Pastor Derek Buikema asks professor, theologian, and author Dr. Carl Trueman to explain a bit about “expressive individualism,” the subject of Dr. Trueman’s important book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.

The ideas that “The real me is my feelings, and my ability to express those feelings outwardly makes me an authentic person,” are central features of expressive individualism, the most extreme form of which is “transgenderism.”

Dr. Trueman urges Christians to acknowledge what expressive individualism gets right as well as to acknowledge the serious dangers posed by not grounding our feelings in external realities and truths.

In this excerpt from IFI’s interview with professor, theologian, and author Dr. Carl Trueman, Pastor Derek Buikema asks what should determine whether Christians stay or leave a church (or denomination) that appears to be moving away from orthodoxy.

In this excerpt from IFI’s interview with Professor Carl Trueman, author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Pastor Derek Buikema’s asks why, “in some places mainline Christianity” has come to affirm sin. Dr. Trueman identifies two factors as integral to this apostasy: freedom of religion and the church’s “vocabulary of love.”

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, the well-known 108-year-old Christian publishing company, continues its slide into heterodoxy by celebrating June “pride” month. On June 3, 2022, in a post on Eerdmans’ blog, the company recommended not one, not two, but six books for Christians to read in honor of “Pride Month” (rainbow colors seen here are Eerdmans/Satan’s—not God’s or mine). Eerdmans/Satan wrote,

Nothing says doctrinal soundness quite like celebrating pride, homoeroticism, and cross-dressing.

C’mon on, you people of faith, cease all your disunifying and unresting on the topic of men lying with men. Listen to men who are lying with men and cross-dressing. And while you’re at it, please seek to understand polyamorists, consanguinamorists, zoophiles, and minor-attracted persons, all of whom are simply fighting to be seen, heard, cared for, and loved.

Oh, almost forgot—they also want the church to affirm, pridefully celebrate, and promote as good their sinful desires and sinful volitional acts.

The desire of homosexuals and cross-dressers to have their sin “trans”-formed into righteousness takes precedence over the Old and New Testament’s condemnations of homoeroticism, cross-dressing, and pride. If men can become women by wishing it so, then by golly sinners can become sinless by virtue of their desire to be seen, heard, cared for, and loved. No need for confession or repentance.

All sinners—that is to say, all humans—desire to be cared for and loved. Not all sinners, however, pressure the church and the entire world to celebrate their sins and call them righteousness. Most Christians who experience, for example, unwanted, unchosen desires to drink excessively, gossip, steal, and covet are not demanding that drunkenness, gossip, theft, and covetousness be pridefully celebrated as righteous.

Theologian, professor, and author of the book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman, recently wrote an essay about pride month in which he exposes the meaning of adopting an “LGBTQ+” identity:

For anyone not completely hoodwinked by the erotic obsessions of our day, taking pride in one’s sexual identity—indeed, even considering sexual desire to be an identity—would seem at best pitiful and at worst a deep perversion of what it means to be human. Yet, here we are. And we should not underestimate the power of what it signifies.

Clearly, Eerdmans has been hoodwinked.

Trueman continued, making clear the significance for Christians of the demonic appropriation of the rainbow, something that seems to escape the theologically befogged minds of Eerdmans’ leaders:

The use of the rainbow symbol should be particularly egregious to Christians. It is the primary instrument by which the LGBTQ+ movement asserts its ownership of the culture. And it is the means of telling those of us who dare to dissent that we should have no place in the public square anymore. It tears at God’s creation order and design for family relations and social stability. And it is also a blasphemous desecration of a sacred symbol, taking that which was intended as a sign of God’s love and faithfulness and of our dependence upon Him and turning it into an aggressive symbol of human autonomy and sexual decadence.

After the Eerdmans’ blog post went viral, the company received widespread and impassioned criticism to which they responded with unrighteous umbrage, digging in their prideful heels and tweeting,

The revilers say we have changed our position and begun to teach heresy. There are several problems with that accusation. We do not think it is for us as a publisher to define doctrine for the church. We are not the pope, or an ecumenical council, or even a pastor. Our role is to publish books, representing both settled and experimental positions, that serve the church in its ongoing deliberations.

