Nietzsche's madman and moral consequences

Carl explains Nietzsche's parable and how 'God is dead' demands creating new values practically today.

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Episode notes

Western culture today largely lacks a sense of consecration, of setting apart the ordinary as holy. Yet somehow we still have a strong impulse toward desecration, of turning the holy into the ordinary. Why have we lost the taste of the good while developing a taste for the bad?

That’s a core question at the heart of Carl Trueman’s new book, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, published by Penguin Random House’s Sentinel imprint. Carl is a professor of biblical and theological studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He was a guest on Gospelbound in 2020 for his highly acclaimed, bestselling book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

In his new book Trueman writes, “Transgression of the sacred is exhilarating 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 and we thereby assume the role of being gods.” Desecration is how we communicate authenticity, perhaps the most important value for the modern self.

This entire project has backfired. Let’s hear from Carl about why.

In This Episode:
00:00 – Carl Trueman on desecration and the modern crisis of humanity
02:30 – Why write another book after The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self?
04:22 – Why the sexual revolution sits at the center of the story
06:11 – Cultural Christianity, conversion, and why truth still matters
10:30 – Nietzsche’s “madman” and the collapse of moral meaning
12:56 – Authenticity, evangelism, and the uphill battle against expressive individualism
18:23 – Do the revolutions of modernity actually deliver what they promise?
21:04 – Genetic selection, artificial wombs, and the moral vacuum of tech culture
27:29 – Social acceleration, anxiety, and the instability of modern life
30:23 – Technology, human limits, and the need for a normative view of humanity
35:58 – Assisted suicide, autonomy, and why stories matter more than abstractions
41:53 – The transgender movement, fairness, and transhumanism
45:44 – Why Christian nationalism is not the answer
49:40 – Creed, cult, code, congregational singing, and hospitality as a plan of consecration
55:53 – Outro