The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity - Hardcover

Trueman, Carl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593713850 ISBN 13: 9780593713853

Verlag: Sentinel, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, an account of how the rejection of the imago Dei is unraveling Western culture and how we might recover what it means to be truly human

As church attendance falls, suicide rates climb, and birth rates plummet, Christian pundits have suggested disenchantment and the loss of tradition are to blame for our spiritual malaise. But what if the problem is both much simpler and much more serious?

In The Desecration of Man, Carl Trueman argues that modern man's crisis of meaning stems from a rejection of a simple fact—that he was made in the image of God. Unmoored from the basic moral fact that secures human dignity, we violently disrespect our own minds and bodies through abortion, pornography, casual sex, gender transitions, and more—and in this disrespect we blaspheme against God himself, with devastating practical and spiritual consequences.

With gentle pastoral wisdom, deep insight into church history, and an impressive command of philosophical genealogies, The Desecration of Man speaks to those troubled by the spiritual sickness of our time and points toward consecration to a God who is alive and loving as a solution. The Early Church triumphed over Rome because it offered life in place of death. It is time for modern Christians to offer the same kind of vision.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and theological studies at Grove City College, a visiting fellow at the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government at the University of Notre Dame, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. An esteemed church historian, he is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and Strange New World.

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What Is Man?

A few years ago, I was on an influential British podcast, Triggernometry, hosted by atheists. The hosts were both strong advocates of traditional liberal values-particularly freedom of speech-and disturbed by some of the new progressive ideas that were threatening these. They had an important question: Is it possible to build a moral society without a belief in God?

The question was not rhetorical nor a setup for a "Gotcha" moment. It was genuine. They were wrestling with what they saw as the increasing moral chaos of society and the weakness of those answers that rest upon some form of pragmatism or utilitarianism. I did not understand them to be asking the question in order to find proof for God's existence ("If moral order, then necessarily God?") but out of genuine interest in whether I thought atheism was strong enough to support the humanistic values to which they themselves were committed (many of which I myself share).

It is no wonder that our age is marked by a deep and often disturbing sense of cultural vertigo and by our inability to find anywhere solid to stand to assess the moral and political landscape. Once-unquestioned social goods-for example, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, parental rights-are under huge pressure. Moral norms are in a constant state of flux, outdated as soon as they are established. Yesterday's heroic champion of gay marriage who thinks biological sex is important has become today's transphobic bigot. Who twenty years ago could have predicted the acrimonious split within radical feminist circles over who exactly qualifies as a woman? Even the value of life itself has become questioned, with many Western democracies legalizing assisted suicide. Such a move would have been impossible to imagine fifty years ago. This development has also enjoyed considerable cross-party consensus, highlighting that the big issues of our day often do not fit comfortably into the traditional political taxonomy of right versus left. Indeed, the pressure on what it means to be human does not just come from the trans lobby and the queer theorists favored by the left. The emergence of interest in eugenics and transhumanism on the right is also emblematic of this cultural moment.

In answering the Triggernometry hosts, I commented that I could not imagine every possible world and so maybe there might be one where a moral order could be built without reference to the divine, but that it would certainly be more difficult to do in an atheistic context. While I did not elaborate at the time, I would here add that the problem would be compounded by any such moral code being unstable, having nothing beyond itself to justify its precepts. Morality would degenerate into a function of social taste. If not quite mob rule, it would hardly be more predictable than that.

The reason for this is the question that lies behind the question. When atheists ask, "Can we build a moral society without God?" they are not just inquiring about the values that such a world might reflect. They are responding not to a confluence of unrelated crises, but to a general anthropological conundrum. To ask, "What is moral?" is to ask, "How should man behave?" And to answer that question one needs to know what "man" is. Is human life to have a particular goal or goals? Are these shared by all human beings or are they created or chosen by particular communities or even individuals? Do we define ourselves, or is who and what we are to some extent determined, by the fact that we all share something called "human nature" involving a given set of expectations for our behavior that constitute what we call morality?

The idea that to be human involves a given moral structure has a long pedigree. Philosophers from the ancient world onward have seen human life as having a moral shape. For Aristotle, the ideal was the political man, engaged in the public life of the polis. The opposite, the man concerned only with his own private affairs (literally, "the idiotic man") was inferior and not what a human being should be. For Kant, human beings are persons and must not be treated or treat others as things. They are subjects not objects. The man who treats another, say his wife, as a thing dehumanizes her and thereby dehumanizes himself. Aristotle and Kant may have differed, but both saw the question of man as bound up with the question of morality, of how man chooses to behave.

The question "Can we build a moral society without God?" could therefore be rephrased as "Can we have an understanding of man as a moral being without reference to God?" Or more succinctly, "What is man?" Is he a creature that is supposed to behave in certain ways that are, in a sense, given to him by his nature-for Christians, a God-given nature?

What Is Man?

To ask the question "What is man?" is to reveal the staggering nature of what it means to be human even in advance of any answer. No other creature on the face of the planet can ask such a question of itself. No amoeba pauses to reflect on the nature of amoebic existence. And as close to human beings as they are in many ways, there is no evidence to suggest that chimpanzees and gorillas ever meditate upon the meaning of their existence. Only man has the capacity to pose the question about his own nature and significance. Philosophers may struggle to define what exactly the term "self-consciousness" means, but there is no doubt that human beings experience something that corresponds to that term in a manner unknown to any other type of living being.

The question matters because it shapes everything. Common everyday language indicates this. When we see on the news a report of some horrific act, we might comment that such a thing is "inhuman," indicating that it contravenes what we consider to be moral behavior that should be normative for all human beings. If the report is of an act of altruistic kindness, we may perhaps respond that it "restores our faith in human nature," meaning that it embodies some quality or characteristic that we admire and regard as a normative aspirational moral goal for us all. How we understand human nature, how we answer the question "What is man?"-whether we have deeply reflected upon the issue or simply possess intuitions about it-shapes our moral vision of life and guides us in our attitude to others and to the world around us.

But the question has implications beyond morality. It also speaks to the deepest cry of the human heart. Who am I and do I or my life have any significance? That is the same question posed in a pointedly personal way. Who of us has not at some point asked that? Albert Camus perhaps put the issue most dramatically when he identified suicide as the key question of philosophy upon which everything else depends. One has to first decide to continue living before one can ask any other question. But one does not need to have Camus's philosophical acumen to have faced the same basic issue in one's own life: Is anything I do worthwhile? Why should I get out of bed in the morning? Who am I-indeed, is there an "I" at the core of my being?-when I seem to play so many different roles (e.g., husband, father, employee, neighbor, citizen, consumer) in my life? And does any of it count for anything in the grand scheme of existence? Why bother with anything at all? All are applied personal variations on that single question: What is man?

When the Triggernometry team asked me about the possibility of building a moral society without God, they were rephrasing this deeper query. It is no surprise, then, to find precisely this question posed in the Bible. The Old Testament psalmist asks in Psalm 8: "What is man, that you are mindful of him?" The "you" here is, of course, the God of Israel, and in setting the question up in this way, the psalmist indicates that for him the question of man and his significance cannot be...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Sentinel
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593713850
• ISBN 13: 9780593713853
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland