 400 pages, and it includes high level discussion on philosophy and other special areas that you can't expect an average pewdweller to be proficient in. To finish up my thoughts, I’d like to offer some supplementary resources for anyone who is intrigued by the book but not feeling ready to tackle this mammoth. Give the following four recommendations a read, and if you’re still hungry, go buy the book. Save the receipt. If you finish it before 2021 ends, give me a call and I’ll invite you over and we can have a discussion and I’ll shout you a meal equivalent to how much you paid for it.

Review by philosophy professor R.J. Snell

Self-expression and autonomy today are not just artistic ideals, but moral imperatives. To someone who buys into this ideology, denying someone absolute sexual freedom is not just any old kind of wrong, it is anathema, wicked, the ultimate kind of wrong. Why do people get so so so mad when Christians say that they are against gay marriage? You aren’t just saying that a gay person’s sexual practice is wrong or immoral, you are invalidating their entire sense of self, you are assaulting their very existence. Oh how I long for Christians to understand this!

“Consequently, the conservative response often misses the point, returning to a moralism that, while not false, is deemed malicious. Further, and quite troubling, the usual sorts of religious responses overlook how thoroughly modern and therapeutic traditionally religious people themselves have become, hastening to reject their own teachings as mean-spirited, inhumane, and violent.”

Review by Christ College theology lecturer John McClean

"One of the reasons to read The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is to appreciate how various influences have fed into modern thought about human life. Trueman illuminates many features of contemporary life that we often take for granted such as the priority of the aesthetic and the emotional or the tie between the sexual and political. The transgender moment makes sense in a far wider cultural trajectory.” 

Self-plug: Teaching Series on Identity, by Daniel Shih

Before I was made aware of this book, I had completed a theology assignment in a similar subject. The assignment was to produce a teaching plan for a medium-sized church on the subject of “Identity”. Because of the nature of the task, in this assignment are contained many of my thoughts on what I think is relevant to regular Christians and how I would teach this subject in a church setting

Trueman himself gives his own book a rundown on The Gospel Coalition

One of the things that he highlights in this article is how the relationship between Institutions and Self have been reversed. Traditionally, Institutions like family, nation, academia, trade, tribe.. these things inform and determine an individual's identity. “I am a Shih. I am an American living in Australia.” But now, Institutions have followed in the footsteps of the Self in its state of confusion and loss of identity. 

“And this state of institutional liquidity or flux cannot be separated from the disorienting experience of the psychological self. Institutions shape us as individuals. I am who I am, and I know who I am, because of the family—the stable family—in which I grew up, the school in which I was educated, the college where I studied and, yes, the pubs where I enjoyed time with friends around the open fire.

When the external markers by which I understand my world disappear or are constantly changing, then I myself am also constantly changing. Restlessness and dissatisfaction are the routine distempers of such an age.”