Why I’m Not Going to Read “Biblical Critical Theory”

In place of the subjectivist, postmodern, self-contained bubble of critical theory, Christopher Watkin offers his own self-contained bubble of presuppositionalist Christian biblical theology.

I have been exploring the possibility of a Christian empiricism, based belief, grace and nature. Two books lie before me that illustrate the difference between Christian coherentism and Christian empiricism. One I wholeheartedly recommend: Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory. The other, Zondervan could have saved a lot of paper on: The 648-page Biblical Critical Theory, by Christopher Watkin.

If I could summarize the difference, it is clear from Favale’s book that she has engaged with the issues of human sexuality the book is about and has, through experience, found the Christian account of human sexuality to be true. Watkin’s book appears to be a sort of self-contained replica of all the other books on biblical theology that have been published in recent years but posing as a Christian form of critical theory. 

Let’s cut to the chase: I picked up Biblical Critical Theory expecting to see chapter titles on race, sex, transgenderism, economics, and so on. Instead, the chapter titles read as if they might have been those of a book simply titled Biblical Theology, or, Yet Another Book Regurgitating the Entire Story of the Bible.

I looked at the index. It took me a while to find the subject index since it was so small. (Compared to the much larger Scripture index.) Eventually, I found it, and looked for the heading “transgenderism.” Nothing. We have “transcendence,” “transculturalism,” “Trinity, the,” and “triperspectivalism.”

(Shortly after, I observe “umbilicism,” found on at least six pages of the book. What is “umbilicism?” I shudder to think. And no, I’m not turning there.)

Hm, let me look for “sex,” or “sexuality”: “...self-critique,” followed by “simple social space.” Nope.

Race? The first “r” entry is “rational-irrational dialectic.” (Whew, I think I’m going to puke…) Oh, three entries later there are two references for “Rocky.” What is going on?

Ethnicity? No, from “ethic of violence” to “ethos.”

OK, what’s going on here? You write over six-hundred pages on “biblical critical theory,” and race, sex...

Oh, I forgot to look for “gender”! The first entries under “g” are “general equivalent, general will, gerundive living…” (I study philosophy of language and that last one still makes me puke.)

The short of it is that this book makes no reference to reality or to the common, public intellectual discussion of our society. If I handed this to any non-Christian, they could be immediately certain that this did not present a viable alternative to secular critical theory. It seems like a sort of big joke. Why, then, did the rising star of postmodern apologetics, Rebecca McLaughlin, laud it?

Coherentism and Empiricism

At the beginning of this post, I called the sort of theology or philosophy Watkin practices “Christian coherentism” and contrasted it with “Christian empiricism.” But what are coherentism and empiricism, and what connection do they have to Christian theology and apologetics?

In the last several years, I have found that the territory of epistemology in analytic philosophy maps very well onto the territory of Christian discussions of epistemology and apologetics. In analytic philosophy, many have criticized empiricist philosophers, like the logical positivists and Willard Van Orman Quine, for believing that beliefs can be derived directly from sense-experience. Meanwhile, Christian presuppositionalists criticize a sort of evidentialist for thinking that Christianity can be proved directly from experience, which is considered a “crude” empiricism. In both discussions, “sophistication” comes in recognizing that our perception and experience are themselves shaped by our worldview, our conceptualization of things. As a result, all that we can do is try on different holistic worldviews and feel if they are coherent: hence, coherentism. Christian presuppositionalism, too, is a type of coherentism.

One of my guiding lights on epistemology is the analytic philosopher John McDowell. In his Mind and World, he criticized the major proponents of empiricist and coherentist epistemology, offering a middle way. Empiricism is the view that knowledge comes from experience, or in the modern day, from science. Many modern, secular analytic philosophers aspire to be empiricists. The goal is to have one’s thought derive directly from experience, from the senses, from science (assuming those are the same thing). The leading empiricist of the mid-twentieth century was Willard Van Orman Quine, about whom the public knows little, but he was the leading philosopher at the leading American philosophy department, Harvard. We know of his philosophy in a popular context via another of his students, Daniel Dennett. Think of Quine as the philosophical grandpa of New Atheism.

On the other hand, according to coherentism, it is impossible to directly check one’s beliefs against experience. We can only verify a belief against other beliefs, which is to say, the best we can do is formulate a coherent set of beliefs that allow us to operate in the world. You might connect this to a sort of postmodernism, but in an American analytic philosophy setting, it was represented, more famously by Thomas Kuhn, but most precisely by Donald Davidson, the leading philosopher at Berkeley for decades.

McDowell identifies a problem with both “crude” empiricism and pure coherentism. Crude empiricism, of the sort the positivists and Quine defended, views the input to our knowledge as an unformatted, non-conceptual, brute impact upon the senses. My professor Jim Conant illustrated this by slamming his fist against the chalkboard. Hume called these inputs “impressions,” and if we take that very literally, we can see the problem. If we think of perception as something like being punched by the world and it leaving an “impression,” the indentation upon our skull or our brain lacks cognitive or conceptual content. What does that impression say? What does it mean? What belief does it justify? Unless we smuggle in some conceptualization, like what it is an impression of, say, a rose, then the impression cannot justify any beliefs.

Davidson took this argument to mean that only a belief could justify another belief. But McDowell cautions, if that is the case, then what are our beliefs except a sort of self-contained circle, like a wheel moving frictionlessly? There is nothing outside the circle providing a check: Our thought is “a frictionless spinning in a void.” This cannot be an account of how our thought is actually about the world and reflective of how things are.

Now, presenting McDowell’s solution to the dilemma goes beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say, if your critique of empiricism lands you in “frictionless spinning in the void” territory, you haven’t given an adequate account of human knowledge. But this is exactly what Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory obviously is. It is the self-contained circle of Reformed biblical theology without any external, empirical input. I expected to see external, empirical input in very noticeable ways. Perhaps, among all the chapters on different moments in biblical theology, there would be one interacting with the literature on and reality of human sexual dimorphism. There might be at least brief interruptions of the retelling of the biblical story to bring in a contemporary discussion and show how the Bible addresses that discussion. But to do so, I warrant, would be to allow something other than the Bible to frame the question. The presuppositionalist wants the Bible to answer the questions, but also frame the questions, so that there is really no place for any non-biblical input. (And by “non-biblical,” I do not mean unbiblical, nor certainly, “umbilical”).

Lest someone accuse me of judging a book by its cover, let me remind you that I am judging it by its table of contents and index. Those evidence that this book is yet another version of a self-contained intellectual bubble of biblical restatement. There is a market for such books, apparently. (Many Christians seem to think that only such books can be trusted.) But such a book does not persuade me, a Christian, that I will learn anything from it that I do not already know. Nor will this book persuade a secular person, interested in understanding the world, that a biblical point of view will help them do so.

In place of the subjectivist, postmodern, self-contained bubble of critical theory, Watkin offers his own self-contained bubble of presuppositionalist Christian biblical theology. By admitting that Christianity has no relevant connection or grounding in the common, natural world we all share, or connection to the debates in the public sphere that are now raging, Watkin concedes the game.

Fortunately, there are other writers out there writing with real understanding of the postmodern “theories” that swirl about us but with their eyes firmly fixed on reality. Abigail Favale is one such, and we’ll examine her book The Genesis of Gender in a future post. But for now, scratch Biblical Critical Theory off your reading list.