#166 | Biblical Critical Theory, Pt. 1 | Christopher Watkin

I sort of knew the Bible was one story, but I didn't really know. I didn't sense viscerally feel the thrill of understanding that from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, this is one coherent narrative.

And that penny dropping was huge.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Water, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today in our show we're having another one of our deep conversations.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you go deep? Did that just happen? I mean, did that just happen? You know, I look at our world today and I go, what is going on?

Sometimes I'll see a headline and I'm like, did that really just happen? Is this what we're talking about today? Has the whole world gone nuts?

It feels like we just went on this three hour tour and now we're stuck in this crazy world that we can't get out of. I don't know about you, but that's how I feel.

I feel like every time I turn around, it's just getting crazier and crazier and crazier and I need to get my bearings, I need to keep myself focused because I'm in bizarro world right now. That's what it feels like. I don't know if you feel that way, but that is exactly how I feel.

And I really need someone to come alongside me and really help me understand what's going on and how we got here.

I'm tired of the memes, I'm tired of the just quotes that we throw out online and our social media profiles that try to give these really just, I don't know, kitschy ways of describing the world, these little cliches. And we reduce it. We don't have the complexity or the minds to understand it and untangle everything that's going on.

But every once in a while, God brings people into our midst that really can come alongside and point it out to us and help us to understand it. And that's why I'm really excited about the conversation that we're having today. I had an opportunity to chat with Chris Watkin.

Chris is an author, philosopher, and all around deep thinker. He's British, but he's teaching French studies in Australia. That's a pretty interesting combo.

I mean, he's written books on philosophy, including his latest book, Biblical Critical Theory and so many People are talking about it now. This isn't a small book, though, and I have to say, it's not an easy read. I mean, it is 600 pages plus.

And when you hear someone that is a philosopher writing a book about the Bible, it is what you think it is, but it's not an easy read. But it is an enlightening one.

And it may well be the most important book that I have read this year because it helped me to think bigger about the Bible and its story, about how the Bible helps me to see the world and understand the world around me. And I'm not just talking about worldview here.

I'm talking about how different philosophical movements have actually shaped how we think in the here and now. And that helps me to make sense of it, to understand where that comes from.

And that story is just as valid as any modern story that we tell ourselves today. We have to learn how to frame our world. We have to understand that there is a story in which all other stories find meaning.

And that's what he helps us to do. And he lays the groundwork for every other story that might even try to critique it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I want you to meet Christopher Watkin and begin a journey through his book, Biblical Critical Theory. But before we get to that, we need your help.

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Now, without further ado, let's get to my conversation with Christopher Watkin. Happy listening. Chris Watkin. Welcome to Apollo's water.

Thank you, Travis. It's wonderful to be here.

You say that to all the podcasters. I know you do, but it is.

Seriously. I'm not going to lie. You mean it? Every time.

Listen, we get to talk about the most wonderful things in the universe and the most nourishing and rich things for human beings. What is there not to like?

You just made like that. The best introduction ever out of all of our show. That's going to be, like, the top highlight part. Oh.

Do you know what that means, though? That means it's downhill from here.

It's true. We've got no place to go but down. Well, are you ready for the fast five?

Let's go, I guess.

Okay, now, you have filled your book with a lot of contemporary references, and you spent some time talking about Rocky. And the reason that I want to bring this up is I actually introduced my kids to Rocky the other day. So here's my question for you.

The best Rocky movie of all.

Oh, man. I only really know Four, because that's the one that we watched on the rugby tour that I went on a hard loop on the coach.

So I'm gonna have to say Four.

It's a really good one. I mean, it is pretty good. It's with Ivan Drago, right?

That's the one, yeah.

And you've never seen any of the others?

Oh, look, I've seen little bits. I'm not sure I've seen any of them all the way through.

I know the iconic sort of, you know, going up the steps scene and little bits, but I couldn't reconstruct the story for you.

Well, it's pretty easy. He beats everybody. He goes down, and then he gets back up and goes over. I was actually disappointed because you. You talked about where it was filmed.

