Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

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A brilliant and unique book . . . It is the most biblical, up-to-date, and comprehensive analysis of contemporary Western culture that I know of.” Watkin believes that a close, attentive reading of Scripture reveals the significance of creation and redemption similarly. [14] While God can never be domesticated or mastered, we have in Scripture access to as much revealed divine truth as we can handle this side of glory. God is showing us in Scripture patterns in creation and redemption. Figures arise out of careful contemplation of Holy Scripture. Figures are at the center of Watkin’s theory. When all the types of figures combine, they form the world of meaning for an individual (more below). Over the last few years, new terms like “cisgender,”“intersectionality,”“heteronormativity,”“centering,” and “white fragility” have suddenly entered our cultural lexicon—seemingly out of nowhere. In reality, these words and concepts have been working their way through academia for decades, perpetuated by disciplines such as Post-Colonial Studies, Queer Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Critical Race Theory, among others. These fields can be placed within the larger discipline of “ critical theory,” an ideology more popularly known as “cultural Marxism.” In discussing Watkin’s critical concerns, we already noted the figure-ground distinction. The Biblical figures that arise from Scripture have the effect of shaping the way we perceive our experience. Figures provide us with our world of meaning. “A world is not only that which is perceived by human consciousness. It also includes networks of machines or ecosystems that rhythm and pattern reality just as effectively or extensively as any human actor.” [18] Crucially, given the concrete nature of Watkin’s critical concerns, world is a more concrete and comprehensive concept than worldview. It includes rational and physical elements. Finally, critical theory claims that members of oppressed groups have special access to truth because of their “lived experience” of oppression. Such insight is unavailable to members of oppressor groups, who are blinded by their privilege. Consequently, any appeals to “objective evidence” or “reason” made by dominant groups are actually surreptitious bids for continued institutional power. This view is rooted in standpoint theory (organic to Marxism and repurposed by feminist theory), which argues that knowledge is conditioned and determined by social location.

Intellectual movements are often easier to describe than they are to specifically define. This is certainly true of critical theory, a twentieth-century philosophical ideology that has birthed the numerous previously mentioned critical movements (and others) that stand against established institutions, whether secular or sacred, that are perceived as using power as a means of oppression. At its core, critical theory perpetually challenges the notion of institutional authority and the idea that true freedom can be identified with any one system of thought—whether that be a particular religion, a stream of political thought, or an overarching view of the world. At its core, critical theory attempts to analyze authority relationships from both a philosophical and practical point of view by searching for hidden biases and ulterior motives with an interest in replacing power structures with new ones that promise greater autonomy and material benefits.Bible– Like liberalism’s universal, all humans are equally in the image of God. [26] Within this overarching framework I can belong to many groups, including those foregrounded by CRT, but they can never capture my identity at its most fundamental level. God sees individuals as more than members of their groups, [27] and yet can deal with nations (not races, a concept which is foreign to the Bible) en bloc. [28] The accent falls both on the one and the many, or rather on the unity and glorious diversity of all things – including all peoples and groups – in Christ. [29] People are more than their group identities, [30] but they are not abstracted from those identities. [31] Fall Here’s a few comments on Tim’s take on critical theory to illumine how critical theory can help us make space for God to work in an antagonistic broken world.

Ricard Delgado and Jean Stefanic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 3. See also Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1996). ↩The second principle can be gleaned from the biblical wisdom literature, and can provide a guiding light for Christians seeking to navigate the questions of systemic racism in the boardroom, hospital ward, or school classroom.

How do specific doctrines help us engage thoughtfully in the philosophical, political, and social questions of our day? Rather than beginning at a single moment in time, critical theory began as a confluence of several intellectual streams that came together to form a larger body of thought. The first of these streams is often referred to as the Frankfurt school (or the International School for Social Research) that originated in Goethe, Germany, during the 1920s and ’30s. Men such as Theodor Adorno, Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer, working in different disciplines, were some of the early architects of the movement, with Jürgen Habermas becoming one of the better-known, later luminaries. 6This school was something of a multi-disciplinary think-tank focusing on contemporary social issues such as power, oppression, wealth, identity, and politics. The school was eventually forced to relocate due to pressures from the Nazi party, which perceived it as a threat to its political agenda. The overlapping timelines of Nazi ideology and the Frankfurt school are important to note, as the latter sat in stark contrast with the former. One was an ideology of oppression through totalitarianism; the other sought liberation for the oppressed through philosophical reflection on power structures and how change comes about. Both movements were highly political and were a threat to one another in different ways.An argument against the liberal notion of “color-blindness” is made by Jayne Chong-Soon Lee, “Navigating the Topology of Race,” 441–49. ↩ Dan. 9:4–19. For a longer discussion of corporate responsibility in the Bible, see Timothy Keller, ‘Justice in the Bible’, available at https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/justice-in-the-bible/ In 1 Corinthians 1, how does Paul deal with two of the dominant cultural values of his day, namely that ‘Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom’ (1:22)? He does not simply affirm wisdom as the Greeks understand it, nor signs as the Jews think of them, but neither does he completely reject these values either. Let us examine the example of wisdom. Second, Watkin moves from sound biblical exegesis to sound cultural exegesis (we will discuss his method later), drawing upon a stunning array of sources. His formal training is in French Studies (Cambridge University, M.Phil., Ph.D.). He has published widely in French studies, philosophy, and theology. (He has several volumes in the P&R Great Thinkers series on French Philosophers.) He is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Monash University in Australia, a renown global research institution. All this breadth is displayed in BCT, but never arrogantly or excessively. Watkin’s biblical and accessible response to various cultural issues would also warrant the book’s price. Third, Watkin’s unique method (more below) provides a pathway for believers to move from Scripture to conversation with unbelievers about some of the most polarizing issues of our time. Critical theory is concerned with the marginalized’ experience and the majority’s ethics. Traditional apologetics in the Reformed tradition tends to engage epistemology first, asking interlocutors to set their experience aside. In today’s social climate, the conversation often fails to bloom. The Reformed apologist declares the unbeliever irrational, and the unbeliever declares the apologist ethically irresponsible and uncaring. Watkin’s use of biblical figures (below) to diagonalize (also below) false dichotomies in the culture opens the dialogue without compromising biblical conviction.

An ambitious, comprehensive, and thrilling work of Christian apologetics . . . The most significant work of its kind to appear in a decade.” Another significant influence on critical theory was, and is, Marxism. “Critical Theory was conceived and birthed within the intellectual crucible of Marxism.” 7 But critical theory should not be equated with Marxism or reduced to it. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that early architects of critical theory had something of a love-hate relationship with Marxism, sometimes drawing from Marxist ideology and sometimes forcefully rejecting it. Marxism is well known for its portrayal of the tensions that exist between various economic classes that are collapsed into the categories of “oppressors” and the “oppressed,” with capitalism being one of the main causes of oppression. At the same time, critical theorists saw in Marxism yet another system of thought that proved unsuccessful in its attempt to bring equity to the world.

Instead I view post-structuralism, critical theory, and critical race theory as tools of diagnosis. They can be extremely helpful in clarifying the issues of power, antagonism, cultural frameworks and subjectivity at work in various issues in race, sexuality, gender, inequality, economics, politics. At their best, these cultural theorists teach us how to ask good questions, make astute observations, locate voices. It can open space for the work of God in Christ to reconcile, heal, make bodies whole, put into place various attractions, reactions, and other formations. Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022).