Author Dr. Carl Trueman Speaks to DBU Faculty, Staff, and Students During Fall IGE Lecture Series

Dr. Carl Trueman, an esteemed church historian, has in recent years become more well-known as a cultural commentator on the moral crises facing Western culture, particularly in analyzing the historical idolization of sexual identity and the erosion of any sense of transcendent divine authority. Dr. Trueman visited the DBU campus for the first time as the featured speaker of the fall's Institute for Global Engagement lecture series.

In his chapel message to DBU students, Dr. Trueman illumined the common nature of temptation. Whether in Satan's insidious deception of Eve in the Garden, or the moral failure of King David with Uriah's wife Bathsheeba, sin always promises instant delight to the senses but divorces what may be good and beautiful from truth - the moral boundaries and authority established by God's Word. In our own time, and especially through the power of technology, Western moral culture has been steadily eroding by redefining what it means to be a human being and through deifying sexual identity preference because a world without God provides no grander, metaphysical purpose or a common ethic for human life and relationships.

Dr. Trueman continued his remarks at a luncheon attended by DBU faculty and staff where he discussed the ways that technology has increasingly diminished our view of external authority. As the revolution of the printing press profoundly destabilized the hierarchical control of knowledge and information beginning in the late 1400s, the innovations of the modern digital age have drastically allowed people to insulate themselves and base authority in the sovereignty of self. In light of this, Dr. Trueman advised Christian leaders to think pastorally and philosophically about the implications of technological change and its ubiquitous impact on shaping psychological, social, and spiritual conditions. In closing, he stressed the critical need for building healthy community and ministry that is locally re-centered.

Dr. Carl Trueman is professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College. He is a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen and has taught on the faculties of the Universities of Nottingham and Aberdeen and Westminster Theological Seminary. Most recently, he was the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Dr. Trueman is the author of numerous books, most notably The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.