The Christian Worldview

David Wheaton: How the rejection of God degrades our humanity. That is the topic we'll discuss today here on the Christian Worldview Radio Program where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host. The Christian Worldview is a non-profit, listener-supported radio ministry. Our website is thechristianworldview.org, and the rest of our contact information will be given throughout today's program. As always, thank you for your notes of encouragement, financial support, and lifting us up in prayer.

If you're a Christian, you likely find yourself gobsmacked—that's a British word in light of our guest today for utterly astonished—at the craziness you see all around you in society, such as how abortion, the killing of unborn human beings, is celebrated. Or how living together before marriage is promoted as necessary to ascertain compatibility.

Or how boys can purportedly become girls and vice versa, and how hospitals and doctors are more than willing to remove private parts to quote-unquote transition them. Or how two men can quote-unquote marry and then choose a woman out of a catalog to be artificially inseminated by one of them to carry their baby. Or how the proposed solution to crime is quote, "defunding the police," and then reducing consequences for criminals. Or how those who illegally enter the country should be able to vote and receive taxpayer benefits.

The worldview on these issues and many more may seem like lunacy to the Christian, but to the non-Christian or to the liberal professing Christian, these things seem perfectly reasonable, even worthy of celebration. Fundamentally, the divide we see and feel in our society is between one side that believes in God and adheres to the framework he established versus another side that rejects the biblical worldview on each point and promotes what is right in their own eyes.

Frankly, this shouldn't surprise us, as it's been the story of mankind from the very beginning. What God establishes, man rejects and rebels against. Satan falsely promised Eve that eating the forbidden fruit would lead to wisdom and liberation, but the opposite occurred: shame, enslavement, and ultimately death.

Our guest this weekend is Carl Trueman. He is a professor of biblical and theological studies at Grove City College and the author of the book, *The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity*. This is our new featured resource, and we'll tell you how you can order a copy today. We hope this discussion helps you better discern what is at work in our society and how the only answer is to repent, believe, and follow God's gospel and will. Let's get to the interview with Carl Trueman.

Carl, it's so good to have you on the Christian Worldview Radio Program. This is your first time on the program. Before we get into the topic of your book, tell us about your background, how you became a Christian, and what you do now.

Carl Trueman: My background is I grew up in England, the West Country of England, over in Gloucestershire. I became a Christian, there was no single moment of a flash of lightning moment, but I became a Christian sometime during my first year at university. I was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge through reading a book by Dr. J. I. Packer. I'm married, kids, granddaughter, and currently I have two hats. I'm a visiting fellow at the University of Notre Dame, but my full-time job that I'm returning to in a couple months' time is teaching in the biblical and theological studies department at Grove City College in Western Pennsylvania.

David Wheaton: Thank you for sharing that with us. Now let's get to your book. On the inside cover of your book, where it gives almost the thesis or what is this book about, it says, "In *The Desecration of Man*, Carl Trueman argues that modern man's crisis of meaning stems from a rejection of a simple truth: that we, humans, were made in the image of God. Unmoored from the basic moral fact that secures human dignity, that we're made in the image of God, we violently disrespect our own minds and bodies through abortion, pornography, casual sex, gender transitions, and more. And in this respect, we blaspheme God himself with devastating practical and spiritual consequences."

So Carl, the rejection of God is really the story of humanity. That really explains what goes on in our world. Explain what you mean, though, by the desecration of man, and is it worse now than previously, or is it just more evident now?

Carl Trueman: The interesting thing, of course, is if we're made in God's image, then one of the ways that we can demonstrate independence from God, a godlike stature, is to transgress the limits that God has placed upon us and the end which God has tailored us towards. We see that back in Genesis 3 in the narrative when the serpent tempts Eve by saying, "God knows that if you eat of the fruit of the tree, you will be like God." If you want to be godlike, then you've got to break the rules; you've got to break God's rules.

The paradox of that, of course, is that what gives us our dignity, what makes us unique, what makes us special, is the fact we're made in the image of God. Therefore, throwing off that image or rejecting what that image requires of us, although it promises to deliver us as gods ourselves, what it actually does is it degrades us quite dramatically.

