Carl Trueman Interview (2011)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the

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Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the

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Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth, and we have a theme here. The theme is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

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And it is our desire by the Spirit's power to, of course, be a person, be people who don't compromise.

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But ultimately, we look to Christ Jesus because we fall short and everybody compromises. I hate to admit it, but I'm a compromiser.

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Yet because of the gospel, because of Christ's life, we look to Him, and He's the one who never compromised in action, thought, word, or deed.

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And so we have a radio show, and basically the format is you hear me preach from Bethlehem Bible Church on Mondays.

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Tuesdays I meet with my associate pastor and we discuss church issues. Wednesdays we talk to authors.

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Thursdays we usually talk about something that is positive. What is repentance?

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What is confession? And then Friday, it is something very controversial.

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And so since it's Wednesday today, I have an author on the phone that I'm excited to have.

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And when I think of historians, I usually think of people who are old, think of people who are boring, kind of old curmudgeons.

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Yet our author today, he's not old, he's not boring, and he's not a curmudgeon.

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And so, Carl Truman, welcome to No Compromise Radio. It's great to be here, Mike. I think my teenage sons would disagree with you on everything you've just said in describing me.

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Well, I know that you quote, you talk about Led Zeppelin in your latest book, and so you must not be that old.

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That's true, I'm in my forties. All right, well, Carl is at Westminster Seminary.

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And he is a professor of historical theology and church history. And we got him on the radio station today to talk about several things, including his crossway book,

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Histories and Fallacies. But before we talk about that, Carl, just give me a little background for our listeners today.

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How did the Lord save you and under what circumstances did you come to know Christ Jesus? I grew up in a very loving but non -Christian home, and I was converted through going to hear

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Billy Graham speak at a rally in Bristol, which is in the west of England, not far from where I grew up in 1984.

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And then by a somewhat circuitous route, I ended up as a Presbyterian. And it's in that capacity that I was approached by Westminster in 1999, and then came out to take my current post here in 2001.

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Well, I've got something that'll be very interesting, maybe for our listeners. I'm going to give you a quote, and then,

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Dr. Truman, you tell me who said it, all right? This is kind of going to be a no -compromise first here. Sell a man a fish he eats for a day.

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Teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity. I couldn't begin to speculate.

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Okay, the same man who said that said this, the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

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Any guesses? Are you getting closer, Dr. Truman? Sounds like something Karl Marx might have said. That is exactly right.

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That is from Karl Marx. I had another one, but I knew you'd get this one. Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

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The reason why I bring up Karl Marx is, tell me about your new book. I think I see a picture of Karl Marx on the cover of a

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Crossway book. How did that happen? You do? Well, the book was commissioned by Crossway.

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Justin Taylor, I think, at Crossway, approached me some years ago and said that he would like a book written that would be appropriate to give to, perhaps, final year high school students or first year history students at liberal arts colleges, outlining had a right history and some of the basic errors to avoid.

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So the book deals with a series of what I call classic fallacies or classic mistakes in the writing of history.

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And one of the chapters deals with Marxist approach to history, which is a great example,

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I think, of a grand theory of how to interpret history, which has some things to commend itself to us for, but also makes one or two fairly fundamental errors that can serve to vitiate the whole, if I could put it that way.

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So that's why Marx is on the front. He's on the front in brackets, if you look carefully, of course.

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That is true. The subtitle is Problems Faced in the Writing of History. And so, Karl, before we talk about the book specifically, give our readers here, our listeners, rather, on No Compromise Radio, a kind of broad spectrum.

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I have a few questions you can answer in any order you'd like. Why read? Why read theology?

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And then why read history? Tell us a little bit about your perspective regarding those answers and questions.

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I think in terms of why read theology, we are, as Christians, we worship God. We should naturally desire, as Christians, to want to know more about God.

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And theology, when you cut away the pretentious jargon, all theology is is a description of who

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God is and how he acts. All Christians are therefore theologians to some extent.

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And I would expect that for most, if not all, Christians, we would aspire to be better theologians than we are at any given point in time, and therefore would be constantly studying theology in order to sharpen and improve our knowledge of who

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God is and our ability to articulate that to other people. In terms of why study history,

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I think two reasons. One, for me, it's my earthly calling, if you like.

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It just happens to be something I'm good at, that the Lord has called me to do, and therefore I want to do it to the best of my ability and be the best historian

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I can. More specifically, as a Christian, I stand within a historic tradition of Christianity.

