Cancelling the Trueman Show

Examining "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" [Pt.7]

[Continued from Pt.6]

§VII. Introduction

Trueman’s corrective to what he calls the modern (i.e. contemporary) self is the self of postmodernism as mediated by communitarian and communitarian-esque thinkers. It is a social construction constituted by dialogical engagements within the social body as a whole, as well as within institutional bodies within the overall social body (e.g. the family, the university, and the church. While Trueman presents this idea of the self as a corrective to the “expressive individualism” which he identifies as the source of identity politics in general, and sexual identity politics in particular, he is doing so against reason and Scripture. In this last article, we will first demonstrate that identity politics does not have its roots in individualism of any variety but in collectivism. We will then offer a biblical corrective to many of Trueman’s errors regarding the human self. We will close by making some observations about the reason why Trueman’s book has found acceptance among not only the openly communitarian conservatives, but also Reformed and Roman Catholic conservatives.¹

§VIIa. Trueman’s Cartesian Error

When we first looked into RTMS, we began by trying to understand the meaning of the word modern. We gradually came to see that Trueman’s opposition is not to the contemporary self as it actually exists but to the modernist self who is marked by psychological and, therefore, rational primacy, expressivism, and individualism. We saw that Trueman’s opposition is rooted in his acceptance of communitarianism — either in whole or in large part — and not in the findings of an actual genealogy of the self. What needs to be underscored now is the fact that Trueman’s identification of the individualist self as the source of identity politics is not merely ahistorical and incorrect, but also serves to exacerbate the very problems with which his readers are concerned.

As we noted elsewhere, the whereas the self of modernism was individualistic, the self of postmodernism was viewed as an emergent phenomenon, a social construction whose existence is completely dependent upon the social body. In postmodernism, the individual “I” has no true isolated existence. Rather, in keeping with the proto-postmodernist thinking of men like Hegel, Marx, and Freud, postmodern thinkers viewed the individual as social construct reducible to historically traceable fragments. The individual is merely a part of the machinery of human social life (in the case of the proto-postmodernists like Hegel, Marx, and Freud), or a part of the chaotic flow of human social life (in the case of the postmodernists).

Ironically, the very thing which Trueman and the communitarians criticize Descartes for — i.e. identifying himself as an autonomous individual — because of his apparent lack of linguistic awareness is mirrored in their own thinking. For in their belief that the contemporary abundance of assertions like “‘I have lived a lie’ […] ‘Society made me play a role that was not me’ [or] ‘I am finally free to be who I always have been inside’”² are indicative of “expressive individualism,” they are mistakenly attributing to a linguistic formality a psychological and philosophical reality that it simply lacks. This is the case for non-academics as well as academics.

Academically, while postmodern philosophers attacked the notion of the unified Catersian/modernist self, they did so from within the limitations of language. This led many of their peers to criticize their often perplexing and novel use of language and traditional concepts. As Gavin Rae explains —

Although it is true that poststructuralist writers are unlikely to win any praise for their writing style, a large part of this is due to the challenge that these writers set themselves; namely, to contest many of the foundational assumptions upon which much mainstream Western (political) philosophical thought is and has been based. To do so, they do not simply reconfigure pre-existing concepts, but go further by disrupting and undermining the concepts, categories and ways of thinking that have long dominated.³

The ways in which they explained away personal and individualist language differ from thinker to thinker. Deleuze and Guattari, for example, state that the language of “the self” or the “I”/“ego” plays an ordering function. They write —

Direct discourse is a detached fragment of a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage; but the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice. I always depend on a molecular assemblage of enunciation that is not given in my conscious mind, any more than it depends solely on my apparent social determinations, which combine many heterogeneous regimes of signs. Speaking in tongues. To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word. A schizophrenic said: "I heard voices say: he is conscious of life." In this sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic cogito, but it is a cogito that makes self-consciousness the incorporeal transformation of an order-word, or a result of indirect discourse. My direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse running through me, coming from other worlds or other planets.⁴

In a similar vein, the word “I” in Lacanian psychoanalysis⁵ is understood as a unifying term connecting an ideal representation of the self to what one actually experiences as a “self.”⁶ The individual’s use of the word “I” or “Mine” or “My,” therefore, signifies not a unity of the self but a disunity, a fragile and conflictual correspondence of the various psychosocial elements constitutive of an individual’s history. Simply put, an individual thinker or a body of thinkers using phraseology that sounds individualistic may not give us grounds for thinking that they are actually committed to a notion of individualism consonant with that of modernism.