Now, the second part of your question, has this—is this a new thing or has it always gone on? There's a sense in which it's always gone on. I pointed back to Eve when Eve desecrates what it means to be human when she breaks the rules. I think what's different today is we have tremendous technological power at our disposal which allows us to think that we're just so close to becoming gods ourselves. You even see this language being used with regularity by the tech gurus who are pushing some aspects of artificial intelligence, by the transhumanists: we're about to transcend ourselves and become godlike. So yes, it's a perennial problem, but we now have the capacity for achieving this which we've never had before.

David Wheaton: I'm going to read from the introduction to your book. You say, "What does it mean to be a human being today? Or more succinctly, what is man? Once upon a time in the West," you write, "the answer would have been easy: man is a creature made in the image of God who created him, and his life, man's life, is to be ordered to those ends that this involves," as you were just saying. "The book of Genesis, the origin of this idea, defines these as going forth and reproducing, subduing the earth, and living life under the authority of God the creator."

Then you say, "We now live in a world that no longer agrees on that definition. We often experience our world as one that is disenchanted, one that finds implausible the idea that there is anything transcendent to which we can point to find meaning and significance in the imminent." And then you say, "Modern society glories in transgression. Transgression is exhilarating." I thought that was a very interesting observation.

You set up this contrast in this early part of the book where you say like the mayor of Belfast, Ireland, had done this stained-glass window in City Hall depicting a young man with a t-shirt that says, "Save Sodomy from Ulster." In other words, the original quote was save Ulster, I think it's the town or something in Ireland, from sodomy, but it was a perversion or a mockery of that, so they're promoting the LGBTQ movement.

And then you say the contrast is, yet people today, they're all for that, but then you'll get a warning before you go to a movie in the 1940s that there's going to be smoking scenes in this movie and you better be aware of that. And so talk about how the exhilarating rebellion part of this, how the desecration of man, the rebellion against God, the rejection of him—that that is just the inner motivation that drives this desecration.

Carl Trueman: You set it in a much larger context. I think what's emerged in the last 500-600 years is slowly but surely a notion of what it means to be human defined by autonomy. If you lived in the Middle Ages in the village of my home county of Gloucestershire, everything about you would have been given to you. You'd have had no say over it: where you were born, where you lived your life, the church you were baptized, married, and would be buried by. There would be no career choice: born the son of the local blacksmith, hey, you're going to be a blacksmith when you grow up; born the son of a local peasant farmer, you're going to be a peasant farmer when you grow up. Everything that defined you as a human being was solid and fixed and you had no choice or power over it.

The last four or five hundred years, all of that has changed. Most of us, if not all of us, in the West now are really defined by things that we have chosen. We choose where to work, we choose who we marry, we choose the career path, we choose where we go to college or we choose not to go to college, we choose the friends we have, we choose where we travel. And that means that the sense of self has dramatically changed as, we might say, external authority has faded away.

The sense of self has moved inwards, and that then raises another question: so what does it mean to be genuinely me? If I was to ask a medieval peasant that, well, to be genuinely me in the Middle Ages would have been to have conformed to those things that were given. They're not solid anymore. What does it mean to be genuinely me? Well, that's where the notion of authenticity emerges. And how do I know my actions are authentic? Because I have chosen them independently and freely for myself.

And that tends, on the whole, to tilt us in the direction of breaking the rules. How do we know we're authentic? Because we don't simply accept the sexual mores of previous generations; in fact, we break through them. We don't simply accept the morality, the customs, the art, the culture of previous generations; we smash through them, we transgress. So the whole notion of the modern self as a kind of autonomous, expressive individual points strongly towards transgression as a means of authentication.

David Wheaton: And you also say that the reason this has changed, this move to radical autonomy, trying to be your own god, rejecting everything that God established—it's often assigned to industrialization or bureaucracy. Explain why those two reasons are not why we are where we are today.

Carl Trueman: Well, that connects to what's often referred to as the disenchantment thesis, which was made popular by a German sociologist, Max Weber, in the early 20th century. And he was really pointing out that industrialization, the development of industrialized labor and bureaucracy, massive state bureaucracies, led to a different experience of the world for the individual. The individual in some sense loses his value. I mean, think if you're the blacksmith in a medieval village, you're a very important person, only you can do that job, you're not replaceable with somebody else. So there's a sense of value that you feel about yourself in that context.