I actually thought it was in Russia. It was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was like, no, my childhood is ruined. Okay, you also talk about the Avengers. So here's the next question.

If you were an Avenger, what Avenger would you be and why?

Well, the first Marvel character that comes to mind is Rocket Raccoon. I'm not sure if that's some sort of Freudian thing going on in my mind there.

Oh, look, you know, I'd be someone who comes on and makes the tea and sort of makes sure they're fed and watered. You know, I'm not a huge Captain America. Certainly not a Hulk. My goodness me. I would be the anti Hulk.

If there's an Avenger called Anti Hulk who never goes to the gym, that's me.

You could be. I think you would be the Young Groot.

Because the Groot is just kind of quiet and on the sideline and then just totally wakes up and then surprises everybody.

So you mean I only ever say one word?

No, definitely. Well, that word means a lot of different things, so it translates to a lot of different things. Different things.

I'll take it. The Young Groot.

The Young Groot. Number three, You're a professor of French studies. But what's your favorite place? And I'm assuming you've been to France.

So what's your favorite place to visit in France? And what is the best part of French cuisine? Pick a dish.

Well, the favorite place for me in France is a place that I have one of my most treasured memories. It's the Place des Vosges in Paris. So it's not super central tourist area, but it's pretty touristy.

And I remember very distinctly sitting there with Alice and my wife. One day they'd put lavender in the square, so it looked like a field of lavender. And there we were.

I was sipping my espresso and she was having her cappuccino. I think it was. It was just one of those moments that stays in your memory forever. One of those eternal moments.

So that's my favorite place cuisine wise? Well, the day that I asked Alison to marry me, we went to this beautiful French. I did it in Paris.

We went to this beautiful French restaurant and I had garlic snails. And so that, again, is just wrapped up with the most precious memories for me. And so I'm going to go for the garlic snail like snails.

I've never had garlic snails before.

You're missing out, Travis. It's a unique taste and a unique texture as well.

Never had that before. You've made me want to try it.

That's one of the things I do love about the show is I get to meet so many fascinating people and I hear about all these dishes because oftentimes I ask questions about food because I like food. And so I've just never had. I don't think I've ever had garlic snails. And I really want to go. But in Paris, nonetheless, that makes it even better.

Gotta be in Paris.

Number four, you've traveled quite a bit. You've been to the US Quite a bit, too. The thing that you just don't get about Americans is what.

Oh, boy, this is a minefield, isn't it? You're setting Me up to get hammered. Oh.

The thing that I love about Americans is, and a thing that I find quite hard is the directness because I'm British and we never say what we mean, but we all know what we mean. We can all navigate those circumlocutions and paraphrases and we know what it really means.

And then I go to America and people just let it all hang out. Well, I was expecting you to be really coy and ironic and no, you're just telling me exactly what you think. And that's quite confronting.

So that's something that I struggle with, but it's also just fantastic because you know where you stand.

All right, number five, if you could have a cup of tea with just one philosopher, who would it be and.

Why Is Jesus a philosopher?

Well, no, I mean, he could be, but in this illustration, we're not going to have Jesus because he could be. I mean, he's everything. He's everything, which is wonderful. Well, let's go with a non biblical person.

Okay, I'm going to give you two answers. The first is the guy that I wrote a book on recently but never got the chance to meet face to face.

So I'd love having read almost all I think of what he wrote. I'd love to be able to chat with him. His name was Michel Serre, French philosopher. Same generation as David Foucault.

Those guys, much less well known, but becoming much more know now. Love to chat with him about the things I read in his book.

And I think the other person, although it would be very intimidating cup of tea to have, would be Blaise Pascal, the 17th century. Everything, man, you know, like he was a pioneer of mathematician. He developed like probability theory and he was crazily wise.

And then he wrote this amazing book of apologetics. It was still in fragments in his day. He didn't get to finish it. Called the Pensee.

And just to listen to how he talks about the culture of his day is absolutely fascinating. And I would be really interested to see what he made of our day.

I might be depressed of what he would see at our day.

Insightfully depressed, though.

Oh, yes, yes. Their ability to see so many different things is overwhelming really at times. How precinct and how they could see where the cultures were headed.