§VIIb. Identity Politics & Shifting the Blame

This is important to underscore, seeing as in Trueman’s writing, as well as in the writings of other communitarians, there is an attempt to associate identity politics with classical liberalism, the modernist self, and, therefore, individualism. The reality of the situation is that identity politics is a collectivist response to the individualism of Enlightenment/Modernist thinking. Consequently, it is decidedly anti-individualist. Andrew Heywood explains —

Identity politics is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of political trends and ideological developments, ranging from ethnocultural nationalism and religious fundamentalism to second-wave feminism and pluralist multiculturalism... What all forms of identity politics nevertheless have in common is that they advance a political critique of liberal universalism. Liberal universalism is a source of oppression, even a form of cultural imperialism, in that it tends to marginalize and demoralize subordinate groups and peoples. It does this because, behind a façade of universalism, the culture of liberal societies is constructed in line with the values and interests of its dominant groups: men, whites, the wealthy and so on.⁷

As regards identity politics, then, those who speak of their individual authenticity and their “true self” are speaking within the context of an overarching collectivist ideology. As Heywood elsewhere notes —

Identity politics…seeks to challenge and overthrow oppression by reshaping a group's identity through what amounts to a process of politicocultural self-assertion. This reflects two core beliefs. The first is that group marginalization operates through stereotypes and values developed by dominant groups that structure how marginalized groups see themselves and are seen by others. These typically inculcate a sense of inferiority, even shame. The second belief is that subordination can be challenged by reshaping identity to give the group concerned a sense of pride and self-respect (for instance, ‘black is beautiful’ or ‘gay pride’). In seeking to reclaim a ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ sense of identity, identity politics expresses defiance against marginalization and disadvantage, and serves as a source of liberation. This is what gives identity politics its typically combative character and imbues it with psycho-emotional force.⁸

The assertion of special individual rights by proponents of identity politics, in other words, does not support the claim that “expressive individualism” is fueling the LGBTQIA+ movement’s growing momentum in the West. Rather, it underscores just how deeply radically collectivist postmodern assumptions about the self are rooted in the West.

It is common knowledge among academics that “the foundations for identity politics were laid by the postcolonial theories,”⁹ which are offshoots of postmodernism. It is also common knowledge among academics that postmodernism and, therefore, identity politics, seeks to “challenge and overturn the cultural dimension of imperial rule by establishing the legitimacy of non-western – and sometimes anti-western – political ideas and traditions,”¹⁰ of which the modernist/individualist self is part and parcel. How, then, can Trueman honestly point to identity politics as an indicator or symptom of expressive individualism?

As we noted in our first two articles, Trueman’s shifting of blame for contemporary evils on to the modernist self is an intentional move that allows him to present certain postmodern ideas as solutions to the cultural problems we are facing in the West, presenting them as if they are solutions that are consonant with the teaching of Scripture.¹¹ Trueman wants to present the notions of constructivism and collectivism in a positive light, and so he attributes the effects of constructivism and collectivism — namely identity politics in general, as well as sexual identity politics in particular — to modernism, individualism, and the primacy of reason.

Trueman’s communitarian view of the self as historico-materially embedded, and inextricably so, is echoed by identity politicians for whom the individual cannot be understood at all apart from his historical, material, social conditions. Heywood explains that

The central theme within all forms of multiculturalism [and, by extension, all forms of identity politics] is that individual identity is culturally embedded, in the sense that people largely derive their understanding of the world and their framework of moral beliefs from the culture in which they live and develop.¹²

Rather than giving us an accurate picture of the contemporary self, RTMS frames the modernist/individualist self for the crimes of the postmodern/constructivist/collectivist self. This is, in essence, a form of calling that which is good evil, and vice versa. For in identifying expressivism, the primacy of reason, individualism, and the self-as-soul as the root causes of our culture’s decay, Trueman is openly contradicting the Scriptures.

§VIIc. The Scriptural Self

Genesis 1 teaches us that God’s creative activity culminated in the creation of his sole image bearer — man.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.¹³

God identifies three categories of animate creatures — 1. vegetation, 2. animals, and 3. man. Man occupies a unique category as the imago dei.¹⁴ It is man’s likeness to God that sets him apart from all other creatures. That which is like God is not physical, but spiritual. Thus, man’s identity as the image of God is spiritual, not physical. This is the case within the broad scope of views regarding the imago dei,¹⁵ excluding the anthropomorphite view, seeing as they all correctly identify reason as having primacy over the actions of man.

