Book Review: Classical Theology and the Modern Mind by Carl R. Trueman
Classical Theology for the Modern Mind Carl R. Trueman. Crossway, 2026. Paperback, 96pp.
As someone who has been both an advocate of historic retrieval, as well as someone who has become increasingly mindful of the theological novelties that have emerged within nineteenth- and, particularly, twentieth-century evangelicalism, I am always on the lookout for short and accessible titles that I can pass on to those beginning to wrestle with these matters. Carl Trueman’s Classical Theology and the Modern Mind fits this need remarkably well.
Too often, instead of looking backwards to the rich theological inheritance that we have received, we reach instinctively for new formulations that better fit our immediate sensibilities. In doing so, we have not only neglected the very categories and grammar bequeathed to us by the church, but have also frequently failed to recognise the social, philosophical, and theological undercurrents that have shaped the questions we are confronted with in the first place. As Trueman puts it, there is today ‘a general cultural disposition that disparages the importance of history as a source of positive wisdom’ (p. 4).
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Trueman has written this particular primer. A great deal of his recent work has concerned the importance of creedal and confessional theology, historical consciousness, as well as the ways in which modern anthropology has shaped Christian thought. His recent work, Crisis of Confidence, has served as a worthy successor to The Creedal Imperative, and this brief volume brings many of those concerns into direct conversation with the contemporary retrieval of classical Christian theology.
Over a brisk seventy-odd pages, Trueman begins by mapping the erosion of classical theology within modern Protestantism, whilst recognising the present revival of interest as welcome and ‘surely overdue’ (p. 1). One of his more important observations is that many Christians have continued formally to subscribe to historic confessions without adequately understanding either their theological background or the meaning which their authors intended their terminology to convey.
That is not an insignificant problem. Indeed, I would argue that this historical detachment goes some way towards explaining how twentieth-century Reformed and evangelical theology could generate positions on God and Christ that sit uneasily, and sometimes quite obviously outside, the broad theological consensus of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Trueman notes that ‘the principle of “Scripture alone,” divorced from the actual theological methods of the Reformers, can foster a radical biblicism’ (p. 6).
And therein lies, perhaps, one of the persistent ironies of modern evangelicalism. Sola Scriptura can be invoked in a manner that is quite foreign to those who originally championed it.
Indeed, the Reformers did not believe Scripture needed to be supplemented by another source of divine revelation. Scripture alone was, and remains, the only infallible rule of faith. However, while this was never understood to require the exegete to approach the Bible as an historical tabula rasa, as though the highest expression of fidelity were somehow the individual believer armed with an English Bible and sufficiently strong opinions. The modern autonomous individual can easily become the functional arbiter of orthodoxy while simultaneously believing himself merely to be faithfully ‘following the Bible’.
This wider tendency is reinforced by what Trueman calls evangelicalism’s susceptibility to the tastes of the culture: ‘The culture of theologically conservative evangelical Protestantism typically resonates with this wider antihistorical tendency’ (p. 5).
This is a problem that has become particularly acute when the grammar of both patristic and medieval theology is itself placed under suspicion. Terms such as simplicity, immutability, impassibility, nature, person, and relation see themselves easily dismissed because of the sheer crime of not appearing verbatim in the biblical text. And to the modern reader, ‘talk of immutability and impassibility does not sit well with the God who walks in the garden of Eden, is a consuming fire, and repents that he made Saul King’ (p. 7).
But the question is not whether these terms appear in Scripture, but as to whether they faithfully articulate what Scripture teaches. The same is true, after all, of the term Trinity. Nicene theology emerged not because fourth-century bishops developed an unfortunate fondness for the Greek metaphysical Kool-Aid, but, rather, because rival accounts of God and Christ proved incapable of doing justice to the biblical material.
Alongside the charming challenge of biblicism stands pragmatism. If the former asks only, ‘Where is that word in the Bible?’, the latter asks, ‘What works?’ Theology becomes subordinate to perceived immediate need. Doctrine is to be assessed, or subordinated, by therapeutic usefulness, ministry effectiveness, or experiential resonance rather than by whether it speaks truthfully of God.
Here too, Trueman observes that ‘Evangelicalism, with its experiential emphasis, is vulnerable to these and other tastes of society’ (p. 10). Even our worship has reflected the transition. Classical Christian theology, once embedded in the hymns regularly sung by ordinary Christians, has frequently been displaced by ‘songs of far less theological depth’ (p. 11). ‘All of this quietly shapes the Christian imagination in ways antithetical to the great creedal doctrines of the church’ (p. 11). The importance of historical retrieval therefore becomes clear. The Reformation cannot properly be understood as an attempt to create Christianity anew.
As Trueman writes:
‘Despite the dramatic ecclesiastical ruptures that the Reformation represented and the ecclesiastical discontinuity with the past that it involved, Reformation Protestantism was not a break with the classical theology of the past but rather a continuation of it, even as new issues, such as justification, required further confessional elaboration and formulation’ (p. 13).
This is particularly important for how we understand the Reformed tradition itself. As I have argued in my own writings elsewhere, the remarkable theological unity observable across many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed confessions did not simply emerge because everyone just so happened to independently read the relevant biblical passages in precisely the same way. They shared the principia theologiae, inherited categories, exegetical traditions, and assumptions concerning how theology was to be done. Confessionalisation was, in many respects, the crystallised ecclesiastical expression of this common theological method.