Oh, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Just one line on him. You got me going now. He was talking about distraction and amusing ourselves to death back in the 17th century.

Really?

Yeah. For him, the big thing about life in his day was distraction. People just too busy to stop and think.

And if that was the case, pre telephone, pre tv, pre pretty much all the technology we take for granted, what on earth you would make about it, I have no idea.

Let's transition then a little bit because I'm very curious to hear your story, where you grew up. You said you're British and how did you get from. I mean, just growing up, learning to want to be a philosopher.

That always fascinates me, the people that want to be philosophers. But then to write a book, I mean, as the title is Biblical Critical Theory.

I know there's a lot there, but give us a little bit of a bit insight into your background and your faith.

Well, I didn't grow up as a Christian. In the early years of my life, I guess I would have called myself normal, not even an atheist. Like Christianity wasn't even an option.

It was, of course, there's no God, that's ridiculous. And I was happy. Like I wasn't. There was no God shaped hole to use in other Pascal's images.

That was like, this is just life as it is and I'm enjoying mine, thank you very much. I don't need anything else.

And the short version of a much longer story is that a trip to the battlefields of the First World War with my school at the time woke me up to bigger questions. Not to God at that stage necessarily, but I was invited on that trip to go along to church by a friend of mine. So I went along.

You do that sort of thing when you're 15. Not expecting anything particularly to change in my world. But she was a good friend and so we went along.

And then over the course of, I guess about two years, I got to the point where I couldn't walk away from Christianity.

I don't think I was a Christian yet, but there was something about the way that Christians loved each other and something about Jesus in the Bible that I didn't have categories for. I couldn't explain. Anyway, I became a Christian just after that time, and I guess even before that I was really interested in big questions.

That's probably one thing that drew me to Christianity, and that's also why I love philosophy.

People say, don't they sometimes, that Christianity and philosophy are in conflict, But I've always found a real kinship between them because they're two of the groups of people, two of the very few groups of people in our society who are actually asking the big questions and are not just distracting themselves, as Pascal would put it on a daily basis, but are stopping to think, hey, what is this all about? What is the meaning of this thing that we call life? And I love that. And that's, I think, why I love the French philosophers.

So there's a very caricaturely Anglophone way of doing philosophy, which is you break things down and then analyze them. You're very careful and, you know, you, you proceed very cautiously.

And then there's a fetch way of doing philosophy, which is you, you grab yourself an espresso, you sit in the terrace of a cafe, you know, you open your notebooking, you, you write the title life. You go for it, you know, what, what is this all about? And that, that's the sort of philosophy that I love.

You start with a big question, start where you are with existence, and say, what is this all about? And I love it. I love following people as they think through those sorts of questions.

So, you know, most philosophers I read I don't agree with, but it's really interesting seeing how they piece things together, how they try and justify their position, what arguments they put forward, what they think's worth looking at and talking about out there in the world, and just to put yourself in someone else's shoes for a few hours and walk around and try and get a sense of what the world looks like to them. I think if I didn't do philosophy as my day job, it's just a really pleasant pastime as well.

It's really fascinating trying to think your way into how other people see the world. And I suppose that's where my interest in philosophy comes from.

And then, of course, you know, you've got to, you've got to write books about it in order to sustain an academic career. So that's what I do.

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Let's transition into the book then, because you're talking about philosophy, you're talking about these big questions of life. And I don't think I've ever encountered a book.

And I know there's a lot of books out there that I've never read that have tried to encapsulate so many different pieces of life as your book. I consider myself a pretty well read person.

I mean, I know that there's a lot of people out there that read a whole lot more than I do, but I've never seen a book so pregnant with philosophy, sociology, missiology, I mean, biblical studies, contemporary culture. I mean, you cross the gamut. It's as if I'm watching two different parts of the map.

Like there's like the Bible world and then there's a contemporary world. And it's like I'm seeing flight patterns just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, over and over and over again.

What was the impetus behind this book? Biblical Critical Theory.

