Trueman and Rome: Co-belligerency Against the LGBTQ+ Fails to Uphold the Gospel
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By Jonathan Peters
The Napa Institute (NI) exists to “empower … Catholic leaders to renew the Church and transform the culture.” As their website states: “We believe that now is the time to advance the re-evangelization of the United States. Yet many yearn for the foundation they need to advance Christ’s mission. At the same time, leaders and benefactors yearn to support Catholic causes. The Napa Institute acts as a conduit so all can courageously and eloquently defend our faith in the public square.” NI seeks to accomplish this goal by providing conferences, pilgrimages, and events worldwide.
For their 2021 conference, NI invited Carl Trueman, a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In his lecture at the institute, Trueman declared that “Christianity is a dogmatic religion. On that much the greatest theologians across the Christian spectrum agree, from [the Protestant] Martin Luther to [the Catholic] John Henry Newman” (emphasis added).
After the lecture, the senior editor of the National Catholic Register (NCR) interviewed Trueman and asked how he, a Presbyterian minister, became a keynote speaker at NI. Trueman answered (emphasis added):
Over the last couple of years, I’ve developed good friendships with Catholics.
There are significant differences between us over things that we believe. But as we move into this new phase of cultural engagement, or cultural war, I see significant common ground between myself and my Catholic friends both on the affirmation of the supernatural against those who deny it and on the need to stand in opposition to the dominant mores of the cultural elites—two issues that divide me from my liberal Protestant peers.
Recently, another Catholic organization, the Leonine Forum (LF), asked Trueman to speak at one of their sessions in Washington D.C. At the conclusion of his lecture, Trueman was asked: “Why are you not a Catholic?” After all, the inquirer noted Trueman “expressed love [in his presentation] for the early Church Fathers, admiration for Thomas Aquinas, and an approach to ethics that resonated with [the late Pope] John Paul II’s theology of the body.”
On December 12, Trueman explained his response in a First Things article (emphasis added throughout):
It’s hard to answer such a question in brief compass at the end of a lecture. Many issues are important in my commitment to Reformed Protestantism: authority, salvation, the nature of the ministry, and the significance of sacraments are just a few of the more obvious. And while I am open to the criticism that Protestantism hasn’t given Mary her due, I believe the Catholic Church has given her a significance that is well beyond anything the Bible would countenance. But above all, at the current moment, Catholicism doesn’t appeal to me because of the man at the top: Pope Francis. In my answer, I did try to be respectful of my audience, but I could not help but observe that the present pope seems to be nothing more than a liberal Protestant in a white papal robe. And as a Protestant, I am acutely aware of the damage such people do.
Furthermore, he said:
I have numerous friends who have swum the Tiber over the last decades, mainly for intellectual or aesthetic reasons. Ironically, the intellectual heft of historic Catholicism and its enviable aesthetic achievements seem to be the very things that the pope regards with indifference. And both of these seem to connect to that telltale sign that always presages trouble in Christian circles: a loss of the transcendent in favor of the immanent.
Trueman concluded:
Confessional, orthodox Protestants should take no satisfaction in Rome’s increasing resemblance to the old enemy of liberal Protestantism. Rome still has the money and institutional weight to make a difference in these great struggles over what it means to be human. If Rome equivocates and falls on these issues, the world will become colder and harsher for all of us. To quote Elrond, our list of allies grows thin. And Pope Francis is not reversing that process.
Orthodox Protestants should be greatly disturbed by Trueman’s actions listed above. They certainly should abhor theological liberalism and moral perversion, but this should not cause them to neglect their duty to stand against other false religions, with or without Pope Francis at the helm (Rom. 16:17-18, Gal. 1:6-9, 2 Tim. 3:1-9, 1 John 4:1-3, Jude 3-4). Traditionally, Catholicism has had a better view than liberalism on matters like the Trinity, the person of Christ, and supernaturalism, but as Kevin Bauder has noted, Rome’s “grasp of both the nature of spiritual authority and the application of salvation are [still] fatally flawed.”1 Unfortunately, Trueman has downplayed these facts and promoted an unbiblical ecumenicity with culturally conservative Catholics to fight against the LGBTQ+ community.
His friends’ conversions to Rome and the NCR and LF inquiries should have been wake-up calls to Trueman. His presence on Romanist platforms, his assistance in Catholic education, his compliments of Rome,2 and his failure to clearly preach against Rome’s soul-damning theology, have compromised the gospel and caused confusion. He has condemned one enemy of Christ (a progressive pope) while granting Christian fellowship to others (traditional Catholics). He has therefore “unequally yoked [himself] together with unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:14) and become a “partaker of [their] evil deeds” (2 John 9-11). Protestants must be acutely aware of the damage such people do.
Notes
1 Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism, eds. Andrew David Naselli and Collin Hansen (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 33. Mark Sidwell has also argued that orthodox Protestants should “not associate with a movement on the basis that it is not as far from the truth as some other movement. Rather we [should] associate with those persons and movements that actively hold to the truth.” The Dividing Line: Understanding and Applying Biblical Separation (Greenville, SC: BJU Press, 1998), 150.
2 See also Trueman’s article, “What Protestants Can Learn from Catholics” (emphasis added):
I confess to a deep envy of Catholic intellectual life among many of its brightest young people, and the vibrancy of this is evident in several of the interviews. For example, at the University of Pennsylvania, Dan Cheely runs the remarkable Collegium Institute, offering a rich program of thoughtful lectures and seminars to students. The D.C.-based Leonine Forum provides thoughtful mentoring for those whose talents may well take them to places of cultural influence. And behind many of these programs lies an impressive and generous network of Catholic philanthropists.