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And the more I understand about how to do history, and the more I understand about church history and Christian history, the better I can understand the reason why my church and I myself think and act the way we do.

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Well, I am very thankful you wrote the book, and I am thankful that we have men who are good church historians.

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And before I get into the book specifically, Carl, can you tell our listeners, if there was one book, you met somebody at your church and they said,

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I'd like to read a book on church history, one or two volumes that gives me an overview from Acts until the present day to make me understand how the

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Spirit of God works through people and denominations. If there was one book for our listeners today that you said, you need to read this book about church history, which book would that be?

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I think if I was recommending a survey, probably something like Nick Needham's book,

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Two Thousand Years of Christ's Reign or Christ's Power, I can't remember the precise title, but it's by Nick Needham, and it would be in, it's three or four pretty chunky volumes, but covers the whole story fairly comprehensively.

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If it was a single, one single book on a particular church history figure, I would recommend it would be

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Roland Bainton's book on Martin Luther, entitled Here I Stand, that really captures the passion and the excitement generated by Martin Luther at the time of the

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Reformation. So Nick Needham's big survey books, Roland Bainton's Here I Stand would be the things

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I would recommend. Yeah, but what if we don't want to read Dr. Truman, we'd just like to watch the Luther movie instead.

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Wouldn't that be better? I'm trying to think of a polite way to respond to that.

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It's no compromise, so you can just, as we see in America, let it all hang out. I would say the movie is certainly, it's good for capturing something of the feel of the time.

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It's also pretty sympathetic to Luther's position and is reasonably accurate from a historical perspective.

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What you lose, I think, is some of the chronology. The movie compresses events that took place over several years into a fairly short span of time, and you also miss the detail in terms of the development of Luther's convictions that comes through very clearly in Bainton's book.

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A movie can only do so much in two hours. I would say, don't make Bainton or the movie an either -or.

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Read the one and watch the other. Absolutely. Well, I love that book by Bainton. It's an excellent book about Martin Luther, Here I Stand.

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I recommend that for all our listeners. Let's talk about your book now. We're on No Compromise Radio. I'm talking to Dr.

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Carl Truman, and he's at Westminster. By the way, you can read many of his articles at Reformation21, the number is 21, dot org,

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Reformation 21. I just read his Easy Virtues and Cruel Mistresses this morning.

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We might get to that later. But Dr. Truman, in your crossway book, Histories and Fallacies, you work through evaluating historical writings of others.

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Would you just give us a snapshot of the book in terms of how do I read history? If I'm a layperson,

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I'm a grandmother, I'm a plumber, and I want to read a book about history, give me some hints on how do

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I read the history that others have written? Well, I think you need to ...

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There are numerous things that you need to understand about how a historian goes about their task.

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What I try to do in my book is bring these out without being dry. History can be dry.

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Writing books about history, about history writing, can be even drier, so I try to avoid that.

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For example, in chapter one, I raise a basic question. Do texts and do historical evidence, do they mean anything?

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Is there a legitimate range of meanings? Are there certain meanings that can be put on text that are self -evidently wrong?

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The primary example I use there is Holocaust denial. Did the Holocaust happen?

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Most of us would say, obviously, of course it did. There is a small group of people out there who try to argue that the

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Holocaust never happened. Looking at their writings, I try to bring out what, if you like, conjuring tricks.

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What errors are these people committing in order to be able to come to that conclusion? I then look at anybody approaching the past.

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If you're a historian, you're really going back into the past and you're trying to make retrospective sense and bring retrospective order out of something that at the time may have seemed to have been happening rather chaotically.

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We all bring great schemes and plans and models back to the evidence in order to make sense of it.

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In the second chapter, I try to draw out how a model can be used in a way that helps us make sense of the past, but must be used in such a way that the model itself can always be corrected by the past.

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Marxism is my example there. Marxism, love it or hate it, it's not boring.

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Most people have strong opinions about it, so using Marxism as a model, I was trying to use something that would grab people's imagination.

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The third chapter, I look at the problem of anachronism. We all know how easy it is to be anachronistic.

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For example, one of the examples I use in that chapter is, was Luther a racist? He writes such hateful things about the

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Jews in 1543, was he a racist? One of the points I try to make there is, well,

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Luther thought in religious terms. He didn't think in racial terms. If a Jew converted to Christianity, Luther had no problem with them anymore.

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Even though we can find his writings on the Jews very obnoxious, in actual fact to say they were racist is incorrect, because he would not have understood what we meant by the term.