It was very personal, really. As an undergraduate in a large secular university studying arts and humanities, you become sort of an essay factory, don't you?

You're, you're thrown these books, you know, every week, every couple of weeks, you know, here's five books of Marx, here's a pile of Freud, here's some Nietzsche, you know, here's some Derrida, here's some Foucault. Go and go and pump out an essay on them, which, which I loved. It was fantastic. But I really want to understand how these people see the world.

And I'm only getting about four or five days to write these essays on each of them. And that was a wonderfully intoxicating sort of rollercoaster ride. And then there was this other part of my life.

I suppose it's what you were just talking about, this map with two different continents, which was my Christian life.

I was part of a church that took the Bible really seriously, by God's grace, and wanted to teach it thoroughly and have it sort of work its way into our lives. And that was fantastic as well. And there was, there were precious few places where those two worlds touched in my life at the time.

And I looked at all these different theoreticians, these critical theories, different ways of viewing the world and society and diagnosing what's wrong with it and saying what it should be like. And when I read the Bible, I thought, there's a similar set of ideas here.

The Bible has a sense of what life is about and should be and what's wrong with society and how it can be fixed. Now, it's more than that, of course. The Bible is the word of God that makes us wise for salvation, and it thoroughly equips us for every good work.

And all of that is absolutely true. But in addition to that, it is also performing these similar moves of critical theory.

And it was frustrating to me that there was no way on earth that the Bible got a seat at the table in the units I was looking at. You know, we did Marx, Freud, Nietzsche. There's no way we were going to do Paul or Jesus in those units.

And similarly, at church, the sort of the philosophers that I was studying just didn't really come up. No particular fault of the church. It's just that, you know, nobody had particularly read those people.

And so I was thinking, how do these worlds talk to each other? If the Bible unfolded a critical theory in the way that these different theoreticians are doing in my units, what would it look like?

And how would it engage with these other critical theories that are being thrown around? And it really niggled at me. And I got to the point where I thought, look, if I do write a book, I think that's the book that I want to try and write.

I want to try and bring those two worlds into conversation and show that the Bible does have a critical theory among all the other things that the Bible is doing as well, and that it is actually quite a surprising one to modern ears. Like, this is not your grandmother's Bible, in a sense.

This is not what you think the Bible is and not what you've been inoculated against thinking the Bible teaches.

There are some really quite powerful, explosive and delicious things that the Bible says about our society that take us off guard sometimes, but also set forth a really beguiling vision, a really attractive vision for how society could be. I wanted to try and share some of that excitement, but also to put it down on paper for myself.

I don't know about you, but I always find I don't really know what I want to say until I've written it. And I think through writing.

And so I knew that writing the book would be a huge blessing for me because it would make me think through these ideas and pursue them with a greater rigor than I had done. And that the story of how it actually came about is I guess, a story with two chapters really.

The first one was the first Bible overview that I ever did where I was a junior leader on a summer camp, a Church of England summer camp, where the 14 to 18 year olds were being sort of taught the Bible and doing lots of crazy games. And I was one of the 18, 19 year old junior leaders. And part of our program was that we had a teaching session every day and it was a Bible overview.

And I struggled to find words to express what a thrill it was to have my first Bible overview. I sort of knew the Bible was one story, but I didn't really know.

I didn't sense, viscerally feel the thrill of understanding that from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, this is one coherent narrative. Not a simple narrative, not a one layered narrative, but nevertheless one story from beginning to end.

The story that makes sense of everything, the story inside which our universe exists.

And that penny dropping was huge and helped me to see that what the Bible brings to the table of critical theories, that is really unique and for people wanting to chase up sort of footnotes, Herman Doyvit is really good on this, is that the Christian view, the biblical view of reality is a story. It's not a static set of principles or forces or laws. It is irreducibly narrative and that makes all the difference in the world.

So that was the first thing. And the second thing that helped me to see what a book like this might look like was my first encounter with Augustine's City of God.

It was a rainy week in the Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington.

I was on holiday with my parents and I took the City of God along because it's one of those books that you probably ought to have read as a Christian. Didn't really know much about it, so it was really big. Thought I'd try and do it on holiday. I think it rained all week.

