Quotes from Carl R. Trueman

Indifference, the plague of modern Western culture in general and evangelicalism in particular, is at best the result of intellectual laziness, at worst a sign of moral abdication.

obsession with method is one of the baleful aspects of modern literary theory, and it has not served society well in promoting the reading or writing of literature. Nevertheless,

Christian theology, in other words, always has a certain ineradicable complexity, which has serious implications for the modern evangelical predilection for simple and very brief statements of faith.

Of course, that a sentence is utterly fallacious has never prevented it from being believed by large numbers of people and, on occasion, used as a foundational principle for a comprehensive philosophy of life.

If the expressive individual sees personal satisfaction or happiness as central to the fulfilled human life, then pornography allows for the realization of that in sexual terms. It presents the sexual act as something whose significance is found simply in the pleasure of the observer or consumer.

To use a distinction deployed by philosopher Roger Scruton, pornography is about bodies, not faces. If sex is just about my pleasure, any body will do as a partner. But in a marriage, the specific identity of the sexual partners is critical. The purpose of sex is not to have sex but to make love, to reinforce a relationship with a particular person—or, to use Scruton's terminology, with a face, not just with a body.

A world, and a church, which is hooked on novelty like some cultural equivalent of crack cocaine needs the cold, cynical eye of the historian to stand as a prophetic witness against it.

Fish swim in water; they do not give it a second thought; but the scientist who analyzes water is far more informed about the aquatic environment

Given all this, we can see why the foul-mouthed politician has supplanted the polite and reserved one, because in a world where the inner voice is key to the real person, the former is authentic while the latter presents a public image likely at odds with his private behavior.

We must hold firmly to the conviction that God gives no one his Spirit or grace except through or with the external Word.

Does human nature carry with it a moral structure and a specific end or purpose that remain constant over time and to which we must conform ourselves in order to flourish? Or are we simply the stuff of which we are made and beyond that free to be or do whatever we so choose? Pieces of living playdough attached to a will?

The prepolitical is no more. There is nothing in this world where human beings can relate to each other that is not a potential arena of political conflict, because all areas of life connect to the overall economic structure of society and thus to society's inequalities and injustices; and Marx should be given much of the credit for laying the theoretical foundations of that.

Our godlike self-understanding, however, keeps colliding with the facts of death and of the fallen finiteness of this world.

In sum, the social imaginary is the way people think about the world, how they imagine it to be, how they act intuitively in relation to it—though that is emphatically not to make the social imaginary simply into a set of identifiable ideas.3 It is the totality of the way we look at our world, to make sense of it and to make sense of our behavior within it.

In biblical times or in ancient Greece, sex was regarded as something that human beings did; today it is considered to be something vital to who human beings are.

Seria uma trágica ironia se a rejeição de credos e confissões — por tantas pessoas que com sinceridade desejam ser fiéis em sentido bíblico — se revelasse não um ato de fidelidade, mas uma capitulação involuntária ao espírito da época.

The idea that the will should master nature—creation—is, after all, plausible only under certain conditions.

Abandoning the myth of the evangelical movement can only help us, as it will free us to be who we truly are and to speak the gospel in all of its richness as we understand it.

the Christian as a Christian has a power that is to be conceived of in cross-shaped terms, and the church, as the body of believers, is also to see its power and its role in a spiritual manner.

Doctors today, however, grant normative authority in such cases to inner feelings or psychological convictions.

To respond to our times we must first understand our times.

In fact, Rousseau's focus in Confessions on his inner psychology and the idea of the true self that he articulates in the Discourses together represent what we noted in chapter 1 is now known as expressive individualism, the notion that I am most truly myself when I am able to express outwardly what that voice of nature says to me inwardly. Doing that, to use modern parlance, is what makes me authentic.

What I am claiming is that mere Christianity, a Christianity which lacks this doctrinal elaboration, is an insufficient basis either for building a church or for guaranteeing the long-term stability of the tradition of the church, i.e. the transmission from generation to generation and from place to place of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

Word and sacrament define the task of the pastoral office in simple, beautiful, and powerful terms.