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That's a highly loaded emotional example, but we're always doing those kind of anachronistic things ourselves when we look back to history.

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What would so -and -so have done if he were alive today would be a great example. And I try in exploring the issue of anachronism to make us more self -conscious and critical about how we do that.

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And then in the final chapter, I look at a whole heap of smaller fallacies that people routinely commit without ever having realized they're committing them, just to try to help people become more self -conscious in the way they think and talk about the past.

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Well, let's talk a little bit more about the racism of Luther. Lots of people who don't like the Reformation or the doctrines of grace, for instance, they'll have these throwaway lines that somehow demolish the entire argument, at least in their minds, regarding the

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Reformation. So Calvin killed Servetus and Luther was a racist. Somehow that is supposed to destroy all the doctrines that are built from the

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Bible and are found in the Bible. This book, I think, would be helpful for those kind of people who want to defend against statements that are throwaways, like I said, don't you think?

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Yes. One of the points I would want to make to somebody who said, well, Luther was a racist as well, even if we allow that he was a racist, that doesn't necessarily mean that everything he said about everything else is automatically wrong.

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Most people hold, you know, most of us have some obnoxious or unacceptable view somewhere, and hopefully it doesn't render the whole of our life or our contribution to be utterly invalid.

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Secondly, I think we always need to set people within the context of their times. That's not to excuse

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Luther's attitude to the Jews, but to say, well, he's typical of his time. It would have been rather remarkable had he not held this opinion at that particular point in time.

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So one can relativize the distinctiveness of his era, if you like, by setting him in context there.

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And one of the things I would also do, particularly with Luther on the Jews, is say, yes, but in 1523, he writes this remarkable treatise that Jesus Christ was born a

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Jew, which is incredibly positive about the Jews, saying, you know, we have to be good neighbors, we have to love our

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Jewish neighbors in order to show them the love of Christ and to bring them into the kingdom. That's the remarkable treatise he writes in the 16th century, because he lived in a world where all

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Christians hated Jews. But for this brief moment of time, it seems that the gospel gives him this great handle on how to reach out to his

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Jewish neighbors. Sadly, due to circumstances and age, and I think bitterness to some extent, he falls back into a pattern of thought that is more typical of the 16th century towards the end of his life.

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But I think we do need to give him credit for his moment of clarity, if you like.

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Well, certainly in that 1523 book that Jesus was born a Jew, fast forward 20 years when we get on the

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Jews and their lies, I like it, Carl, that in the book you talk about Luther, even though anti -Semitic in a certain sense, it wasn't like he was leading, and he wasn't some kind of figurehead of a movement of anti -Semitism, correct?

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Correct. One could say, sadly, he was merely representative of a fairly typical kind of opinion in the 16th century.

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The philo -Semites, if you like, would have been the very unusual people then. And also,

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I think a careful study of Luther's writing on the Jews allows us to break the kind of simplistic connection that's often made between Luther and Hitler.

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The Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany are very clear that if a Jew converts to Christianity, it makes no difference.

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This, from the Nazi perspective, is a matter of blood, not religion. As I said, for Luther, if a

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Jew converts to Christianity, that's an item for praise. Absolutely.

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Well, we're talking to Carl Truman on No Compromise Radio. Dr. Truman, tell us a little bit about your views regarding bias and presupposition.

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Is bias inevitable when we read history, but does that mean everything is tainted?

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What are your views about presuppositions and bias, personally? Yeah, I make a distinction in the book between neutrality and objectivity.

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I don't think anybody can write neutral history. It's a fairly simple point, but everybody is going to write history from their perspective.

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They're going to choose the evidence to look at. Their horizons are somewhat limited. Their take on things is going to be somewhat distinctive.

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Nobody can write neutrally. It's impossible to do that. I do believe, however, it's possible to write objectively.

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And what I mean by this is that it's possible to come up with a historical narrative or historical explanation which can be subject to public criteria of verifiability and falsifiability.

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So I could say, you know, I'm trying to think of a neutral example from an

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American perspective. I was going to go for the Civil War, but I'm sure that will divide your audience down the middle.

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This is Massachusetts, though, after all. That's true. So I could perhaps say, you know,

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Robert E. Lee was a great general. That's not a neutral statement.

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That clearly tells you something about the perspective of the writer relative to Robert E.

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Lee as a general. There's an element of approval there of his ability, if not of his moral character.

