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.
Important pushback - but I think the quotes further illustrate the problem. Especially, that he ends up not taking sides on anything. For example, the motif of liberation/exodus shows up in gay liberation AND Exodus International. I feel like that is basically saying, Hey, the Bible has been used to support totally opposed social ideas! And my biblical critical theory doesn't take a stand on any of it! My wife called it the "zeroth way," the other day. It's not a third way between extremes; it simply claims to be biblical while prescinding from arguing for anything concrete.
I'm also amazed that his only mention of the main contemporary issues are these brief mentions. I feel like Watkins will get praise from many quarters for saying things that no Christian can disagree with. But I'm afraid that this amounts to saying nothing at all. You haven't said anything for a Christian to disagree with, and by refusing to enter into the contemporary political debates, you refuse to say anything a secular person must engage with. I think this is simply absolving oneself of the duty of Christian social criticism, not doing it.
You may be right, but I am of the persuasion that polarization and the nonsensical rhetoric within the culture wars (on both sides) is a significant spiritual stronghold. So while this work may only be doing some biblical theological work and putting it into some initial conversation with historical and contemporary philosophy/dialogue (showing that Biblical theology does critical theory?), I believe that even a "zeroth way" is a refreshing breather in this toxic culture.
While I've seen graphs that illustrate the growing polarization in our society, I'm also aware that this isn't a new (spiritual) battle. The conversation about reforms within the Protestant and Catholic churches has unfortunately been significantly informed by a "well we can't say or do that, because that would sound like the (insert opposing side)." His solution to this is what he describes as "diagonalization," a concept I'd have to read more about to understand but it seems to map onto "upside-down kingdom" thinking. Regardless, I appreciate work done in this Keller-esque posture. Maybe this is the first step many people need right now: to just stop, take a breath, and start thinking a bit more about what ground they're standing on? And apparently at the end he admits to the fact that he's just laying the initial groundwork:
"the present volume will provide a warm-up act before the main event, a pump-priming exercise making it just a little easier for others to come after me and do the real labor of deploying a range of biblical figures as they carefully and painstakingly work through complex social questions. Some of these interventions will deploy only a handful or even only one of the biblical figures I have identified; some will no doubt find others I have missed."
I can understand that - I want to distinguish two things:
1) Rising above partisanship, having a space of thought and human commonality across political/culture-war differences
and
2) Attempting to present biblical teaching as politically neutral and non-partisan in the contemporary culture war, in Presbyterian settings, following the principle of "the spirituality of the church."
I am all for the first, with the "refreshing breather" it provides. But I think the second is actually the kind of error I described in "Whatever Happened to Reformed Theology?"
The other thing is that my seminary experience involved understanding the structure of biblical theology in a politically neutral way. Many of us explicitly went to seminary with the philosophy, "You don't affect the world through political means but through the preaching of the gospel." I feel like I've already had teaching on the basic structure of biblical theology that all Christians agree on. It's time to move beyond that to the specifics of Christian calling in our culture.
One more thing would be that a great many books published, for example, by Crossway recently, purport to be about specific practical topics but actually just repeat the structure of biblical theology without getting to specifics. My wife always mentions "Risen Motherhood" as an example. Then there are many of the new children's story Bibles and other storybooks. I forget all the titles I've seen where you look at the table of contents and you realize, "It's another repetition of the entire story of the Bible." In a practical book, this is a cop-out from providing actual biblical wisdom. And in a children's book, it is misguided, because children want to hear specific biblical stories, "moralism and all." We can broaden out to the entire story of the Bible in due time.
Those are some additional factors. Lastly, in terms of providing something like a third way or appealing to both sides politically, I prefer to be concrete about how this plays out. The secular progressive side is very strong and very opposed to Christianity; Christians need strength in opposition to it. I lack sympathy for the various forms of critical theory as a result. However, libertarian, capitalist individualism is not the solution. Christian communitarianism is a better idea. At the level of political economy, this leads to what I call conservative anti-capitalism. I'm sympathetic to John Ruskin's Christian socialism, from which the British Labour party arose, etc.