So too, the Reformers were not ahistorical; instead, they ‘read deeply in the fathers, drew positively on the language of classical doctrinal paradigms, and constructed their theology in careful and respectful dialogue with the past’ (p. 15). This is why, for us too, retrieval must also involve doing history well. Trueman pushes against overly pristine narratives of doctrinal development that dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography, particularly older presentations of Nicene theology which drew excessively neat divisions between Greek and Latin approaches to the Trinity. The work of scholars such as Lewis Ayres and Khaled Anatolios, as Trueman notes, has demonstrated just how complex that landscape actually was. Simplistic East-versus-West constructions have sometimes provided supposed historical justification for modern innovations, including forms of social Trinitarianism and its EFS offshoot, which have considerably less patristic precedent than their proponents have imagined.
The underlying point is that ‘Evangelical theology’s tendency in some of its expressions toward a bare biblicism and away from serious engagement with the intellectual history of the church has left it vulnerable to unwittingly holding positions that are basically incompatible with both the Nicene faith and its later appropriation and reiteration by the Reformers and their immediate successors’ (p. 22).
Chapter Two presses the confessional consequences of this argument. The great debates between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries took place against a ‘shared background of Nicene Trinitarianism’ (p. 23). Augsburg, Westminster, the Belgic Confession, the Second Helvetic Confession and, importantly for Baptists, the Second London Baptist Confession all consciously locate themselves within this catholic inheritance.
This matters because confessions are not collections of unrelated theological propositions. Their doctrines interlock. Pull significantly upon the doctrine of God, and eventually one discovers that Christology, providence, creation, anthropology, Scripture and salvation have all begun moving with it.
Trueman is therefore right when he states:
‘One cannot, for example, complain about those who deviate from classic confessional positions on Scripture while simultaneously doing exactly the same thing with classic confessional views of God and Christ’ (p. 25).
And his warning deserves to be heard:
‘Downgrades on Trinitarianism, simplicity, immutability, and impassability are all as lethal as downgrades on Scripture and revelation in the long run for orthodoxy’ (p. 26).
This also requires Protestants to abandon the caricature of the medieval period as a theological wasteland situated conveniently between Augustine and Luther. The popular phrase, Post tenebras lux, had never been intended to mean that nothing worthwhile happened for a millennium. Indeed, Trueman is particularly useful here in showing the Reformation’s relationship to medieval scholastic theology. The work of Heiko Oberman, David Steinmetz, Richard Muller and others has made increasingly difficult the older mythology of complete rupture. There were profound disagreements with medieval Catholicism, certainly, but to deny the considerable methodological, exegetical and theological continuity is to create a deviant history that serves no one.
There is no better test case here than Thomas Aquinas. One should not need to become a Thomist in order to recognise how profoundly Thomas influenced the language and categories later employed in Protestant confessions. Trueman presses this point by observing that Westminster’s description of God as ‘without body, parts, or passions’ simply cannot be understood apart from the theological tradition in which Thomas contributed. Trueman, again rightly, notes that it is the Second London Baptist Confession which makes the connection more explicit still in its language concerning the divine essence, relative properties, as well as personal relations.
Yet Trueman does not treat retrieval as antiquarianism, simply doing so because an old theologian said it. For Protestants, the confessions provide an ecclesiastically received framework within which retrieval takes place. And, above them, Scripture remains the norming norm by which every subordinate standard is itself judged. This distinction remains important. Confessions do not displace Scripture, but they should not be vulnerable to reshaping whenever their historic theology becomes inconvenient. If we believe a confession is wrong, and believe Scripture warrants that conclusion, intellectual honesty demands that we say so rather than claiming subscription whilst quietly redefining its terminology.
Trueman then turns from the historical and confessional significance of classical theology to its practical consequences. Chapter 4 addresses its pastoral usefulness, particularly the modern assumption that an immutable and impassible God must therefore be distant from human suffering (pp. 47–49). Drawing upon J. Todd Billings’ reflections on suffering through terminal cancer, Trueman argues almost the reverse: what the sufferer ultimately needs is not a God who is himself overcome by suffering, but one whose covenant faithfulness, goodness and power remain unshaken by it (pp. 50–53). Classical Christology allows us simultaneously to affirm that the Son truly suffered according to his human nature whilst denying that God must become passible in his divine nature in order genuinely to sympathise with us (pp. 51–52). Indeed, a God who suffers in the manner of his creatures may initially have some therapeutic appeal, but, as Trueman observes, ultimately offers little comfort if he too is subject to the instability from which we require deliverance (p. 53).
This naturally carries into Trueman’s treatment of worship in Chapter 5. Classical theology historically developed within the worshipping life of the church, rather than as an abstract academic exercise detached from it (pp. 55–57). And what we believe about God necessarily shapes how we approach him. Trueman contrasts the casual familiarity encouraged by a God conceived largely in human terms with the reverence, wonder and humility that follow from contemplating the infinite and incomprehensible Creator (pp. 59–64). This is one of the more important strengths of the book: classical theology does not reduce God to a philosophical abstraction but guards precisely against reducing him to a creature writ large. As Trueman concludes, ‘To recover classical theology is not to recover an approach to an academic discipline: it is to recover the great rich tradition of what it means to be a worshipping community’ (p. 68).
And this is ultimately why I found this little volume so worthwhile. Its brevity necessarily means that it is a primer rather than a comprehensive defence of simplicity, immutability, impassibility, or the other doctrines it touches upon. Yet as a primer it is excellent. Trueman explains why classical theology belongs naturally within confessional Protestantism, exposes some of the historical naivety behind modern biblicism, and, importantly, refuses to leave these doctrines in the seminar room. The God confessed at Nicaea and Chalcedon, and subsequently within Westminster and the Second London Baptist Confession, is the God whom the church worships, trusts in suffering, and proclaims in the gospel.
For that reason, this is a book I expect to recommend often and one I can readily place into the hands of someone beginning to ask why doctrines such as simplicity, immutability and impassibility matter. For confessional Protestants, their recovery is not really the adoption of something new, but the recovery of something we should never have allowed ourselves to forget.
