Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture is a tricky book to categorize: it’s part biblical theology, part worldview survey, part apologetic, and part primer on Christian ethics. In the introduction, Christopher Watkin offers the alternative titles of Know What Follows from What You Believe or perhaps The Bible: So What? (2).
Those titles make it sound very general—like a book about the Bible and all its implications. Actually, it’s even more broad-ranging than that. Biblical Critical Theory isn’t just a book about what the Bible says and means, it’s also about the alternatives. It’s both an attempt to show off Christianity’s riches (3) and an exposé that demonstrates how Bible-rejecting cultures and ideologies represent “reductive and partial simplifications of a more complex biblical position” (262).
Watkin takes his cue from Augustine’s City of God as he seeks to “out-narrate” paganism (21)—first laying bare its failures and then setting forth biblically described reality as the truth pagans are really seeking.
Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture
Christopher Watkin
Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture
Christopher Watkin
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.
Deconstructing Narratives
To achieve this purpose, Watkin works his way through Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, highlighting the themes and implications of the Bible (what he calls “figures”) and then showing how each comes with failed alternatives. Here are three examples:
- The doctrine of the image of God (Gen. 1:26–28), which both exalts and humbles humans, breaks down into secular theories that either pretend humans are themselves gods or reduces us to animals (chap. 3).
- The Bible’s declaration that all have sinned (Rom. 6:23) is converted into competing and self-serving narratives that make one group or idea or social structure the source of our problems (chap. 4).
- The Christian understanding of a God who is both personal and law-giving falls apart into the warring dichotomy of the rational versus the passionate (chap. 5).
And so on—600 pages of it! In example after example, Watkin presents biblical truth as the “diagonal” take on reality that bridges the too-simple binaries of human-generated social theories.
This approach makes the book astonishingly useful in (at least) two ways.
Biblical truth is the ‘diagonal’ take on reality that bridges the too-simple binaries of human-generated social theories.
First, as a Bible overview, it acquaints the reader with a feast of theological insights equal to the best introductions to biblical theology. This is especially timely in an age where ignorance of the Bible and its story leaves so many Christians as easy prey to foolishness.
Second, it offers students, workers, apologists, and many others serving on the ideological front lines an indispensable chart for navigating the current cultural and intellectual milieu. Watkin’s vast learning and academic credentials (he is senior lecturer in French studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia) are on display as he reads culture both broadly and closely, faithfully mapping its contours, appreciating its strengths, and deconstructing its self-serving narratives.
By way of example, I especially appreciated the chapters toward the end where he shows how the “be yourself” doctrines of expressive individualism are themselves products of conformity and the market:
If we go our own way in our society today, can anyone still think that it is their own idea? The truth is that we are being sold our individuality, our uniqueness. . . . The market presents to us a carefully curated and, in truth, very conservative and restricted portfolio of monetizable identity options. (572)
Watkin skewers the left and right, the ancient and the postmodern. And as his case studies accumulate so does the apologetic value of the book. It’s like observing the groupings left by a gang of drunk sharpshooters: their shots all go astray, but once we have enough of them, we can begin to see the shape of the target they all keep missing. Biblical Critical Theory does a great job of identifying both the target—reality as described by the Bible—and the sub-Christian misfires scattered around it.
Scope and Scale
But no isolated example (or review) can do justice to this book of vast ambition and towering achievement. It needs to be read slowly and reread. I expect it’ll serve as a reference book for those in gospel ministry for many years to come.
The sheer scope and scale of the book will make it difficult for some, however. It might be too challenging for readers with a low tolerance for abstract arguments. Yet this observation is less of a criticism and more an exhortation to those in Christian leadership to read this book and find ways to pass on its riches. Because Biblical Critical Theory holds out truths and insights every Christian should have access to. Many of us are reeling from the sudden turn in our culture and its hostility to Christian truth. Many of us are tongue-tied and confused as we try to articulate our faith. Many of us are scrambling to understand the strange new world around us.
Watkin is here to help. He calls us out of our foxholes and offers us new ways to think and speak. He shows us there are better ways to respond to our current age than denunciation or capitulation. In the Bible, we have the tools to respond with wisdom and grace.
Truth Beyond Dichotomy
In Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton describes how his coming to faith involved the puzzling observation that Christianity was attacked for contradictory reasons by different critics:
Christianity was too pessimistic; and then . . . it was a great deal too optimistic. . . . Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. . . . Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars. . . . One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise.
For Chesterton, the proliferation of such dichotomies gradually led to the “slow and awful impression” that Christianity was the norm against which everything else was reacting. It was fundamental to his journey from agnosticism to belief.
There are better ways to respond to our current age than denunciation or capitulation.
Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory provides the detail that Chesterton’s account summarizes. Biblical Christianity sets the standard for the beautiful, the true, and the good. It accounts for the merits observed in alternative ideologies and exposes their failures.
I pray it might serve to produce a new generation of Chestertons. It’s well suited to the task.
