The author, Christopher Watkin engages secular philosophers with depth, thoughtfulness and insight, often times exposing some of the fallacies of their views. With objectivity Watkin grants the same thinkers recognition of those thoughts and ideas that may be helpful or useful for his essay. If there is any critique of this aspect of Watkin’s work is simply that the high frequency of engagement with a variety of such thinkers sometimes obfuscates Watkin’s driving theme for each section.

Watkin reminds us that a biblical third way to resolve many of our secular dichotomies transcends the dichotomies’ limitations and offers a much better approach. This is indeed a strong general argument in the apologetic toolkit for any Christian. Watkin walks us through the specifics of how the third way view works in various scenarios.

The critique I have with a wholesale approach to the third way view is that often times one side of the cultural dichotomy is actually closer to, if not indeed, the third way. An example of this is Watkin’s approach to politics. Not to be surprised, in our current Western environment, politics is indeed a topic rich with emotions and passions fraught with dichotomies. Watkin resources himself of Dr. Tim Keller’s argument for a third way approach to American politics, wherein Keller plots, “four biblical values: care for the poor, racial justice, being pro-life, and monogamous heterosexual marriage. The Christian position is split down the middle: two of these issues are characteristic of the left, and two of the right, indicating that both left and right are reductive heresies of a more complex biblical politics, and that a full-orbed biblical Christianity can be fully at home in neither camp.”

One must wonder what is meant by “reductive heresies of a more complex biblical politics”. Which are the heresies?

A “full-orbed biblical Christianity” cannot indeed be fully at home in either political camp. Secular politics is not about embracing “full-orbed” biblical Christianity. Healthy politics should be about embracing biblical categories and bringing them to bear fruit in the marketplace through implementation of ethically sound policies. The question is what side of the political spectrum is closer to this premise.

I take the view that there is a problem with Dr. Keller’s view. As it applies to American politics, his view may have been more applicable thirty years ago. At the present time it is difficult (I argue impossible) to legitimize the argument that somehow two sides to the political equation can find equivalent moral underpinnings in biblical values. The key word to my point is the word ”equivalent”. No doubt one can find biblical values on both conservative and liberal arguments. But are they morally equivalent? Do they simply represent different emphases? I suggest, in the present American political atmosphere, to infer a certain moral equivalency between conservatives and liberals that differs only by emphasis, overlooks the implications of the arguments and policies of either side.

In the equivalency view, both sides are thought to be morally equivalent because they are just emphasizing different virtues. Watkin picks up on Keller’s view of equivalency to build up his own take on politics.

Watkin writes “viewed in the context of modernity the contrast between left and right is less like black and white and more like 7UP and Sprite: the two sides have much more in common than what separates them, and their bitter fighting reflects what Freud called the narcissism of small differences.” I don’t think that conservatives’ efforts against abortion can adequately be characterized as “narcissism of small differences.”

His take on economics suffers of the same equivalency dichotomization. He treats Marxism and capitalism as both sides of a dehumanizing force: “capitalism dehumanizes the worker and results in the domination of things over people, and Marxism dehumanizes by robbing the individual of the responsibility of self-determination.” If this equivalency of sides were true, we would not have experienced the utter rejection of Marxism and Communism during the last century, and social flourishing in capitalist societies.

What both Keller and Watkin miss is that there are times in the life of a nation when definitive political action of one side is emulsified from biblical values, while the other is not. Unless I am missing something, in my read of Watkin I don’t see where he is allowing for political situations when one side is closer to biblical values (albeit never completely aligned with) than the other.

Sometimes one political side, if not totally aligned with biblical values (they never are) may, at least, be a better reflection of biblical virtues or justice than the other side. Such is the case of the resistance movement during the rise of the Third Reich, or Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement, and others. The current obsession of the left with social deconstruction is a pervasive destabilizing force, yet conspicuously absent from Watkin’s critique. One is hard pressed to find Keller’s “care for the poor and racial justice” on this camp.

Watkin does a good job of examining the various biblical texts. The chapter about God’s promises to Abraham though, lack enough connection to Jesus and the Gospel. Jesus looms large in Gen 12, 15, 17, 20, 22 and the Gospel is practically explicit in Gen 15.

While Watkin generally does a pretty good job of capturing the wholesale biblical storyline of each major section of the Bible, his approach to applying the storyline to cultural critique can be, at times, challenging. He captures a survey of biblical sections. I prefer to go deep into the text piece by piece to derive instruction, application, and if the case may be, social critique.

Watkin’s approach throughout his work appears to utilize a modified Hegelian structure of thesis/antithesis to offer a third option, which is not a synthesis but a “diagonalization”. 

Watkin is right to root his approach in the biblical narrative, of course. The challenge or even danger I see with positing the approach of a biblical social theory though, is that the theory becomes the goal and takes a life of its own. Sociology becomes Theology, as Neil Shenvi reminds us. Future potential adherents of Watkin’s biblical theory might embrace the social theory rather than biblical text.

The other danger in the third way approach is that it can become formulaic. If we can’t agree about a particular cultural issue than we just assign it to a diagonalized third way rather than a direct biblical engagement.