Once people are making horseshoes in factories and the only skill needed is pressing a button or pulling a lever, anybody can do it. You're very replaceable. So this kind of disillusionment about what it means to be me as an individual sets in. And bureaucracy does a similar thing. If ever you've had to tackle with the healthcare system or the immigration system, you know exactly what it means to be a number rather than an individual person in the way you're treated.

So what I was getting at there is there've been developments in modern society that have led to a loss of the sense of depth and mystery and magic in the world around us and a loss of the sense of depth in ourselves as well. And that's become a very popular way, even among Christians, of thinking about what's going on in contemporary society. We're living in a world that's disenchanted, and the answer is we need to re-enchant the world.

Well, I'm persuaded by that about 80%, should we say. But it doesn't quite go to the moral heart of the problem. And the example I use in the book is the language surrounding abortion. Disenchantment explains to me language about abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. The world is not what it should be, sometimes we have to do bad stuff to avoid worse stuff; when we do it, we want it to be safe, legal, and rare. That seems to me to be the logic underlying that, a kind of disillusioned acceptance of what's gone on.

That's very different to "shout your abortion," proclaiming your abortion on a sweatshirt, talking about abortion as a fundamental human right that you can't truly be a woman unless you have access to this right. There's a glorying in abortion there that is absent from what I might say the rather squeamish and sort of embarrassed tone of safe, legal, and rare. The former, safe, legal, and rare, I think can be explained in terms of disenchantment. The glorying in destruction of our more recent iterations of the pro-abortion movement—that goes beyond disenchantment.

There's something active and destructive going on there. And that's where I say, you know, that's desecration. Why does society find that exhilarating? Because there's nothing more exhilarating than having the blood of God on your hands, defying those things that God says need to be followed, trashing the sacred. And there's nothing more sacred than those who bear his image on the face of the planet.

David Wheaton: And I think that's so accurate because you see things on social media and you just say someone's clearly or a group of people are clearly just sticking their finger in the eye of God, doing something you just, I can't believe that. But what you just said explains it. There's an intentional destruction and a glorying and exhilaration that they're getting when they destroy things that God has established for our good and his glory.

By the way, and I think, Carl, this goes to explain so much of what is taking place politically, let's say in our country on the left. And I want to read from early in the book. You say that there's a dominant cultural pathology that is particularly notable in today's cultural elites. Transgression of that once considered sacred has become the primary task. And transgression of the sacred is exhilarating, as you've been discussing, precisely because it makes us feel like gods, the creators of our own meanings and our own selves. All we need to do is cross lines previously enforced by the idea of God with a capital G and we thereby assume the role of being gods. That sounds to me like that defines the political left today. And we'll get into the political right in a second because you did mention there's a desecration going on there too. But talk about the political left today, even in America and abroad, and how that paradigm defines it.

Carl Trueman: Well, the political left I think certainly in the United States and also in many parts of Europe has defined itself, I would say, on the basis of destroying what it means to be human. Whether we're talking about abortion, whether we're talking about transgenderism, which involves the mutilation and destruction of the body, whether you're talking about medically assisted suicide—all of these things really strike very deeply at the heart of anthropology.

When I was growing up in Europe, the political debates in England were about tax rates or should it be a mixed economy or purely private enterprise. And they were significant and important debates, but they weren't quite so directly assaults on what it means to be human that we see today. Today we're in a political environment where the left is laser-focused—or certainly the radical elements of the left, I'm not going to embrace everybody left of center in this—but the radical elements of the left, the noisiest parts of the left, are laser-focused on dismantling what it means to be human and maybe not just dismantling it, but smashing it to pieces and taking delight in so doing.

David Wheaton: Smash the patriarchy. I was at a place and I saw the t-shirt that said that and it's like, who thinks that way? We want to smash the patriarchal system that God set up with God the Father.

Carl Trueman is our guest today here on the Christian Worldview. We're talking about his brand-new book, *The Desecration of Man*. You talked about the political left and how it's defined by the desecration of man and the destruction of anything that's sacred. How do you see that desecration operating on the right politically as well too in terms of President Trump and maybe the MAGA movement?