I think it's so much better to be concrete about our understanding of the application of biblical teaching to social life than to take the zeroth way.
Feb 8, 2023·edited Feb 8, 2023Liked by Joel Carini
Sorry, you said you didn't want to read it, and then I just spammed you with too long of quotes in the comments. My bad!
While I am very much looking forward to your examination of Genesis of Gender (because I am very interested in a thorough Christian engagement of these matters), I push back a little bit with simply saying that this can be scratched off of every reading list. It does seem to be doing a little more than simply rehashing Reformed Biblical Theology in a larger page count. It is bringing the Biblical narrative into conversation with contemporary narratives. I remember reading somewhere that the original title was something a bit different, and maybe something a bit more accurate to what it is doing. What I appreciate about this title is that I think it can help Christians become less CT-phobic, and to instead help them think through whether a specific Critical Theory is harmonious with our groundings in Scripture. Though maybe it will just get used to bash all other works of CT in worldview debates, rather than fostering critical thought and dialogue...
Homosexuality gets one mention in chapter 11, "Moses, The Exodus, and the Torah", where he examines the Exodus and modern politics, critiquing the left-wing and right-wing versions of the emancipation narrative which both look for new liberation from different forms of oppression (right: taxes and regulations; left: limitations of identity)
"This framework of oppression and liberation and its narrative of revolutionary change have since informed and helped to shape mid-twentieth-century second-wave feminism or the “women’s liberation” movement and then the “gay liberation” movement of the late 1970s and 1980s in which “gay liberation theologians imagined their own experience as a deliverance from the oppression of homophobia, a journey through the Wilderness to the Promised Land.” In a very different move, the legacy of the flight from Egypt was also claimed by “the world’s largest ministry to individuals and families impacted by homosexuality” in the ex-gay movement calling itself Exodus International. The emancipation narrative underwent a further transformation in the mid-1970s with the publication of Peter Singer’s seminal Animal Liberation .
There are real injustices in each of these cases, and they need to be addressed. But the Marxist framework ill suits the biblical pattern of justice and mercy, faithfulness and compassion, presented in Exodus 3 and 33. It militates rather towards a merciless—and therefore unjust—justice which relies on identifying pure oppressors and pure victims in complex and multidimensional situations. Lyotard said the emancipation narrative is dead. He was wrong; it has just evolved. It is no longer the preserve of totalitarian governments or Marxist revolutions. It has gone cultural."
In this chapter is where he brings in the fun word "umbilical"! He says the modern simplification and isolation of the exodus narrative feeds the overwrought victim-oppressor binary:
"An umbilical position, then, is one in which everything is fed through one narrow bottleneck, one strait gate, “that unnatural simplification of everything into one system or another.” In umbilical thinking, one aspect of reality (perhaps the economic aspect, or the psychological, or the physical, or the mathematical) has primacy over all others: everything else is a metaphor, but this one thing is bedrock, literal truth. It is a classic move of idolatry and heresy: taking something from the biblical revelation—even a crucially important event like the exodus—and erecting it as the single gatekeeper of orthodoxy. C. S. Lewis calls it “everythingism.” The everythingist “thinks that everything is in the long run ‘merely’ a precursor or a development or a relic or an instance or a disguise” of the one fundamental thing."
I appreciate this philosophical overview of empiricism and coherentism. I think I (intuitively?) developed a coherentism that included not only the presuppositional aspects but also a coherent with reality (so a bit empirical in nature).
But regarding this book, which I've not read much yet, I bought the digital version because I wanted ready access to see what it said about things like you searched for in the index. But I was able to search the whole book! Let me know if the mentions of gender reinforces your perspective or not.
Gender is mentioned in three chapters.