We therefore routinely publish books that contradict each other on many contested doctrinal points. We publish conservative and liberal books; we publish Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant books. We are not confused. We are a publisher that serves the ecumenical church.

With regard to Christian understandings of LGBTQ+ people, Eerdmans has been publishing books for quite a few years by authors who have come to an affirming conclusion on biblical and theological grounds. This is not new for us. …

We reject the tendency to promote division and discord by categorizing Christians into two camps, considering “us” to be right about everything and “them” to be wrong. We decline to swear loyalty to one faction’s “us” and join their hostilities against all corresponding “thems.”

So, we reiterate our invitation, especially to our conservative friends, whom we value and respect: use #PrideMonth to read a book by LGBTQ+ Christians and their allies.

What an ironic use of the epithet “reviler.” Eerdmans is calling critics of the company’s affirmation of the sins of homosexuality and cross-sex identification “revilers,” and yet Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians,

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Cor. 6:9-10)

Was Paul a “reviler” in his clear condemnation of homosexuality?

Once upon a time, Eerdmans was connected to doctrine–sound doctrine. While it may not have “defined doctrine,” it reflected doctrine. At one point in its history, Eerdmans would have rejected heretical positions—er, I mean, “experimental positions.”

The fact that Eerdmans has been publishing books “for years” by authors who affirm homoeroticism and cross-dressing as biblically defensible “identities” is neither doubted nor assuring. By continuing to do so passionately and unapologetically, Eerdmans is promoting “division and discord.” When the company refuses to “swear loyalty” to the “faction” also known as theologically orthodox Christians, Eerdmans has necessarily joined the faction known as heretics.

Don’t support Eerdmans. The company has been bought out by Satan.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Bought-by-Satan.mp3

Illinois Family Institute (IFI) was blessed to be able to interview three Christian luminaries and astute cultural critics when they were in the Chicago area for the annual Touchstone Conference: Peter Leithart, Carl Trueman, and Rod Dreher.

Sincere thanks to Dr. Leithart, Dr. Trueman, and Mr. Dreher for generously sharing their time and wisdom. Thanks too to James M. Kushiner, writer and editor of Touchstone Magazine and Salvo Magazine, for making these interviews possible, and to Orland Park Christian Reformed Church Pastor Derek Buikema for conducting the interviews.

IFI is pleased to offer these interviews in short savory segments for your edification beginning with Peter Leithart, president of Theopolis Institute and teacher at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Dr. Leithart is a prolific writer who has authored many books and writes a regular column for First Things Magazine. He received an A.B. in English and History from Hillsdale College in 1981, and a Master of Arts in Religion and a Master of Theology from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1986 and 1987. In 1998 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in England. He and his wife, Noel, have ten children and twelve grandchildren.

The first segment of the interview with Dr. Leithart is titled “How Are We Living in Apocalyptic Times?” Pastor Buikema begins by asking what Dr. Leithart means when he refers to “apocalyptic times.” Dr. Leithart explains how he uses that term and shows what “end times have looked like throughout the history of the church. He points to the “fraying of Christian civilization” in America and Europe as evidence that the world system in which we’ve been living is experiencing a “massive upheaval” that signals the end—an apocalypse—of one system, with another one soon to emerge.

Lesbian actress Ellen Page just posted an Instagram photo of her and her “wife” topless and kissing in honor of LGBTQ “pride” month, providing symbolic evidence that the cultural movement to normalize homoeroticism is chiefly about sex—not love—at least not love in its true and complete sense.

Page is the young actress who in early February delivered an anti-Christian screed on The Late Show with arrogant Catholic heretic Stephen Colbert in which she attacked Vice President Mike Pence over his theologically orthodox views on marriage. In her diatribe, Page demonstrated—again—that cultural regressives can’t distinguish between moral disapproval of acts and hatred of persons.

With a sycophantic Colbert hanging on her every word, the over-emoting Page declared that Mike Pence’s views on homosexuality and marriage were the cause of the allegedly homophobic attack on homosexual actor Jussie Smollett:

The vice president of America wishes I didn’t have the love with my wife…. Connect the dots! If you were in a position of power, and you hate people, and you want to cause suffering to them… you spend your career trying to cause suffering, what do you think is going to happen? Kids are going to be abused and they’re going to kill themselves. And people are going to be beaten on the street…. This needs to f**king stop. 