Carl Trueman: There's a number of things one could point to. Most obviously, I think, the crudity of language that is deployed. The last two presidents have been the most foul-mouthed presidents in the history of the United States. Well, what's so attractive about using the F-bomb in public, for example, which would have ended a political career 40 years ago? It's transgressive. It makes you look cool and hip in a transgressive world. Think about the vice president who's touted as a devout Catholic convert but can use the F-bomb as good as anybody and he's quite happy to treat other people made in the image of God like dirt on his social media accounts.

While in terms of policies, it seems to me that the left is the most explicitly committed to what we might call anti-humanism—when I take humanism there to mean understanding human beings made in the image of God—the way the right behaves is often anti-humanist as well.

David Wheaton: Carl Trueman gives us a lot to think about and a lot of clarity about what drives the unbelieving world we live in. The goal is to replace God and to be their own God. And by smashing God's laws, it makes them feel powerful and autonomous. But it always ends badly. Carl's new book, *The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity*, is our new featured resource. The book is hardcover, 256 pages, and retails for $29. For a limited time, you can order it for a donation of any amount to the Christian Worldview by going to thechristianworldview.org or calling 1-888-646-2233 or writing to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. We have much more coming up with Carl Trueman, so please stay with us. I'm David Wheaton, and you are listening to the Christian Worldview Radio Program.

Commercial: Welcome back to the Christian Worldview. I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit thechristianworldview.org where you can sign up for our weekly email and the Christian Worldview Journal print publication, order resources for adults and children, and support the ministry. Our topic today is how the rejection of God degrades our humanity, which is the subtitle of the book titled *The Desecration of Man*, written by our guest, Carl Trueman.

You write in the book, Carl, you say, "In sum, this book argues that there are only two ways to address the question, and the question is what is man? We can embrace Nietzsche's challenge and continue the project of self-creation, becoming our own gods, or we can embrace the Christian faith with its dogmas, its cultic practices, and its ethics." We'll get to that in a bit. You said, "There is no stable third option. We must choose today whom we will follow: Christianity's Messiah or Nietzsche's madman. All else is nihilism."

Is there a third way, though, that is becoming very popular today, at least in the West, in Europe, in your country where you're from in the UK? And this is the rise of Islam. How does Islam factor into what you see as the desecration of man? Because this seems to be becoming dominant in many places in Western civilization.

Carl Trueman: The rise of Islam is interesting, clearly connected to immigration patterns in the West, particularly in Western Europe. I think I'm right in saying that Islam does not believe that human beings are made in the image of God, so there's a clear theological divide between Muslims and Christians there. I would say Islam is a great example of something that's moving in to fill the vacuum.

Most people who sit and reflect for any length of time on what's going on relative to humanity realize that the problem is fundamentally a metaphysical one. It's one that points beyond this world to some grounding of this world in something beyond. And Islam offers a metaphysical answer to that—that the world is created by Allah, etcetera, etcetera. So I would say people moving towards Islam are asking the right question. As a Christian, I would say they're coming up with the wrong answer. But certainly, the rise of Islam is intimately connected to the spiritual and metaphysical poverty of the West at this point.

David Wheaton: Following up on that question about the rise of Islam in the Western civilization, especially Western Europe, how is the digression taking place in Europe, which was formerly very strongly Christian, the Reformation and everything that took place there? How is what is taking place there a case study in the thesis of your book? And what has been the process for how that has taken place in Europe and to some degree what is happening in some places in America right now?

Carl Trueman: Americans often talk about Europe as if it was a coherent entity. Of course, it isn't. It's a collection of different countries that have very different cultures. My home country of England even has a different culture to that of Scotland, let alone Italy or Spain. But certainly, I would say in England, what we've seen, clearly immigration plays a significant role. And without wanting to get too much into the nitty-gritty, Islam at the moment exerts an oversized influence because the current Labour government has much of its power base in inner cities where Islam is strong. If you were to visit my home village in Gloucestershire, it's not really changed much since I was a kid there 40 years ago. So there are local political reasons why we see Islam exert such power and influence.