Jonathan Peters serves as an administrative assistant at Reformation Bible Church and Harford Christian School (Darlington, MD).
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What resources would you recommend that are accessible and understandable for the average church member?
In my experience, the ‘average church member’ in a suburb in a Bible college town is quite different from the average church member in a rural church an hour or more away from a Baptist/baptistic Bible college.
When I taught an adult SS series through church history, I used as a ‘textbook,’ a really short book with a lot of pictures. It wasn’t ‘dumbed down’; it was just streamlined and super easy to read.
I don’t think it was Bruce Shelley’s Church History in Plain Language (https://amzn.to/42bb7Nh) but something along those lines. I supplemented the teaching with things I pulled from several other books and wove in a lot of history of doctrine, which the ‘textbook’ we used didn’t really address much to speak of.
I’ll see if I can dig up the title of that really short, friendly book we used.
Edit: It might have been Christian History Made Easy https://amzn.to/4acMBgX (Yes, pretty sure. I didn’t care for the video series—though I don’t remember why. Maybe it moved too slow and didn’t interface with the Bible enough. For SS series, I wanted to be in the Bible every week also, so I linked major features of the period to Scripture themes that related to it, and we always spent time on that, including practical applications for our times.)
My assumption was that my audience was not very interested in the topic and also most didn’t have much background in it. (It was a pretty well informed assumption.) So I wanted more than anything else, to begin to plant seeds of interest in the topic. You can always do a deeper dive later if you get them interested.
Edit: Found some of my notes from that series. Used a lot of PowerPoints. Debunked Trail of Blood at the end of the series. At least a little. Not sure how far I went into that.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I've taught church history for a series of Sunday School classes using my seminary class notes as a basic framework and writing my own notes. I'm teaching it a second time right now in our Wed night study. We look at as many original documents as possible: 1 Clement, The Didache, Ignatius' letters, The Shepherd of Hermas, etc.
"Yes" on teaching church history to congregants! Growing up in small-town, independent fundamental Baptist churches, I didn't learn about church history until middle and high school at a non-denominational evangelical school. Wisely, the school included a church history course in the social studies/history curriculum. It was then I realized that people with different convictions and preferences from my upbringing were still true followers of Christ, and I'd be sharing heaven with them.
What would have been different if our end-time charts and conferences had been replaced with old-time charts and education about those who have preceded us in following Christ?
I realized that people with different convictions and preferences from my upbringing were still true followers of Christ, and I’d be sharing heaven with them.
Some are surprised when I tell them I learned this at BJU. There were guys in the dorms who were Presbyterian and a few other things I don’t recall now. Then there were some international students I got to know a bit, and they had a pretty different perspective on a lot of things.
But before that, my high school Bible teacher got me interested in Francis Schaeffer and some other authors I don’t recall.
So in addition to the church history, we all need relationships with Christian thinkers outside our circles (books) and Christian people outside our circles (other churches, ministries).
What happens, among other things, is that the real points of disagreement come into focus, and this is important. Counterintuitively, we tend to think acknowledging points of agreement is losing the argument. It feels like losing. But it’s not, if the goal is truth rather than winning a fight. Well, if the goal is winning the fight for truth rather than winning the fight for a label or tribe or just myself to feel superior.
But ironically, sort of, I really think that “winning” even for tribe and label happens more when we get the actual points of disagreement clear and concede or table all the rest. It’s just more persuasive in the long run.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Ligonier Ministries has a video series on church history that is fairly easy to follow. They used to sell it as a DVD set, but now it is available free online.
A Survey of Church History, Parts 1-6 by W. Robert Godfrey | Ligonier Ministries
What I find interesting is that I have had reformed friends who were really big on quoting the church fathers and putting more stock into them than the Bible, but this reformed series by Ligonier shows that although we have a lot to be grateful for with the early church leaders, there are some powerful reasons why they got a lot of things wrong as well.
my high school Bible teacher got me interested in Francis Schaeffer and some other authors I don’t recall.
This reminded me that in that same non-denominational Christian school (which was sponsored by a church that had been pastored by one of the founding fathers of the PCA) was where I was first exposed in Bible classes to Francis Schaeffer ("True Spirituality"), A.W. Tozer ("Knowledge of the Holy"), Paul Little (can't remember title, but maybe "How to Give Away Your Faith"), Josh McDowell ("More than a Carpenter") and some others. It was a great kindness of the Lord to expose me to the richness of Christ's Body.
And even though much of my experience at BJU was with people of the same IFB church background, I appreciated and am still a strong advocate for the fact that BJU is a non-denominational school. Not to pull this thread in a different direction, but I hope that at least some future board members are attendees at non-Baptist churches.
>>And even though much of my experience at BJU was with people of the same IFB church background, I appreciated and am still a strong advocate for the fact that BJU is a non-denominational school.<<
I had the opposite but similar experience coming to BJU from an independent Methodist background. I certainly saw my share of a few of the >95% IFB students telling me my church and beliefs weren’t biblical, etc. However, by-and-large, my interactions with students outside my orbit was very enriching. I also got to know some of the non-Baptist faculty when doing some of the various projects for the Bible classes. BJU was on my college list because of the fact they were non-denominational, with BJ senior having been a Methodist.
Since I didn’t see a solid independent Methodist church in the Greenville area that was on the school’s approved church list, I tried a number of different churches, but eventually settled on Heritage Bible Church for the remainder of my time at the school. Since that time, as I have lived in the south, most of the churches I have attended have been Baptist with one Bible church. Currently, I’m in a Baptist church. I still don’t consider myself really a Baptist, but since the differences between most of those churches and my home church were mostly on secondary issues, the adjustment has never been difficult.
Dave Barnhart
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