So many questions about her unhinged lecture.

Pence spent his “career trying to cause suffering”? Really? His entire career?

Do efforts to retain sexual complementarity in the legal definition of marriage constitute “trying to cause suffering”? If so, do efforts to retain the criterion regarding number of partners in the legal definition of marriage constitute “trying to cause” polygamists and polyamorists to suffer? Does the desire to prohibit close relatives from marrying constitute “trying to cause” those who experience Genetic Sexual Attraction to suffer?

What exactly “needs to stop”? Does Page think Christians should stop believing Scripture? Stop reading it? Stop preaching it? Stop expressing biblical truths in the public square, where Page remains free to express her anti-biblical beliefs? If so, which biblical truths should Christians stop expressing in the public square? All biblical truths or just the ones Page doesn’t like?

What is Page’s conclusive, research-based evidence that it is the faith of theologically orthodox Christians who express their views in a biblically defensible manner that causes child abuse, childhood suicide, or “hate” crimes?

Word to Page: No one objects to her “loving” another woman. Christians are commanded to love their neighbors and even their enemies. No, theologically orthodox Christians never begrudge people love. What Christ-followers disapprove of are homoerotic acts.

And they believe that marriage has a nature—an ontology—central to which is sexual differentiation, and without which a union is intrinsically non-marital.

If Page is befuddled by the origin of such beliefs, she should ask Catholic heretic Colbert who surely knows their origins even as he rejects them. Colbert surely knows what the Old Testament teaches about homosexual acts, what St. Paul teaches about homosexual acts, and what Jesus teaches about marriage.

Colbert and Page would be well-served by spending some time with Carl Trueman, biblical studies professor at Grove City College, who recently wrote an essay for First Things titled “Love Is Not a Feeling” in which he said,

in contemporary Christian approaches to political issues, “love” –a code word for whatever the political piety du jour may be—is set in opposition to “dogma” or “doctrine”—code words for whatever piece of traditional Christian teaching is deemed to be inconsistent with said political piety….

Trueman exposes the thinness, instability, and error in contemporary conceptions of “love” by summarizing the ways three different scholars characterize post-modern man’s conception of love, which in turn shapes post-modern man’s understanding of man:

To approach the matter from Philip Rieff’s perspective, we might characterize modern men and women as psychological selves for whom the good and the true is identical with whatever happens to make them psychologically happy at any particular moment. Or we could use Charles Taylor’s notion of expressive individualism, that the modern self is the person who expresses outwardly that which they feel inwardly…. Or we could adopt Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of emotivism, and see modern ethics as manifestations of emotional preferences. Bringing all three to bear upon the sexual revolution, it becomes clear that the LGBTQ moment is not merely a revolution in what sex means; it is a revolution in what it means to be human. (emphasis added)

Trueman further argues that,

For many, gay marriage is a dead issue…. And therein lies the danger: We need to remember that for a Christian to recognize gay marriage as Christian… is not simply to recognize a shift or expansion in the definition of marriage. It is far more significant for the Faith…. it is to abandon Christian teaching about the self—as made in the image of God, and as resting upon an order which transcends individuals and their contexts—in favor of one constituted by whatever the moral structure of society happens to be at any given moment in time.

Gay marriage emerged from the sexual revolution; and the sexual revolution is the latest iteration of a revolution in the self, which has been taking place for hundreds of years and which stands opposed to the essentialism regarding human beings at the heart of orthodox Christianity. The moral structure of contemporary society stresses the foundational importance of individual psychological conviction with a marked preference for prioritizing polymorphous sexual desire as definitive of a sense of self. In legitimating gay marriage, a symptom of this underlying structure, Christians therefore effectively affirm the legitimacy of this deeper revolution of the self.

It’s important to note that the conception of marriage as the union of one man and one woman as articulated by Jesus is intellectually accessible even to those who reject Christ.

It’s important to note also that to reject Page’s and Colbert’s re-conception of marriage is not a manifestation of hatred but, rather, of true love—the kind that children deserve and society desperately needs. Homosexual faux-marriage will no more be a dead issue for committed Christ-followers than will be the slaughter of the unborn.

“The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.”
(Isaiah 40:8)

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Ellen-Page.mp3

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!