In the third chapter, "Sin and Society":
"The propensity to draw these manifold fault lines between good and evil is a recurring symptom of our tradition’s dislocation from God. First, the lines are sometimes drawn between different aspects of creation. Herman Dooyeweerd identifies three such dichotomous ways of understanding the world—or “ground motives”—in the history of Western thought. The first, which is characteristic of much ancient Greek philosophy, is a division between form and matter, where form is fixed and definite, and matter is unformed and indefinite. So Plato, for example, considers this material world to be imprecise, decaying, and inferior to the immaterial world of the Forms, or Ideas, and in Neoplatonist philosophy the soul must free itself from the material, an idea that stokes a rich and problematic tradition of Western body-soul dualism, which still haunts contemporary debates about eating disorders, gender dysphoria, and more fanciful science fiction accounts of achieving immortality by uploading human beings to silicon-based hardware. There is no synthesis possible between form and matter, Dooyeweerd argues, and so “there remains no other way out than to attribute the primacy to one of the opposed motives, which implies a religious depreciation, or at least, a subordination of the other."
In Chapter 17, "The Ministry of Jesus, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor," he makes a list of how Jesus' ministry is shaped by "the great reversal" and how Jesus "consistently seeks out those who are marginalized in the society of his day... those marginalized because of their gender: women".
In the same chapter, within the section of "How the Great Reversal Has Shaped Us" (described as the "nonlinear" way God "upends expectations and outcomes, crowning them with a subversive fulfillment.") he lists the eight most important ways that the contemporary world has been molded and shaped by Jesus. 1. charity for the poor, 2. structural reform, 3. antislavery liberation movements, 4. flattening of social hierarchies, 5. servant-leadership in government, 6. new ethic of beauty (which isn't actually described... he just mentions the absence of Jesus being beautiful in Isa 53:2), 7. Revolution of Gender relationships, 8. new moral grammar (e.g. humility)
In chapter 24, "The Last Days and Modernity", he describes Christianity's "egalitarian moral intuitions," tracing its impact on the "emergence of the individual and the universal" that was formulated in the Middle Ages canon law, which shift things from being based on race, class, and gender.
David,
Important pushback - but I think the quotes further illustrate the problem. Especially, that he ends up not taking sides on anything. For example, the motif of liberation/exodus shows up in gay liberation AND Exodus International. I feel like that is basically saying, Hey, the Bible has been used to support totally opposed social ideas! And my biblical critical theory doesn't take a stand on any of it! My wife called it the "zeroth way," the other day. It's not a third way between extremes; it simply claims to be biblical while prescinding from arguing for anything concrete.
I'm also amazed that his only mention of the main contemporary issues are these brief mentions. I feel like Watkins will get praise from many quarters for saying things that no Christian can disagree with. But I'm afraid that this amounts to saying nothing at all. You haven't said anything for a Christian to disagree with, and by refusing to enter into the contemporary political debates, you refuse to say anything a secular person must engage with. I think this is simply absolving oneself of the duty of Christian social criticism, not doing it.
You may be right, but I am of the persuasion that polarization and the nonsensical rhetoric within the culture wars (on both sides) is a significant spiritual stronghold. So while this work may only be doing some biblical theological work and putting it into some initial conversation with historical and contemporary philosophy/dialogue (showing that Biblical theology does critical theory?), I believe that even a "zeroth way" is a refreshing breather in this toxic culture.
While I've seen graphs that illustrate the growing polarization in our society, I'm also aware that this isn't a new (spiritual) battle. The conversation about reforms within the Protestant and Catholic churches has unfortunately been significantly informed by a "well we can't say or do that, because that would sound like the (insert opposing side)." His solution to this is what he describes as "diagonalization," a concept I'd have to read more about to understand but it seems to map onto "upside-down kingdom" thinking. Regardless, I appreciate work done in this Keller-esque posture. Maybe this is the first step many people need right now: to just stop, take a breath, and start thinking a bit more about what ground they're standing on? And apparently at the end he admits to the fact that he's just laying the initial groundwork:
"the present volume will provide a warm-up act before the main event, a pump-priming exercise making it just a little easier for others to come after me and do the real labor of deploying a range of biblical figures as they carefully and painstakingly work through complex social questions. Some of these interventions will deploy only a handful or even only one of the biblical figures I have identified; some will no doubt find others I have missed."