Even after the Fall, we see that whether man’s remains the image of God — a rational, volitional, ethical mind/spirit. Thus, whether man’s actions are sinful or righteous, they are subsequent to, and dependent upon, his thinking. As Christ tells the Pharisees —

…the tree is known by its fruit…For out of the abundance of the heart [i.e. mind] the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil.¹⁶

It is in light of this truth that Scripture reminds Christians to guard our “heart [i.e. mind] with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”¹⁷ As God reveals his character and thought by means of external actions and the effects of his external actions,¹⁸ so too does man.

This means that the body, contrary to what Trueman has stated elsewhere,¹⁹ has been crafted by God to function instrumentally as the vehicle of man’s self-expression. Paul makes this same point, albeit implicitly, when he commands us —

Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.²⁰

This further implies that the body is not the self, for the self is that which is expressed via the instrumentality of the body. If the body were identical to the self, or if it were an essential element of the self, then men would cease to be selves upon death, which would result in two insurmountable problems. In the first place, it would render all claims about the resurrection of the dead false, for death would render men non-existent. If the body is essential to the self or identical with it, then in the eschaton men would not be resurrected but recreated. This is irrational, heretical, and clearly stands in contradiction to the words of Jesus, who clearly affirmed the continued conscious existence of the dead when he told the Sadducees—

“…as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.”²¹

Those who have died have not ceased to exist, even if their bodies have been reduced to the elements from which God initially crafted them. Ergo, their bodies are neither synonymous with their person/self nor an essential part of their person/self.

That this is the case is further evidenced by the book of Hebrews, in which the author calls the righteous who have died “spirits” who have been made “perfect.”²² The apostle John’s report in Revelation 6:9-11, moreover, confirms what the writer to the Hebrews states —

When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.²³

Whereas Trueman attributes the notion that the self is the soul to Descartes, we see from Scripture that this is what God clearly reveals to us about man.

Trueman’s opposition to identifying the self as the soul/spirit takes is given even clearer articulation in an interview with Jordan Wootten, wherein he states —

The Christian distinction between body and soul (to which I am committed) can tend to lead us to think of the soul as the real thing and the body simply a house or a machine which we inhabit. We need to stress the integral unity of body and soul, that we do not ‘inhabit’ our bodies as we might ‘inhabit’ a house; we are our bodies. This is very helpful when it comes to a matter such as trans ideology which is predicated on the notion that some people are born ‘in’ or ‘with’ the wrong body. No. If your body is an integral part of you, then it is nonsense to say it is the wrong body. ²⁴

This kind of thinking not only leads to the above mentioned contradictions, it is the very antithesis of what the Scriptures teach. Writing to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul states very plainly our bodies are a tent/house/dwelling/home from which we depart when we die, and which will be replaced in the resurrection. He writes —

…we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.²⁵

Over the span of ten verses, the apostle identifies the body as something which we inhabit as one inhabits a house. He explicitly states that we will be judged for the deeds done in the body, once again affirming that the self is not the body but the soul inhabiting the body.²⁶

This is also repeated by the apostle Peter in his second epistle, wherein he states —

Therefore I intend always to remind you of these qualities, though you know them and are established in the truth that you have. I think it right, as long as I am in this body [lit. tent], to stir you up by way of reminder, since I know that the putting off of my body [lit. tent] will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me. And I will make every effort so that after my departure you may be able at any time to recall these things.²⁷

Peter, in contradiction to Trueman, states that his body is indeed something which he inhabits as one inhabits a house. The body is not Peter, but a tent which Peter occupies and will soon “put off” as he makes his departure to be with Christ. There is perfect harmony between the words of Paul and those of Peter, and they both contradict Trueman’s claim that the body is the self, and that it is not something we inhabit as one inhabits a house.

We understand the desire to combat the evil idea that one can inhabit the “wrong body,” but contradicting Scripture in order to do so is neither righteous nor helpful. It is wicked, and it must be corrected. The correct teaching is that the self is the soul/spirit, not the body. However, our bodies are divinely formed for us individually by God in the womb. As David declares —

For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.²⁸

The body is created for the express purpose of the soul fulfilling its days laid out by the decree of the Sovereign God. Just as God created the heavens to be inhabited by flying creatures, the sea to be inhabited by aquatic creatures, and the land to be inhabited by earth bound creatures, he created the body to be inhabited by the soul. As it is written —

…the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.²⁹

The body is external evidence of what we are internally. It is identifiable as the man/the individual only in a representational sense, i.e. as the means whereby we come to know ourselves, as well as the means whereby others come to know us.

It is God who has united the spirit and the body. Consequently, just as breaking the union of man and woman constitutes a high act of rebellion against God who placed them together in an inseparable bond, so too does attempting to set the soul and the body in opposition to one another, whether in thought or in deed. What God has joined together man must not separate.