I would say that some of the problem has been the corruption of the church. The child abuse scandal that swirled around the Catholic Church for many years has done a lot of damage to the Catholic Church's credibility. And by, given the fact that a lot of people don't make a distinction between churches—you know, if you're in a church, you tend to blur the distinctions—that I think has had an effect on all churches in terms of how they're perceived.

I think we've had 50 or 60 years of a strong cultural emphasis that has downplayed Christianity or damned Christianity in the public sphere for the longest time. England I think also had its powerhouse church was the Church of England. Well, the Church of England, though there are some faithful men, women in the Church of England, the Church of England on the whole long ago became the vassal of the secular state and was there really to do the secular state's bidding or to be treated like a joke. So there are strong impulses within the culture that have downgraded the authority of Christianity in England.

David Wheaton: Let's touch on something that you mentioned earlier about technology, how technology has led in some way to this desecration or destruction of man. You talk about feminism in the book and you say, "This kind of feminism is a direct challenge to the notion that we have limits, obligations, and ends." God established limits and obligations and ends for us and those are to be—now we don't pay attention to those anymore.

It sees the womb as a limitation, it sees motherhood as an imposition, and it sees the reproductive teleology of the body not as something to be embraced but as something to be overcome. It involves a desecration of the human body in all three aspects. And then skipping down a bit, you quote the opening lines of the Transhumanist Manifesto. You say, "The Transhumanist Manifesto challenges the human condition. This condition asserts that aging is a disease. Augmentation and enhancement to the human body and brain are essential to prevail, and that well-being is essential to prosper within safe and healthy environments."

And so the common types of issues we see in the news nowadays, people are trying to transcend being a human, "I want my brain to live forever and I want to upgrade my brain," and all this technology used. How is the technological aspect almost like a technocracy enhancing and augmenting this desecration of man?

Carl Trueman: I think you're putting your finger on what's key there: that technology really allows us to think that any given limits are problems. And you're referring there to sort of the radical—we're talking about the radical feminism that sort of flows from Simone de Beauvoir, the French thinker, who makes a comment, you know, women won't be truly liberated until motherhood is abolished. Very explicit that the body is a problem.

And I think transhumanism picks that up. And we now live in an era where technology allows us to imagine that. Again, think of going to a doctor 200 years ago and saying, "I think I'm a woman trapped in a man's body." The doctor would have said, "Well, that's a problem, it's a problem with your mind, we need to bring your mind into line with your body." Today you're likely to get completely the opposite answer: "That's a problem with your body, we need to bring your body into line with your mind." Well, what's the difference? The difference is the technology available today makes it possible to imagine that we can be born a man and turn ourselves electively into a woman.

So technology is absolutely crucial to the way we imagine the authority of our bodies. And secondly, just talk about the authority of the body. If I'm correct that the last five or six hundred years have been marked by an increasingly explicit and active rebellion against external authority, then what is the last great external authority? It's our bodies.

I say to the students in class, "Okay, you can self-identify as anything you want, but you cannot self-identify as immortal, because sooner or later your body will assert its authority on that question and you will die." And so I think it's not incidental that technology is turning its attention now to breaking through what they would consider the last enemy, and that is the limited nature of the human body.

David Wheaton: And that's my next question for you because you spend a couple chapters talking about that of the final enemy being death. You also have a chapter on mechanical reproduction. And so these issues of how sex has been changed from not something within the covenant of marriage for reproduction, for unity within husband and wife, how that's become, as you write, mechanical reproduction.

And also with the issue of in-vitro fertilization too, touch on those and explain more about how death is treated nowadays. You even say there's not a sacredness to death anymore; it's we want to ignore it, it's very transient and over and let's move on. How have those things approached core issues of life of the sexual relationship and death been altered?

Carl Trueman: Sex, one could make various comments. One, of course, is that we now think of sex as recreation. We don't see it as primarily connected to marriage or procreation. And the reason we do that is technological. We're able to avoid the natural consequences of sex through antibiotics and contraceptives that would have been impossible or very difficult many, many years ago.

