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Christopher Watkin, Thinking through Creation: Genesis 1 and 2 as Tools of Cultural Critique (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2017). This short book has an extended treatment on the need to study Scripture and culture with a posture of attentiveness.
First, there is prefiguration—what we bring to the encounter with another world. Second, there is configuration—what happens when the new figures we encounter affirm, challenge, or subvert the figures constituting our world. Finally, there is reconfiguration—what happens when we emerge from the encounter with a new world constituted by new figures. These processes are happening continually across all six figures domains in three contiguous movements. [20] Errors rarely deny the truth completely—they instead tend to isolate part of it, making it into the whole truth. CRT– There is an endless struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Justice for the latter can only come at the price of the overthrow of the former: it is a zero-sum game. Salvation does not come from transcending my group, but from embracing it. Becoming righteous, or ‘woke’, is an achievement, often the fruit of a careful and painstaking education in the reality and pervasiveness of systemic racism. Forgiveness is hard to come by, with job losses, ‘cancelling’ and public shaming ensuing from individual infractions of CRT orthodoxies, no doubt compounded by social media. Repentant offenders frequently remain unforgiven. 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.
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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. This analysis doesn’t leave us with a blueprint for a third “Christian” political party, nor a wishy-washy “third-way” compromise between existing political ideologies. But it does show us how the Bible presents a complex view of reality and how modern political ideologies dismember parts of this complex reality, isolate them, and treat them as the whole. And it helps Christians to engage with liberalism, CRT, and other political ideologies in a way that doesn’t invest them with ultimate, messianic hope or allow them to become the uncontested and sovereign ideology of our souls. Chris Watkin] maps a path out of some of the most fundamental impasses of our time . . . Urgent and weighty, Biblical Critical Theory is . . . simply, a tremendously exciting read.”
The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics helps Christians share the truth, goodness, and beauty of the gospel as the only hope that fulfills our deepest longings. We want to train Christians—everyone from pastors to parents to professors—to boldly share the good news of Jesus Christ in a way that clearly communicates to this secular age. For each key moment in the Bible’s storyline I will briefly sketch the CRT and liberal positions, before turning to Scripture itself which, I will argue, diagonalises (cuts across and rearranges) orthodoxies of both critical race theory and liberalism. [25] This exercise reveals them both to be reductive heresies, taking elements of biblical truth and cutting them off from other complementary truths, distorting and falsifying them in the process. Creation Will we one day speak of Christian Figural Apologetics? Time will tell. As critical evaluation of this method unfolds concurrently with the positive application of figures in various fields of endeavor, the durability of Watkin’s method may well be demonstrated. What we are presented with is exactly the same; what we experience it as is radically different. A great deal is at stake in the differences between these experiences, and so the terrain of competing theories today—or what is sometimes called the culture wars, a term that is itself a prime example of seeing-as—is in large part “the struggle of antagonistic social interests at the level of the sign,” at the level of the meaning we attach to things.” [11]
Paul on Greek ‘wisdom’ and Jewish ‘signs’
As with the sketch of CRT above, the version of liberalism I present here is an ideal type, and therefore in some ways a caricature, but it will serve to help us understand the poles towards which contemporary positions gravitate. [20] Another facet of a robust, biblical self-critique is to reflect on the way each of us tends to engage in particular ways with cultural trends like CRT. For some of us, our instinct is immediately to find where such theories are wrong, so that we can denounce them and appear faithful. For others, our first impulse is to engage with cultural trends just to see where they are right, so that we can join with them and appear relevant. Sadly, both approaches find what they are looking for, and receive their reward in full. A wonderful book bringing the Scriptures—every part of them—into a deep and illuminating conversation with the concerns of culture.” The church is thus a colony of heaven. 27 It is where the faithful are gathered from every nation, tribe, and tongue and the earthly things that divide (race, gender, and class) are set aside as our identity and unity are ultimately found in Christ (Col. 3:11). Though the secular ideologies of the past, including critical theory, have never been able to bring peace or usher in their this-worldly utopia, Jesus brought the kingdom of God that is already present among His people by His Spirit and will one day be consummate when all things become perfectly one—in Him. 28 The church embodies the kingdom of God on earth. It may not be all that the kingdom of God is, but it is certainly the way that God manifests the life and love of the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. The keys of the kingdom are held by the church. The righteousness and justice of God should be faithfully, creatively, and actively displayed in the church. The church should be the safest place on earth for the oppressed and the victimized as the mercy and compassion of God are tangibly expressed. The church “is a form of a reconciliatory theater: a theater of faith, hope and love. It is precisely because the church performs the gospel rather than some other script that it is also a revolutionary theater.” 29 The church should be the most just institution under the sun, demonstrating the love, mercy, and kindness of God in ways that silence and captivate the watching world. Finally, a profound distinctive of the biblical position, in contrast both to CRT and liberalism, is its positive message of hope. This hope is not merely a sense that justice will be done at some point in the future, but a way of inhabiting the complexities of racial injustice now in a way that neither merely laments them nor imagines they can be brushed under the carpet.
