Scripture, modern life and culture

en Reviews Editor John Woods speaks to Christopher Watkin, author of Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture.

The book will be published in the UK on 5 January and uses the ‘Biblical-Theological’ structure of Augustine’s City of God to show how Scripture can provide incisive, fresh, and nuanced ways of intervening in today’s debates on everything from science, the arts, and politics to dignity, multiculturalism, and equality. (The picture on the front page of en highlighting this article comes from a podcast about Critical Theory.)

en: You speak about how you were looking for a certain type of book when you were a student but couldn’t find it, so now you have written it.

CW: What I was looking for was a book that spoke in a way that engaged with the material I was studying in my course, thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Freud, but that was also faithful to the Bible and took the Bible seriously. I was studying these writers and engaging with the Christian Union and wanted a book that could reach across that divide and bring them into conversation with each other.

There were authors that went some way toward doing this: Cornelius Van Til, Oliver O’Donovan, Charles Taylor, and John Milbank. They were all doing work moving toward that sort of thinking, but none of them engaged with the authors I was studying in a way that would seem authentic to my lecturers, or that I could bring up in a seminar, so they could say: ‘Yes, you understand what these thinkers are trying to say.’ It felt like there was a spectrum with Biblical faithfulness and convictions at one pole and cultural sensitivity at the other.

en: Why do Christians find it difficult to keep together Biblical thinking and penetrating cultural analysis?

CW: I don’t think they always have. Perhaps the greatest example is Augustine in his City of God. He is very complimentary to Roman culture at points; he can appreciate the achievements of Rome, but he has not sacrificed his commitment to God’s word in order to get there. It is clear in the City of God that he is fully living inside the story of the Bible as it unfolds from Genesis to Revelation.

There is no sense in his writing that there is tension between cultural sensitivity and Biblical faithfulness. It is not that the more he appreciates Rome the looser he has to sit to the Bible; in fact, the opposite is the case. The deeper he gets into Roman culture the more the Bible sparkles for him in comparison to it. Why is that not the norm?

My hunch is that we have assumed that there has got to be a zero-sum game between the Bible being antithetical to culture and the Bible fulfilling the aspirations of culture. Whether this has got something to do with Niebuhr’s five categories in Christ and Culture, so that you either have to say that there is an antithesis between Christ and culture, or you sign up to the view that Christ fulfils everything that culture aspires to, I don’t know. I think that this is a tragic false dichotomy. It is not Augustine’s dichotomy; there is no straight line for him from late Roman culture to Christ, they are utterly opposed to each other. And yet he also shows how Christ fulfils the aspirations of late Roman culture.

I think he gets it from Paul; it resonates with 1 Corinthians:1, where Paul is speaking of Greek wisdom and Jewish signs. Paul says that God has made foolish the wisdom of the world: there is your antithesis. He also says that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom: that is your fulfilment, that is how God’s foolishness fulfils the desire for wisdom.

I think it comes down to embracing the Biblical truth that doesn’t choose between antithesis and fulfilment.

en: What are the instincts that shaped Augustine’s thinking in the City of God, and how can we develop the same instincts in the 21st century?

CW: I think there are six ways in which the City of God can be a helpful pattern for us today.

First, Augustine is both an insider and an outsider to his culture. He is an insider in that he knows Cicero and the other Roman gods backwards; his native language is Roman. But he is also an outsider: he always looks at it as a visitor to a foreign land; late Roman culture often just looks plain weird to him, and sometimes he pokes fun at it. I think this is because his home in the Biblical storyline gives him a critical distance.

Secondly, it is important that he critiques the whole of Roman culture. He looks at how it fits together, or rather how it does not fit together but contradicts itself.

Thirdly, he uses the whole of the Bible to do this. He does not merely use his favourite Bible verses; he takes his time to construct a framework based on the whole Bible.

Fourthly, his critique of late Roman culture is not superficial. He does not merely take the Romans’ opinions of themselves and assume that this is what is going on. He suggests that culture is an expression of particular loves, and that the two cities are formed by two loves, the love of self and the love of God. This really helps him to get under the skin of the culture and look at the deep patterns that are shaping it. That is a really important model for us when we see something on the news: what love is driving this attitude or action?

