How Did It Come to This?: How our world got to the place where the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” makes sense

Moments before his seemingly impregnable fortress is overrun by dark forces, Theoden, King of Rohan, in shock at the brutality and swift advance of the enemy, murmurs to himself, “Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow. The days have come down in the West behind the hills into shadow. How did it come to this?”

How did it come to this?

Many Christians are murmuring to themselves, “How did it come to this?” How, in the span of just a few decades, have the moral foundations of western society crumbled to dust, such that gender is divorced from biological sex, public libraries host drag queen story time, children are chemically and surgically castrated and rendered sterile because of momentary confusion, and opposition to any of this is now considered menacing to the public good?

In Carl Trueman’s latest book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, he traces the philosophical, cultural, and psychological progression of the internal moral rot of the West. This is one of those books that gets down into the details of how, little by little, people in the West began to give up the biblical understanding of man as made in God’s image for the purpose of glorifying him. As Romans 1 reminds us, those who suppress the knowledge of God exchange the truth of God for a lie. 

Trueman tells his readers plainly, “At the heart of this book lies a basic conviction: the so-called sexual revolution of the last sixty years, culminating in its latest triumph—the normalization of transgenderism—cannot be properly understood until it is set within a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood.”

The body of the book is an explanation of the progression, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Romanticism through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wilhelm Reich up to the impact of the 2015 Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges decision to legalize gay marriage and the triumph of transgenderism. It is a tour de force of insight into the erosion of a biblical idea of human nature and selfhood into what philosophers of the modern condition call expressive individualism. He expands on the works of Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre and their concepts of the triumph of the therapeutic, psychological man, the anticulture, and deathworks. 

Although these concepts are not familiar to most, they describe the inward turn of people to consider their feelings and sense of happiness to be their true, authentic selves, even if it means the destruction of morals, society, institutions, and anything else that would limit the expression of their desires. 

Nietzsche and Marx taught that “the history of society is a history of power and oppression and that even notions such as human nature are constructs designed to reinforce and perpetuate” that oppression. With Darwin, they dealt a blow to the idea that human beings have any special significance or essence that determines how they ought to behave or were created with an end in mind. Morality, then, becomes a matter of mere taste and manipulative power games. From Freud we learn that humans, “from infancy onward, are at core sexual beings.” Our sexual desires determine who we are. The New Left has taught us that oppression is fundamentally psychological and any attempt to limit sexual expression is oppressive, dehumanizing, and dangerous.

In a word, Trueman shows us, step by step, how we got to the place we are today where something as nonsensical half a century ago, like the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” can be coherent. By doing so, we see that the task of shining the light of truth on this dark world is more complicated and necessary than we might think. As he has said in interviews, this book is an attempt to explain the world in which we live now to the church. If Christians don’t understand the world as it is, we will miss the mark in our attempts to serve as salt and light. 

This book is critical to our understanding of how it came to this, and even more, where we go from here.

Can We Trust the Gospels?

Can We Trust the Gospels? The Historical Basis for the Christian Faith

Many Christians are unaware of the unique nature of the Christian faith. Since most world religions are not based on historical events, and their beginnings cannot be anchored in any verifiable history, Christianity is unusual. And among those few religions that are based in historical events, the character of the founder, the manner in which the events supposedly happened, and the lack of verified supernatural signs makes Christianity completely unique.

When someone asks why you are a Christian, your answer shouldn’t be merely because of an experience or a perceived benefit, such as joy, peace or hope. Many adherents of other religions testify of experiences and benefits. No, your answer should be something along the lines of, “I believe that Jesus lived, died, and rose again, proving that he is the Son of God as the Bible reports.” That is, our faith should rest entirely in a verifiable historical event, because that is how Paul explained it in 1 Corinthians 15. If the resurrection didn’t happen then Christianity is not true. If it did, nothing can stand against it.

The historical reliability of the Bible matters. But how does the average Christian learn the historical facts about the Bible, especially the Gospels without having to wade through highly academic works?

A new book by Cambridge University professor, Peter Williams, provides a handy reference for the multitude of verifiable historical facts in the Gospels. Can We Trust the Gospels?(Crossway, 2018) is the distillation of many years of research in New Testament studies by one of the foremost scholars in the world. This little volume of 160 pages will amaze the reader with details he has never noticed before in the New Testament. In addition to explaining the testimony about Jesus from non-Christian sources, Williams displays the many ways in which the Gospels demonstrate that they could not have been written later than the first century in another part of the Roman Empire.

Although we live in an age when we have easy access to advance information about anywhere we go, we still tend to be surprised by aspects of geography and culture whenever we travel. Now imagine if someone asked you to write a story about events in a distant place you had never visited, and you were not allowed to use the Internet for research. Even with the wonderful libraries we have today, you would struggle to get all the information together to write a detailed story that fit what a local person would know. This is because of the many aspects of your destination you would have to get right, and getting only most of them right would not make a story sound authentic. You would have to investigate its architecture, culture, economics, geography, language, law, politics, religion, social stratification, weather, and much more. You would even need to ensure that the characters in your tale were given names that were plausible for the historical and geographical setting of your narrative. All this requires effort and is not easily done.

Right down to details of architecture, culture, economics, geography, language, law, politics, religion, social stratification, weather, and more, the Gospels do not shy away from a full-orbed, comprehensive description of life in first century Palestine surrounding the events on which they are focused. Even the mention of names in the Gospels reveals that only someone who lived in that society at that time would have known the common names of the day. Williams reminds us that there was no internet to look up details of the world of Jesus. Many of the details are never mentioned anywhere else in ancient literature, so knowledge of them would have had to have been from firsthand experience.

Knowledge of the location of tax collectors, local botany, unusual customs, local languages, the personalities of characters in the Gospel accounts, and many other particulars are shown to be still further evidence of the reliability of the NT. Williams presents a kind of cumulative case apologetic to show that criticism of the historical reliability of the Gospels is laughable. It is simply too far-fetched to argue that they were written later and in another place.

This little book will be a tremendous help to the average Christian who wants to strengthen her own faith in the Scriptures and a valuable resource to put in the hands of someone searching for answers. I highly recommend it!

 

The Historical Basis of Christianity

Christianity is the only major faith built entirely around a single historical claim. It is, however, a claim quite unlike any other ever made, as any perceptive and scrupulous historian must recognize. Certainly it bears no resemblance to the vague fantasies of witless enthusiasts or to the cunning machinations of opportunistic charlatans. It is the report of men and women who had suffered the devastating defeat of their beloved master’s death, but who in a very short time were proclaiming an immediate experience of his living presence beyond the tomb, and who were, it seems, willing to suffer privation, imprisonment, torture, and death, rather than deny that experience.

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press, 2009), 11.