I, proverbially almost fell off my rocker when I read Dr. Keller’s recent TGC post about Watkin’s book (which incidentally echoes his foreword, but I hadn’t read the foreword). In my view, his comments offer an example of a disengagement from the particulars of the CRT debate. Dr. Keller writes:

“On the one hand, many denounce it [CRT] as evil and toxic and say it should be shunned like a virus. On the other hand, some say, “Let’s learn from it but not swallow it whole.”

Keller proposes that there is a third way view to the contemporary debate over CRT.

Keller asserts that …” Watkin “diagonalizes” these alternatives—taking an approach that doesn’t ignore the concerns of either but that’s more radical than both.” While it is true that Watkin does do that, it is also true that the “third way”, or diagonalization approach to CRT does not work very well.

In several of its tenets, CRT is diametrically opposed to biblical orthodoxy. An adequate third way in this case would be to expose the fallacy of those CRT tenets. The philosophical view that calls for “eat the flesh and spit out the bones” is not a helpful treatment. You can’t extract the poison out of the water. This third way that disengages arguments against those fallacious CRT tenets does not help the CRT debate. It simply removes the debate to a lukewarm philosophical sphere not necessarily a biblical one.

More importantly though, Keller’s CRT comments in reference to Watkin’s book, suggest that Watkin’s case throughout his book is indeed, at least partly built on a Hegelian logical structure (albeit modified) that echoes CT but is not CT.

Critical Theory in its narrow sense as well as critical theories in a broad sense are ideologically driven by the Hegelian dialectic.

In our present cultural moment to say that there is a critical theory in the Bible itself, as Keller points out, is to unnecessarily muddy the waters of philosophical and theological debate over the topic. A preferred way to acknowledge how the Bible ought to inform our view of culture would be to say something like “biblical cultural and social critique” rather than “biblical critical theory”. We don’t need theories (whether the word is used in general sense or much less in the militant Critical Theory sense) for biblical application. We just need exegesis, hermeneutics, and application.

Perhaps there are many critical theories that precede the more recent Marxist theories. Perhaps pre-Marxist theories rely more on philosophical interpretations rather than the transformationalist and normative nature of Marxist theories. Supposedly, the former is less militant than the latter.

In his comments about Watkin’s book, Keller designates critical theories of the last century as “high theories”. He says: “Since the middle of the 20th century and especially since the 1990s, a host of “high theories” in this tradition—literary theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory—have sought to unmask and undermine the oppressive structures of Western society.” Keller then attributes the term critical theory to older origins. He writes: “But the term critical theory has an older and more basic meaning. It means not just accepting what a culture says about itself but also seeing what’s really going on beneath the surface.” Keller’s assertion describes descriptive theories not prescriptive, militantly transformative theories such as critical theories.

Critical theories since the 1930s (anti-colonialist, race, feminist, queer, pedagogy) are actually designated critical theories, not “high theories”. They have much the same shape and ideological structure as the Frankfurt School Critical Theory. They purport liberation or emancipation of individuals supposedly under oppressive circumstances. These theories are energized by a Hegelian logical structure and a Marxist interpretation that makes them much more activist and transformationalist than a simple philosophically interpretive critique of society. As Max Horkheimer declared, a critical theory must be explanatory, practical, and normative. By “practical” Horkheimer means the theory must have a moral application. In his view, any theory that meets these criteria is a critical theory because they seek to explain the problems with society, offer a “practical”, i.e., moral solution, and make it socially and culturally necessary. By these means, the critical theory seeks to emancipate individuals from social structures of oppression, whether these individuals realize or not that they are oppressed.

Watkin does a fair job in some of his chapters about Eschatology. In these chapters we see a more definitive, black and white, Jerusalem/Babylon, conclusive application of the biblical text. One may debate Watkin’s interpretation of the great prostitute and the beast (economic exploitation and political power). He writes “we have woken up to find the prostitute in our beds and the beast raiding our possessions, and we seem to be okay with that.” Watkin’s assertions in this section sound as if “we” are (oppressively?) captive to economic and political forces from which we fail to extricate ourselves. According to him, the book of Revelation calls Christians to “cultural disengagement”. I rather see Revelation is an account of the victorious earthly future second arrival of Christ in all of His splendor.

Watkin’s placement of Greta Thunberg in a prophetic category, akin to Ezequiel, Amos, and Isaiah is an exercise in clumsy logics.

Watkin writes: “the prophetic function in our society is not limited to the intellectual arena. Climate activist Greta Thunberg is a contemporary reimagining of the prophetic role. She comes from outside the machinery of the system she critiques; she is not from a lineage of prophets and received no formal credentials; she uses a broad arsenal of invective and sarcasm… she is a performance prophet like Ezekiel… She is damning like Amos, denouncing the vanity and hypocrisy of the powerful to their face. She is a court prophet, walking among world leaders in Davos like Isaiah at the court of king Hezekiah.”

There is no parallel between Thunberg and OT prophets. At best one could simply say that neither have institutional power or official positions. The parallels end there.

Watkin’s book has received much acclaim from prominent Christian scholars. His engagement of secular philosophy contributes much heft to his case but at the same time it poses a challenge to holding together the threads of his narratives. Perhaps the reason is that there is difference of perspective between his handling of the biblical text and his engagement of secular philosophy. He goes at the biblical text from a survey perspective, and secular philosophy from an exegetical perspective. It might have been better to switch the perspective approach.