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If I were to say Robert E. Lee was a ginger tomcat, that is a statement that is meaningless.

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You can test that and prove that that's not true. You'd have to accept,

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I think, that Robert E. Lee was a general. Whether he was a great general, again, would be a matter of debate. But the first statement,

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I think, is not a neutral statement, but is one that somebody who doesn't share my particular opinion of Robert E.

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Lee could test and argue about. So that would be an example, I think, of a statement that it's not neutral, but it is objectively testable.

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Excellent. We're talking to Carl Truman on No Compromise Radio regarding histories and fallacies. His book, I encourage you to pick it up.

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You can go to Amazon, Westminster Books, wherever you'd like to pick that up. Dr. Truman, let's talk about Calvin and Servetus.

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If someone says, you know, I'm trying to talk to you about the doctrines of grace, they recognize it as so -called

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Calvinism for shorthand. And then they say, yeah, but Calvin killed Servetus. How would you tell our listeners to dissect that and respond to that statement?

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Well, there are numerous aspects to that. First of all, one has to acknowledge that, yes,

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Servetus was tried. Calvin was the chief prosecutor, and then he was executed.

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He was, of course, executed by the civil magistrates, not by Calvin as a church leader.

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I would also throw into the mix there that Calvin did appeal for the sentence to be changed to beheading rather than burning.

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So Calvin was, by the standards of the day, was not at the extreme end of the destroy

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Servetus spectrum. Servetus, of course, was also the only man,

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I think, in the 16th century, who was burned in effigy by the Catholics and in actuality by the Protestants.

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And his burning was not a controversial act in Calvin's own day, with the exception of one particular person who wrote against it.

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And this particular person had been somebody that had a very bad run -in with Calvin earlier, so was badly disposed towards Calvin anyway.

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So I certainly want to acknowledge the fact that Calvin was involved in the execution of Servetus. I would want to emphasize that this was a fairly typical thing in that particular time.

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I would also want to emphasize that it arises out of convictions about the nature of heresy and blasphemy.

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Servetus, of course, was not just done for heresy. He was also done for blasphemy. This was seen to be something that not only jeopardized his own soul, but potentially jeopardized the souls of other people.

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Servetus, if you like, in his day, would have been the equivalent of a serial child abuser today in terms of fear for public health and safety.

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It's difficult for us to make that leap back to the 16th century, but Servetus would have been seen as just as dangerous as a serial killer, a child abuser, an anarchist, a terrorist.

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So the extremity of the punishment in the 16th century, it was not extreme.

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It was because the crime was so bad that that particular punishment was meted out.

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So I would certainly want to contextualize Calvin. I would also want to say that, you know, fair dues,

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I don't want to see heretics being burned today, perish the thought. I'm a big believer in freedom of religion and the right of people to be wrong in the religious sphere.

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So I would certainly not want to say, as Calvinists today, we want to be campaigning to bring back this kind of thing.

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But I would want to try to set him in his context and point out that, you know, we have heresies today that we perhaps overreact to.

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We have heresies today that, in fact, lead to people's lives being destroyed, that in three or four hundred years time, people may be looking back on and thinking, we are secular people, but perhaps not as charitable and as broad -minded and always as tolerant as we like to think we are.

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Excellent answer, and that's why you, the listener, need to read Histories and Fallacies. Dr. Truman, we have two minutes left, and I hate to only give you two minutes, but as a church historian and as someone coming from the

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UK and now lives in the U .S., how would you, in the next minute and a half, describe the state of the

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American church as you look at it as a historian? Or in other words, how would you write about the church if you lived another 50 years and you have to write about the church this century?

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Now you're down to a minute, sorry. Very diverse, struggling to come to terms with the fact that it no longer has a cultural hegemony and is moving towards a more minority position.

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Many places where I think there's great hope and great things happening, and other areas where the church has allowed secularization in the form of materialism to creep in, even while it's retained a relatively strong doctrinal confession.

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Well, that's excellent. I just looked at my notes here, Dr. Truman, and I found another Karl Marx quote that you might like.

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The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. There are other things that result in such useless people as well.

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That's correct. Go to Reformation21 .org if you'd like to read, especially if you go today and you can read

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Dr. Truman's weigh -in regarding probably exactly what he's talked about in his book and how

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Rob Bell has taken Luther out of historical context. Dr. Truman, we're very happy to have you on No Compromise Radio.

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I hope it's not the last. We are trying to get people to learn to think critically like Bereans, and I think histories and fallacies has helped us.