The issue of IVF and surrogacy, I think, you know, one has to handle these very sensitively because they're often very delicate pastoral things. The young couple who can't have children and are desperate to have a child desire a good thing. One wouldn't want to stand in judgment over them for their desire. The question is when we start to take control of procreation and we start to conceive in test tubes, for example, that has consequences.

Now, the consequence many Christians think of, of course, is the so-called surplus embryo problem where, you know, if you're pro-life and you believe life begins at conception, suddenly you've got all of these surplus lives. What do you do with those? In this book, I go a little further and say, though, that even if you just produced one embryo in that process, the question of what IVF and particularly surrogacy do to children and motherhood in modern culture is a significant one.

Surrogate mothers, what is their legal status? They just become baby-carrying machines. The law courts have to treat children like things because lawsuits blow up around IVF and around surrogacy that are really quite horrific when you look at the details. Now, it's not the only thing that turns children into objects. I think no-fault divorce does the same, you know, the judge has to decide who gets the couch, who gets the dog, and who gets the kids. So it's not the only thing in modern society, but the seizing hold of reproduction and bringing it under human control has unforeseen consequences for how we think about what it means to be human. We turn human beings from persons into things.

Death, of course, is always going to be the great challenge because it is the great limiting factor of human existence. And in the book, I point to a number of ways we deal with it. One, we trivialize it through Hollywood movies, for example, where I would say it becomes a kind of harmless, if you like. Another way we deal with it is we ignore it. We don't have graveyards by our churches anymore, often for zoning reasons, of course, but it affects the imagination. We're not confronted with the presence of the dead in our midst as previous generations were. And then, of course, we have the transhumanist gambit: don't worry, we'll be able to overcome death through the doubling down on technological prowess. We trivialize, we ignore, or we try to control it. Those are the three basic elements there.

David Wheaton: Carl Trueman is our guest today. He is the author of the book we're discussing, *The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity*. And the book is our new featured resource. It's hardcover, 256 pages, and retails for $29. For a limited time, you can order it for a donation of any amount to the Christian Worldview. Our contact information will be given during this break. We have one more segment with Carl Trueman coming up, where he will tell us the solution to man desecrating himself. I'm David Wheaton, and you are listening to the Christian Worldview Radio Program.

Commercial: Welcome back to the Christian Worldview. I'm David Wheaton. Be sure to visit thechristianworldview.org where you can sign up for our weekly email and the Christian Worldview Journal print publication, order resources, and support the ministry. Our topic today is how the rejection of God degrades our humanity, which is the subtitle of the book titled *The Desecration of Man*, written by our guest, Carl Trueman.

The final two questions for you, Carl, because I want to get toward the end of the book. When you talk about what is the answer to the desecration of man is the consecration of man. And so you talk in the final chapter of the book on the consecration of man there needs to be a return to deep-rooted Christian faith, not just cultural Christianity.

And you say this: "Christianity is a religion that has at least three dimensions: creed, cult, and code. And precisely because desecration is a function of the modern social imaginary, we need more than just arguments to solve the problem. Creed, cult, and code are all vital. The reassertion of our limits, obligations, and ends," remember that little triad we talked about earlier, "is the result of all three."

So you say a lot there. Define some things for us, what the social imaginary is, why creed, cult, and code are important, and then also the limits, obligations, and ends. I know that's a three-part question, but I know you can handle it.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, well, social imaginary is a term coined by Charles Taylor. It's a rather ugly term because he uses an adjective as a noun, imaginary, but what he's really getting at there is that the way that we think about the world is much less to do with arguments we've heard and been persuaded by and is more intuitive than that. We imagine the world to be a certain way.

And I think that points to the fact that if you're going to win hearts and souls and minds, you've got to present people with more than just an argument, you've got to grab their imagination. Think of why most people shifted their view in towards being favorable to gay marriage. It wasn't because they read books on the subject; it was because they had gay friends or because they watched *Will and Grace* on the TV. Their intuitions were shaped. It was not a propositional thing so much as an intuitive thing.

So turning to the church then, the battle for souls today, first of all, we do need good teaching. Clearly, the Bible teaches things about God and about man that we need to press home on people. But the church needs to do more than that. It needs to have a form of worship, a cult, that reflects that, that embodies that and presses it on people.

