I recently reviewed Carl R. Trueman’s Minority Report: Unpopular Thoughts on Everything from Ancient Christianity to Zen-Calvinism (Scotland: Mentor, 2008). (You may read the front front matter and introduction here.) This second volume of his collected essays follows in the train of his first: Wages of Spin: Critical Writings on Historic and Contemporary Evangelicalism (Scotland: Mentor, 2004). It’s typical Trueman: provocative, humorous, wry, clever, witty, engaging, thought-provoking, delightful, entertaining.
I didn’t have space in my review to share pithy quotes from Trueman’s twenty short essays in the volume, so I’ll share some here:
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Today I took a break for a bit of pleasure reading and scanned a little volume that’s been on my reading list for months: Carl Trueman’s The Wages of Spin: Critical Writings on Historic and Contemporary Evangelicalism (Ross-shire: Mentor, 2004).
The more I hear and read Trueman, the more I like him. His sharp wit puts him in a class of his own. A couple of the short essays at the end are especially entertaining jabs: “Boring Ourselves to Life” (pp. 175-80) and “Evangelicalism Through the Looking Glass: A Fairy Tale” (pp. 187-90). Well done.
On a related note, Mark Dever discusses The Wages of Spin among other things in “A Sweeping Conversation with Carl Trueman” (Feb. 21, 2006).
“[John] Owen’s theology is a salutary reminder that we should not allow the current decline in church attendance and status to turn a blind eye in our evangelical ecumenism to the real problems that exist with the evangelical world. I confess here that I am no longer entirely happy being called an evangelical. Where evangelicalism happens to coincide with biblical, historic Christianity, I do not repudiate the description; but in general consider it to be an unhelpful term, if not misleading and meaningless. That it now embraces those, who, for example, hold to positions on God’s knowledge of the future that are Socinian, it has ceased to be a distinctively Christian term.”
–Carl Trueman, “John Owen As a Theologian,” in John Owen: The Man and His Theology: Papers Read at the Conference of the John Owen Centre for Theological Study, September 2000 (ed. Robert W. Oliver; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2002), 63.
Recommended: Trueman’s five-part lecture series on the life and theology of John Owen (available here).