(quote grabbed from https://journal.rts.edu/article/what-is-biblical-critical-theory-a-review-article/)
David,
I can understand that - I want to distinguish two things:
1) Rising above partisanship, having a space of thought and human commonality across political/culture-war differences
and
2) Attempting to present biblical teaching as politically neutral and non-partisan in the contemporary culture war, in Presbyterian settings, following the principle of "the spirituality of the church."
I am all for the first, with the "refreshing breather" it provides. But I think the second is actually the kind of error I described in "Whatever Happened to Reformed Theology?"
The other thing is that my seminary experience involved understanding the structure of biblical theology in a politically neutral way. Many of us explicitly went to seminary with the philosophy, "You don't affect the world through political means but through the preaching of the gospel." I feel like I've already had teaching on the basic structure of biblical theology that all Christians agree on. It's time to move beyond that to the specifics of Christian calling in our culture.
One more thing would be that a great many books published, for example, by Crossway recently, purport to be about specific practical topics but actually just repeat the structure of biblical theology without getting to specifics. My wife always mentions "Risen Motherhood" as an example. Then there are many of the new children's story Bibles and other storybooks. I forget all the titles I've seen where you look at the table of contents and you realize, "It's another repetition of the entire story of the Bible." In a practical book, this is a cop-out from providing actual biblical wisdom. And in a children's book, it is misguided, because children want to hear specific biblical stories, "moralism and all." We can broaden out to the entire story of the Bible in due time.
Those are some additional factors. Lastly, in terms of providing something like a third way or appealing to both sides politically, I prefer to be concrete about how this plays out. The secular progressive side is very strong and very opposed to Christianity; Christians need strength in opposition to it. I lack sympathy for the various forms of critical theory as a result. However, libertarian, capitalist individualism is not the solution. Christian communitarianism is a better idea. At the level of political economy, this leads to what I call conservative anti-capitalism. I'm sympathetic to John Ruskin's Christian socialism, from which the British Labour party arose, etc.
I think it's so much better to be concrete about our understanding of the application of biblical teaching to social life than to take the zeroth way.
Let me know what you think!
Sorry, you said you didn't want to read it, and then I just spammed you with too long of quotes in the comments. My bad!
While I am very much looking forward to your examination of Genesis of Gender (because I am very interested in a thorough Christian engagement of these matters), I push back a little bit with simply saying that this can be scratched off of every reading list. It does seem to be doing a little more than simply rehashing Reformed Biblical Theology in a larger page count. It is bringing the Biblical narrative into conversation with contemporary narratives. I remember reading somewhere that the original title was something a bit different, and maybe something a bit more accurate to what it is doing. What I appreciate about this title is that I think it can help Christians become less CT-phobic, and to instead help them think through whether a specific Critical Theory is harmonious with our groundings in Scripture. Though maybe it will just get used to bash all other works of CT in worldview debates, rather than fostering critical thought and dialogue...
Homosexuality gets one mention in chapter 11, "Moses, The Exodus, and the Torah", where he examines the Exodus and modern politics, critiquing the left-wing and right-wing versions of the emancipation narrative which both look for new liberation from different forms of oppression (right: taxes and regulations; left: limitations of identity)
"This framework of oppression and liberation and its narrative of revolutionary change have since informed and helped to shape mid-twentieth-century second-wave feminism or the “women’s liberation” movement and then the “gay liberation” movement of the late 1970s and 1980s in which “gay liberation theologians imagined their own experience as a deliverance from the oppression of homophobia, a journey through the Wilderness to the Promised Land.” In a very different move, the legacy of the flight from Egypt was also claimed by “the world’s largest ministry to individuals and families impacted by homosexuality” in the ex-gay movement calling itself Exodus International. The emancipation narrative underwent a further transformation in the mid-1970s with the publication of Peter Singer’s seminal Animal Liberation .