More helpful in navigating through these choppy waters are broad, guiding principles that act like a lighthouse, helping us to keep on course through many adverse currents and buffetings, rather than a step-by-step guide to what to do in every situation. In the light of the biblical storyline of creation, fall, redemption and consummation outlined above, here are three important principles for Christians to bring to bear on questions of systemic racism. Self-examination Biblical Critical Theory exposes and evaluates the often-hidden assumptions and concepts that shape late-modern society, examining them through the lens of the biblical story running from Genesis to Revelation, and asking urgent questions like: An important update of Augustine’s City of God, a proposal for making biblical sense of what is happening in contemporary culture.” Both CRT and liberalism capture something of the complex biblical picture of justice, but both fall short – in different ways – of its rich complexity. As theologian and social theorist Charles Mathewes notes, Christians must not allow any political position to become ‘the uncontested ideology of our souls’. [19]
Guiding principles
The Gospel Coalition supports the church by providing resources that are trusted and timely, winsome and wise, and centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Michael Serres: Figures of Thought, we learn that the concept of the figure became intuitive to Watkin in his reading philosophy as a graduate student: For Instructors and School Administrators Enhance your school’s traditional and online education programs by easily integrating online courses developed from the scholars and textbooks you trust. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey :: 505 U.S. 833 (1992) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/833/
Matt Chandler and Adam Griffin cover these questions and more in Family Discipleship: Leading Your Home through Time, Moments, and Milestones. And we’re excited to offer this book to you for FREE as an eBook today. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 7. CRT: Society is violent, and oppression is endemic and ineradicable. The world is divided into groups of oppressors and oppressed. I am guilty of, and responsible for, the historical and contemporary actions of the majority-culture groups to which I belong. The Bible and Critical Theory is a biannual peer-reviewed open access academic journal in the fields of biblical studies and critical theory. It was established by Roland Boer in 2004, and was published by Monash University ePress until 2010. Since 2011 it has been published independently. [1] Julie Kelso was the editor-in-chief from 2008 to 2011, and then she co-edited with Boer from 2012 to 2015. From 2016 to 2020, Caroline Blyth and Robert J. Myles were editors-in-chief. Corinthians 1 chastens and corrects all of us. For those of us desperate to seem relevant it insists upon an unfashionable cruciform antithesis. For those of us desperate to dig a trench as deep as possible between the church and the world, it confounds us by talking about God’s sophia. And for those of us who always seek a reconciling middle ground or third way, it insists on a categorical antithesis and a glorious fulfilment, both at the top of their energy. No-one should walk away from 1 Corinthians 1 feeling comfortable. Discernment
Christianity provides us with an overarching metanarrative that runs from creation to redemption: We are creatures made in God’s image, who have sinned against him, who need to be rescued through the atoning work of Jesus, and who are called to love both God and neighbor. Note that Paul is not offering his readers a lukewarm, wishy-washy ‘third-way’ compromise between antithesis and fulfilment. In 1 Corinthians 1, neither antithesis nor fulfilment weakens the other. To borrow a Chestertonian expression, Paul gives us ‘not an amalgam or compromise’ of antithesis and fulfilment, ‘but both things at the top of their energy’. [21] DiAngelo, White Fragility, 40–43. It is noteworthy that MLK’s studies took him to the well of liberation theology, another offshoot of critical theory. But MLK was also grounded in the traditional Baptist theology of his family. ↩ Third, critical theory functions as a worldview. It answers our most basic questions: Who are we? What is our fundamental problem? What is the solution to that problem? What is our primary moral duty? How should we live?
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