Paul Grimmond catches up with Carl Trueman, Academic Dean and Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary, to chat about the local church, evangelism, ministry training, evangelicalism, the uniqueness of Scripture and Anglicanism (MP3).
Archives: carl-trueman
Sticking it to the man
Up front
It is almost a given today that history is oppressive. That is why there has been so much hoo-ha about how it has been taught over the last 30 years. Everybody wants their say: if you’re a woman, you need a woman’s history; if you’re gay, you need a queer history; if you’re black, you need a black history, and so on and so forth. The making of many histories is itself a reflection of the priorities and, on occasion, the pathologies of modern society. How long, one wonders, before we get a history written from the perspective of Frank Sinatra impersonators, ginger haired people and compulsive hand-washers? (more…)
Learning from The Pretenders, or The case for church history, Part 3
Thought
As a middle-aged git, an aspiring baldy man, someone as uncool as you can get and a rock dinosaur, much of my wisdom is drawn from song lyrics from bands that most people under the age of 35 have never heard of. Thus, in this final blog post, I want to make the case for church history with reference to a line in a song by The Pretenders (called, I believe, ‘Hymn to Her’): “Some things change, some stay the same”. It’s not too profound, I guess, but it’s a critical element in the historical task, given that the very possibility of history requires some analogy between the present world in which the historian lives and the past that is being studied. Were they identical, history would be pointless, for the past would be the present; were they utterly different, history would be impossible, for there would be no way of analyzing, categorizing or describing the past. No, for history to be possible, there must be things about my world that are the same as those in the past.
Sticking it to the man, or The case for church history, Part 2
Thought
It is almost a given today that history is oppressive. That is why there has been so much hoo-ha about how it is taught over the last 30 years. Everybody wants their say: if you’re a woman, you need a woman’s history; if you’re gay, you need a queer history; if you’re black, you need a black history, and so on and so forth. The making of many histories is itself a reflection of the priorities and, on occasion, the pathologies of modern society. How long, one wonders, before we get a history written from the perspective of Frank Sinatra impersonators, ginger haired people and compulsive hand-washers?
The theological importance of criminal profiling, or The case for church history, Part 1
Thought
It is a great honour and pleasure, being invited to contribute a few guest blog posts to The Sola Panel in advance of my forthcoming visit to Australia. Given the fact that a fool is generally known by his much speaking, I have decided to focus my posts on what I know best—church history, but not in some tedious here-are-a-few-names-and-dates-manner; rather, I want to argue for the importance of church history as a vital discipline for theological education, both in seminary training and in the day-to-day life of the church. Those who do not know history may not be quite as doomed to repeat its mistakes as the famous proverb would imply, but understanding how it can be useful might yet help one or two of us to avoid some embarrassing potholes, or it may just save us from having to reinvent the wheel all over again, fun as such reinvention undoubtedly is (once watching the grass grow and the paint dry has lost its appeal, that is).