Again, think about sermons you've heard and hymns that you've sung. I bet you remember more clearly the hymns you've sung than the sermons you've heard. The hymns shape us. Singing corporately shapes us. The rhythm of the worship service shapes us. And then we have the code, and that's the way we live our lives. And if as I argue in parts of the book the problem is today that we treat other persons as things, the way we live our lives treating other persons as persons of value becomes important.

And so something like hospitality is part of consecration as well. Just as ancient Israel were to be hospitable to the sojourner in their midst, so the church is to be hospitable to people as well. Again, think about, I bet you probably don't remember any lectures you went to at college, but you may well remember being invited to a professor's house for Sunday lunch. Hospitality grabs the imagination.

And the great thing is it also this spreads the responsibility among the people of God. Not everybody can be a great apologist, not everybody can be a great preacher or teacher. But within the body of Christ, there are different tasks. And okay, maybe you're not a great teacher, but maybe you can be hospitable on a Sunday or during the week. And that too plays a part in the church's task of reaching out to the world around with hope by demonstrating what it means to be truly human made in the image of God.

David Wheaton: So we need a deep-rooted faith, one that I think you would agree would have to be based on personal individual salvation, repentance and believing the gospel. It can't just be checking off the boxes of going to church and singing the songs because unbelievers typically don't even want to do those things because they don't have a transformed heart. They have not a regenerated heart. So there has to be personal regeneration.

And so you gave some things there just in your last answer, but what would be your final exhortation to Christians today, pastors listening, to be able to identify this desecration of man? Because a lot of things in your book stood out to me: "Oh, that makes sense," when you see what's going on in that particular cultural, culture-warring issue, you see it. "Oh, okay, that's why it's taking place." So what is your exhortation to Christians to stand against that? What kind of posture, what kind of language, in what means should we stand against it and instead work toward the consecration of man? Is it through evangelism, discipleship? What are your—what do you suggest?

Carl Trueman: It's through all the above. I would say that understand what it means to be made in the image of God. And often when you talk to people about that, they think immediately of, well, it means to be rational, for example. I would say also it also means to be personal. It means to be a person. We are free beings who interact with each other freely. When we look into the eyes of somebody else, we don't just see another thing, we see as Adam says, "flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone."

Treating other people as persons of value and not just as things—that's key. And so I would say to pastors out there, think about how you cultivate that in your church. Obviously, you've got to teach it. But also in the way you worship and the way you encourage your people to live their lives seven days a week, those are areas where we can really press home what it means to be truly human made in the image of God.

David Wheaton: Well Carl, we so appreciate the thoughtfulness that went into writing this book, *The Desecration of Man*. We thank you for coming on the Christian Worldview Radio Program today and we just wish all of God's best and grace to you.

Carl Trueman: Thanks so much for having me on.

David Wheaton: Again, Carl Trueman has been our guest today. We have links to him at our website, thechristianworldview.org. If you missed any of the interview today, you can hear it again at our website or via podcast. You can also order his book, *The Desecration of Man*, for a donation of any amount to the Christian Worldview. Our contact information will be given immediately following today's program.

His book is important because it explains why things are the way they are in the world. It's been the same pattern from the very beginning. God establishes his perfect will and ways; man rejects it, and in doing so, doesn't elevate himself, as he thinks he will, but rather desecrates himself and the world around him and brings God's judgment upon himself.

Remember Adam and Eve in the garden? What God told them for their good, they rejected and then disobeyed and suffered the shame, the separation, and the death that is the result of sin. The same pattern with Cain, their son. God established his will for sacrifice for sin—take the best of your flock, an animal sacrifice. Cain rejected that and decided to do it his own way with a sacrifice from his crops.

The same pattern with Israel. God revealed himself to Israel and how he was to be worshipped. They rejected him and worshipped other gods, desecrated themselves, incurred judgment, and were ultimately taken out of their own country that God had given to them.

The same pattern in America. We started out acknowledging God and his ways to a large degree. The Declaration of Independence and Constitution and our laws are largely based on biblical principles. But the rebels can't have that, and so there has been an unending revolution to undermine and destroy this country and transform it into a secular socialist utopia.