§VIId. A Collective Problem

While we have been talking specifically about Carl R. Trueman’s individual views expressed in RTMS, it is to be noted that he is not alone in denigrating individualism, undermining the primacy of reason, prioritizing the body over the soul, and prioritizing the collective over the individual. The anti-modernism of the postmodernists during their rise to prominence was paralleled by various theological scholars who viewed Protestantism as a Western deviation from the culturally ensconced teaching of Scripture. Consequently, Protestant teachings about the individual nature of salvation of the soul were viewed as deviations from the Hebraic emphasis on communalism, corporate salvation, and corporealism.

This movement away from orthodoxy saw the rise of heretical views of the covenant and salvation, as well as of the self, perhaps most notably with E.P. Sanders’ reinterpretation of the apostle Paul in his work Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Sadly, Sanders’ reinterpretation of Paul influenced many professedly Reformed theologians, eventually finding its way into Westminster Seminary (Philadelphia) through the heretical teachings of Norman Shepherd and N.T. Wright.³⁰ Shepherd and Wright, in turn, influenced many Presbyterian pastors and theologians, including those who embraced the Auburn Avenue theology later known as the Federal Vision heresy.³¹

What is seen in this overall trajectory, therefore, is a movement that, under the pretense of being faithful to the cultural context of the Jewish writers of Scripture and faithful to Reformed covenant theology, embraces ecclesiastical, familial, and political collectivism. This movement was strengthened by a resurgence of interest in the communitarian thinking of Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper,³² whose concept of sphere-sovereignty has much in common with the Roman Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity,³³ which, as it is based on Roman Catholic social theory, is collectivist (although it is presented as a “third way” between collectivism and individualism). This seems to account for the widespread reception of RTMS among many Roman Catholics and Reformed Christians — they, along with Trueman, embrace a collectivist social theory that favors the social body over and against the individual.

§VIIe. Concluding Remarks

In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, we do not encounter a true genealogy of the modern self. Instead, we are given a standard communitarian genealogy of the current problems facing the West, a genealogy which consistently identifies the best features of the modernist self and modernism in general as evils responsible for the state of cultural decay we are now witnessing. What is most pernicious about the book is that it presents the very roots of identity politics — namely anthropological constructivism and social collectivism — as its solution, and does so under the guise of helping Christians better the grasp the age in which we are living and, consequently, how we ought to respond to it.

One need only look out of one’s window to see that the poison that has seeped into all areas of our society is not individualism but collectivism. From identity politics, cancel culture, the rioting of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, the brazen support of Marxism, socialism, communism, social justice, communitarianism, and critical race theory — and this even among professing Christians and the universities they operate and attend — the problem is collectivism and anthropological constructivism.

John W. Robbins notes that before Max Weber’s publication of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism historians were nearly unanimously agreed upon the fact that Protestantism, along with its individualist emphasis, was to thank for the dignification of manual labor, the establishment and preservation of a higher moral code, and the freedom of the church from the grip of ecclesiastical and political tyranny.³⁴ Rather than being responsible for the decay of the West, individualism has been responsible for lifting it out of the dung heap of history created by political and religious tyrants who were more than happy to promote collectivism for the masses and free trade among their own elite class.

Today, we are seeing, hearing, and feeling the socio-economic effects of communitarian policies being put in place by self-appointed transnational “global leaders” who are declaring that we will own nothing and be happy, while simultaneously identifying themselves and their peers as “stakeholders” who have the right and responsibility to engage in free trade with one another. RTMS’ publication is timely, if one occupies that brahmanic class bent on world domination. However, to the Christian who understands that our current cultural collapse owes it origin to a rejection of all of what is good and true in the modernist notion of the self, RTMS is to be marked, avoided, and consigned to the ash heap of history.

-h.

1. In our last article, we briefly pointed out the connection between Eastern Orthodox social philosophy, communitarianism, Rod Dreher, and, therefore, Carl R. Trueman. See —

The Communitarian Option [Cont.]

2. Trueman, Carl R. “How Expressive Individualism Threatens Civil Society,” The Heritage Foundation, May 27, 2021, https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/report/how-expressive-individualism-threatens-civil-society.

3. Poststructuralist Agency: The Subject in Twentieth-Century Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 1.

4. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 83. (emphasis added) [N.B — Note the similarities here between the dialogical self that becomes via a process of intersubjective dialogue within a community, the self that Trueman believes is a corrective to the individualism he identifies as the source of many of the West’s current problems, especially as regards the LGBTQIA+ movement. Deleuze and Guattari, like Trueman, see the self as a product of the collective, something that becomes through a dialogical/dialectical process.]