Fifthly, he does not choose between antithesis and fulfilment. Nor does he take a middle ground; he is fully behind antithesis and fully behind fulfilment.

Sixthly, he stresses that the city of God and the earthly city are intertwined for the moment. You can’t clearly distinguish between the two cities right now, but you will be able to at the Eschaton. They will be divided. Here we have a realism and a humility about the fact that the church as an institution is full of sinful people and it is not in the fullest sense the city of God. It is a messy institution like everything else. But the fact that the two cities will be divided at the end does give us a clarity of vision: the messiness is not the final word.

en: You say: ‘The power of the Biblical witness is in the whole Biblical story.’ What do you mean by that?

CW: I mean that it’s important that everything in the Bible is understood in the context of the whole Bible. If we don’t have a sense of the shape of the Biblical narrative it is going to be very easy to misunderstand and misapply particular truths, in the same way that if you read any single chapter of Jane Eyre, you’re probably going to make assumptions about the rest of the novel that are likely not true.

I think that the Bible has a unique way of looking at reality, but that unique view only emerges as you take the whole Biblical narrative into account. There is this sweep in the Bible: Creation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation, that is incredibly fruitful as a paradigm for looking at culture and engaging in cultural analysis and critique.

en: A key word you use is ‘diagonalise’. Can you define it for us – and how does it differ from the idea of balance?

CW: It is a word for describing a way in which the Bible time and time again relates to the dualisms that are everywhere in modern culture. I try to show that these dualisms are very often Biblical truths that have been dismembered from their Biblical context, wrenched away from other Biblical truths, and set in opposition to each other.

Diagonalisation tries to show that this very opposition is reductive, unnecessary and damaging. The Bible doesn’t split these two things to begin with. Let me give an example: think about the image of God and the way in which that Biblical motif affirms both the dignity of human beings because we have a special place in the creation, (and a particular honour) and also humbles us because it denies deity to us. We are greatly honoured, but we are also humbled. If you look at the way the modern world thinks about human beings, speaking in generalities there are two broad tendencies: one of them is to exalt and over-inflate human value and worth; almost to deify ourselves. We try to remake reality according to our own sense of how it should be or according to our own desire: we deify ourselves. Or we reduce the value and worth of human beings to the point where we are either equivalent to a machine or to any other animal. These two tendencies are taking two aspects of the image of God motif, separating them from each other and then opposing them to each other. You end up with this awkward situation where you either have to deify or humiliate human beings.

To diagonalise that would be simply to say that both of those are reductive heresies of a more complex Biblical truth. So it is not a balance between the two whereby you start with the wonderful Biblical reality of the image of God, and then modernity comes along and dismembers it and sets those parts of the Biblical whole into opposition to each other. It is not saying that everybody is half right and we need to find some wishy-washy position between the two. The way modernity thinks is derivative of richer Biblical truths.

en: How important in our thinking and practice is the idea that God is relational and has made us relational beings?

CW: The Bible does not have a monopoly on thinking about relationships, but there is a profligacy to the relationships that we have in the Bible that isn’t there in modernity.

Biblically speaking I am in relationship with my family, creation, my brothers and sisters in Christ, and those outside the church. Broadly speaking what modernity does is reduce this complexity. It has two fundamental categories: you start with the individual and then you have the state. What you end up with, which is brought out clearly in social contract theory, is a relationship between atomised individuals and one centralised authority. That is so impoverished compared to the Christian view. A lot of the mess we make of ourselves in the modern world can be traced back to this dumbing down of the Bible’s relational complexity.

en: What would you like the book to achieve?

CW: A new confidence that the most sensitive and the most incisive cultural engagement presses hard into God’s word. You do not need to draw back from the Bible in order to do good cultural criticism, you actually have to press further into it. To have a sense that it is good and appropriate to be on the front foot about culture, as well as being willing to defend the teaching of the Bible. Christianity has a surprising and fresh vision to offer.

en: If this book had a soundtrack, what would it be?

CW: I tend to work in silence, so there is no soundtrack when I was writing.

One piece that did punctuate its writing from time to time was Worthy is the Lamb from Handel’s Messiah. Particularly as I was composing the final chapters that was the music that was resonating most in my mind.

en: Thank you, Chris. I saw the beauty of God’s character and unfolding plan reflected at many points in this stimulating book.