This sentence caught my attention from Carl Trueman's book: "Modern society glories in transgression. Transgression is exhilarating." He goes on to say, "If one rejects God, everything changes. Those who kill God, so to speak, those who indulge in the greatest act of desecration, are obliged to become gods themselves and to desecrate God's image again and again."

Why do unbelievers glory in transgression, in sin? Why is sin or transgression exhilarating? Why does man want to be his own god? Being like God, or usurping God's authority, is the root motivation behind every sin. It's "God says one thing, I will do another."

Listen to what Satan told Eve in the garden. The serpent said to the woman, Genesis 3 verse 4, "You surely will not die" if you eat the forbidden fruit. Verse 5: "For God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened" and listen to this, "and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

"You will be like God." This is irresistible for unregenerate mankind. To be like God, to know more, to have more power, to achieve a higher state. So glorying in sin or transgression against God, being exhilarated by it, and striving to be our own god—these are all related. It all begins with the sin nature we are all born with and then cultivate. Just like a child cries to get its own way, so our default position is about getting our own way in life and satisfying our own fleshly desires.

And then along comes the Father, God, with his perfect will and ways that he designed for our good and his glory. He makes us male or female, but we don't like being told what we must be. He designed sex to be within marriage for unity and procreation. We don't like that supposed restriction. Unregenerate men and women want to gratify their flesh by having sex with whomever they want, whenever they want. And then when a baby is conceived, we want the choice to end that life.

The Bible actually says that hearing God's laws with a rebellious heart only makes us want to break the laws even more. Romans 7: "For while we were in the flesh," Paul writes, "the sinful passions in our flesh, which were aroused by the law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death."

So when our inborn rebellion is not repented of, the lust to be our own god and get our own way and just replace God only intensifies. So the unbeliever, thinking he's the master of his own ship, he takes pleasure in sinning against God. He thinks he's winning against God. In fact, sin is not just pleasurable and self-glorifying, but it's exhilarating and exciting to be taking on and defeating God.

Have you ever noticed what it says at the end of Romans chapter 1 that describes this downward spiral of the unbeliever? Romans 1 verse 28: "And just as they [unbelievers] did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed," and it goes on to all sorts of sin. And then it finishes the chapter this way, verse 32: "And although they [unbelievers] know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same [do the same sins] but also give hearty approval to those who practice them."

So this passage says they know God's laws, they know God's judgment for breaking the laws, but they don't care. They give hearty approval to sin. They find it exhilarating. They want to be their own god. This was exactly the pattern of Satan himself. Isaiah 14 describes the King of Babylon, who some biblical scholars also think represents Satan in his fall from heaven. Whatever way you look at it, it describes the rebel and his motivation.

Isaiah 14: "How have you fallen from heaven, O star of the morning, son of the dawn! You have been cut down to the earth, you who have weakened the nations! But you said in your heart, 'I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars... and I will sit on the mount of assembly in the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.'" It's I, I, I, I, I.

So as Carl Trueman was saying, when we reject God and being made in his image to operate according to his will and ways, we don't elevate ourselves like we think we will, but we desecrate ourselves. We literally become crazy because what's crazier than thinking we can usurp God and get away with it?

Frank Sinatra's popular song, "I Did It My Way," it's like our own pathetic little kingdom that accomplishes nothing except for temporarily gratifying our flesh and corrupting other people. It all comes crashing down and we find ourselves on our knees bowing before Christ as Lord. Philippians 2 verse 10: "At the name of Jesus," it says, "every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

So each of us has a choice: to bow before Christ now willingly, enthusiastically, and gratefully as Savior and Lord, or to bow before him unwillingly in judgment. The choice should be obvious, but fear of God and fear of judgment or even the positive side of reward and eternal life are no match for a proud heart that demands it gets its own way.

So the antidote to the desecration of man, which comes from rejecting God, is repentance of sin and bowing before him, believing in his plan of salvation that was earned through his Son. So if you've never been born again, as Jesus commands, call us or go to our website and click on the page "What must I do to be saved?" because reconciliation with God is infinitely better than the desecration of ourselves.

Thank you for joining us today on the Christian Worldview and for your support of this non-profit radio ministry. Until next time, think biblically, live accordingly, and stand firm.

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