5. Jacques Lacan was a poststructuralist psychoanalyst whose work is still widely influential.

6. For a detailed exploration of this see Dawson, Terry. “The Lacanian Subject and the Cartesian Cogito,” Acadamia, https://www.academia.edu/38827585/The_Lacanian_Subject_and_the_Cartesian_Cogito.

7. Political Ideologies: An Introduction 6th ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 451.(emphasis added)

8. The Palgrave Macmillan Politics 4th ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 160. (emphasis added)

9. ibid., 167.

10. ibid.

11. See —

The "Modern" or "Modernist" Self?

A False Equation

12. Heywood, Politics, 167.

13. Gen 1:26-30.

14. cf. 1st Cor 11:7a.

15. For a brief overview of these views see Tarus, David K. “Imago Dei in Christian Theology: Various Approaches,” Academia, https://www.academia.edu/26235190/IMAGO_DEI_IN_CHRISTIAN_THEOLOGY_THE_VARIOUS_APPROACHES.

16. Matt 12:33-35.

17. Prov 4:23.

18. cf. Ps 19 & Rom 1:18-20.

19. See Trueman, Carl R. “The Body is More than a Tool,” First Things, Oct 7, 2021, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/10/the-body-is-more-than-a-tool.

20. Rom 6:12-13. (emphasis added)

21. Matt 22:31-32.

22. Heb 12:23.

23. Emphasis added.

24. “How do we make sense of modern culture? An interview with Carl Trueman about "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self," The Ethics and Religious Liberty Center, May 18, 2021, https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/how-do-we-make-sense-of-modern-culture/. (emphasis added)

25. 2 Cor 5:1-10. (emphasis added)

26. This point is also made by the apostle implicitly in 2 Cor 12:1-4, where he states the following —

I must go on boasting. Though there is nothing to be gained by it, I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.

(emphasis added)

The “man” is here differentiated from “the body” from which he possibly departed. Note that not only is it the case that the man is the soul which possibly departed from the body, it is also the case that the soul has the capacity to learn/hear without the use of the body. This account of disembodied hearing parallels the account of the martyred saints’ disembodied speaking in Rev 6:9-11.

27. 2nd Pet 1:12-15. (emphasis added)

28. Ps 139:13-16. (emphasis added)

29. Gen 2:7.

30. See Robertson, O. Palmer. “The Current Justification Controversy,” The Trinity Foundation, https://www.trinityfou”;Robbins, John W. “False Shepherd — The Neo-Legalism of Norman Shepherd,” The Trinity Foundation, https://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=118; Clark, R. Scott. “Resources on Norman Shepherd,” R. Scott Clark, July 22, 2018, https://rscottclark.org/2018/07/resources-on-norman-shepherd/; DeBoer, Louis F. “The Theology of Norman Shepherd,” American Presbyterian Church, http://www.americanpresbyterianchurch.org/justification/the-theology-of-norman-shepherd/.

31. See Clark, R. Scott. “For Those Just Tuning In: What is the Federal Vision?,” The Heidelblog, Nov 8, 2013, https://heidelblog.net/2013/11/for-those-just-tuning-in-what-is-the-federal-vision/; Elliot, Paul M. “The Orthodox Presbyterian Cover-Up,” The Trinity Foundation, https://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=227; Robbins, John W. “The Theology of N.T. Wright,” The Trinity Foundation, https://www.trinitylectures.org/MP3/Wright_Collection13.mp3, and “The Auburn Avenue Theology,” The Trinity Foundation, https://www.trinitylectures.org/MP3/AubAveTheo_Collection13.MP3.

32. See Claridge, Matthew. “A Modern Calvinist: An Interview with James Bratt on Abraham Kuyper,” Credo, Oct 24, 2013, https://credomag.com/2013/10/a-modern-calvinist-an-interview-with-james-bratt-on-abraham-kuy per/; Raath, Andrew. “Politocratic Communitarianism, Immanentist Sociology and Sphere Sovereignty,” in Koers 83:1 (2018), http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S2304-85572018000100006&script=sci_arttext&tlng=es.

33. See Weinberger, L.D. “The Relationship Between Sphere Sovereignty and Subsidiarity,” in Global Perspectives on Subsidiarity, eds. M. Evans & A. Zimmermann (New York: Springer, 2014), 49-63; Van Til, Kent A. “Subsidiarity and Sphere Sovereignty: A Match Made In…?,” in Theological Studies 68 (2008), 610-636.

34. See “Christ and Civilization,” The Trinity Foundation, https://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=110.