There are real injustices in each of these cases, and they need to be addressed. But the Marxist framework ill suits the biblical pattern of justice and mercy, faithfulness and compassion, presented in Exodus 3 and 33. It militates rather towards a merciless—and therefore unjust—justice which relies on identifying pure oppressors and pure victims in complex and multidimensional situations. Lyotard said the emancipation narrative is dead. He was wrong; it has just evolved. It is no longer the preserve of totalitarian governments or Marxist revolutions. It has gone cultural."
In this chapter is where he brings in the fun word "umbilical"! He says the modern simplification and isolation of the exodus narrative feeds the overwrought victim-oppressor binary:
"An umbilical position, then, is one in which everything is fed through one narrow bottleneck, one strait gate, “that unnatural simplification of everything into one system or another.” In umbilical thinking, one aspect of reality (perhaps the economic aspect, or the psychological, or the physical, or the mathematical) has primacy over all others: everything else is a metaphor, but this one thing is bedrock, literal truth. It is a classic move of idolatry and heresy: taking something from the biblical revelation—even a crucially important event like the exodus—and erecting it as the single gatekeeper of orthodoxy. C. S. Lewis calls it “everythingism.” The everythingist “thinks that everything is in the long run ‘merely’ a precursor or a development or a relic or an instance or a disguise” of the one fundamental thing."
I appreciate this philosophical overview of empiricism and coherentism. I think I (intuitively?) developed a coherentism that included not only the presuppositional aspects but also a coherent with reality (so a bit empirical in nature).
But regarding this book, which I've not read much yet, I bought the digital version because I wanted ready access to see what it said about things like you searched for in the index. But I was able to search the whole book! Let me know if the mentions of gender reinforces your perspective or not.
Gender is mentioned in three chapters.
In the third chapter, "Sin and Society":
"The propensity to draw these manifold fault lines between good and evil is a recurring symptom of our tradition’s dislocation from God. First, the lines are sometimes drawn between different aspects of creation. Herman Dooyeweerd identifies three such dichotomous ways of understanding the world—or “ground motives”—in the history of Western thought. The first, which is characteristic of much ancient Greek philosophy, is a division between form and matter, where form is fixed and definite, and matter is unformed and indefinite. So Plato, for example, considers this material world to be imprecise, decaying, and inferior to the immaterial world of the Forms, or Ideas, and in Neoplatonist philosophy the soul must free itself from the material, an idea that stokes a rich and problematic tradition of Western body-soul dualism, which still haunts contemporary debates about eating disorders, gender dysphoria, and more fanciful science fiction accounts of achieving immortality by uploading human beings to silicon-based hardware. There is no synthesis possible between form and matter, Dooyeweerd argues, and so “there remains no other way out than to attribute the primacy to one of the opposed motives, which implies a religious depreciation, or at least, a subordination of the other."
In Chapter 17, "The Ministry of Jesus, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor," he makes a list of how Jesus' ministry is shaped by "the great reversal" and how Jesus "consistently seeks out those who are marginalized in the society of his day... those marginalized because of their gender: women".
In the same chapter, within the section of "How the Great Reversal Has Shaped Us" (described as the "nonlinear" way God "upends expectations and outcomes, crowning them with a subversive fulfillment.") he lists the eight most important ways that the contemporary world has been molded and shaped by Jesus. 1. charity for the poor, 2. structural reform, 3. antislavery liberation movements, 4. flattening of social hierarchies, 5. servant-leadership in government, 6. new ethic of beauty (which isn't actually described... he just mentions the absence of Jesus being beautiful in Isa 53:2), 7. Revolution of Gender relationships, 8. new moral grammar (e.g. humility)
In chapter 24, "The Last Days and Modernity", he describes Christianity's "egalitarian moral intuitions," tracing its impact on the "emergence of the individual and the universal" that was formulated in the Middle Ages canon law, which shift things from being based on race, class, and gender.