And so there was lots of time in the house just reading and I plowed through it. And to be honest, Travis, most of it just went over my head. All the references to the gods and the heroes. I didn't know what he was talking about.

But the thing that stayed with me was paradigm shifting, which is that he uses the Bible storyline in the second half of the City of God. He just tells a story from before Genesis with the angels to Revelation.

He uses that as a framework to critique late Roman culture and a framework so powerful that he ends up telling the story of Rome better than Rome can tell its own story. He out narrates, to use a little phrase from John Milbank, he out narrates Rome at its own story.

And from the little bit that I understood of the City of God, I thought this is the way to do it.

If you want to try and engage with late modern culture in a way that brings the Bible to bear in its sort of full throttled force and nuance and carefulness on the culture, this is the way that it needs to be done. Unfolding the whole Bible story as a lens through which to look at the culture.

And so with those two bits in place, it just took a lot of reading and thinking and listening to sermons and trying to work out how that biblical narrative engages with late modern culture at its different key turning point.

I know that they watching me trying to figure me out like what's my life like? Am I committed to vow? Perception is relaxed relying on what you trained your sightlight. So what you see is whatever gets permitted by your eyes.

Right?

I'm guessing that it's okay if they follow me as long as they know that the praise is never known.

Not for me know not to be condescending my philosophy this artist represented should never become the God of me crows become the cons artist kind of me but to become content with this content.

Looking at the book for a moment, just the title help us with I know it's very simple. Biblical Critical Theory. Why that title though? In preparation for this conversation saw someone had posted a video about your book.

So I went to watch it and they spent the first maybe five to ten minutes going off on the title and I didn't think a thing about it at first. I went well, oh, I'll ask him what is the point of the title?

And help us to even understand most of our audience isn't necessarily in the world of academia, so why do we need to understand or interact with critical theory? I think you've alluded to it already, but I'd like to hear more.

Yes, it has been a bit controversial, hasn't it?

In a way that I I guess I wasn't particularly expecting, but I'm not surprised by so let me just reconstruct how I arrived at the title and then if we want to do a little bit about why it's become a talking point, we can do that.

So my first encounter with the term critical theory was in a unit that I did as an undergraduate called Modern Critical Theory where we went through a series of post Kantian so 19th and 20th century philosophers and social theorists. There was a week on Marx, there was a week on Foucault, week on Derrida, week on Kristeva, if I remember correctly.

And so that was what I thought critical theory was. And that was the way that the term was used in the circles that I was moving in in those days.

It's a post Kantian way of engaging with society that seeks to critique social norms, critique the status quo, in view of a vision of how society ought to be, in view of something better. And that's what I think the Bible provides. And that's why I'm calling it biblical critical theory.

So the way that I try and parse out that idea in the book is to say that these critical theories are doing three things. They're making certain things in the world viable. In other words, they become believable, they become possible for you.

So one example from critical theory would be, you might laugh at the idea of a socialist revolution. You just might think, that's never going to happen. That is absolutely impossible.

And then you read a whole bunch of Marx and you gradually come to see that I can get now how, at least he thinks this is going to happen. It makes sense. It becomes a possible thing in your world. So it's made viable by reading that particular author. And the Bible does the same thing.

So, you know, most people today would just laugh at you or just be really puzzled if you talked about the idea of trusting the promises of the God of the Bible. Like, what does that even mean?

And yet, you know, you read the account of Abraham and you read the, the way that the psalmists struggle with God, and you read the New Testament and Jesus, and you gradually come to see, okay, now I understand what it would be like to trust God's promises. That becomes a viable thing for me. I may still not do it, but I can see what it would feel like. I can see what it looks like.

It's a part of my world now. So the Bible has made that viable. The second thing that critical theorists do is they make certain things in the world visible.

One great powerful example of this is the way in which 20th century feminisms have made visible the way in which women are unfairly, unjustly treated in ways that may not have been visible previously.

So people may simply ignore them or simply not registered, not seen that certain ways that women have been treated historically have been very unjust. Feminism shines a light on that and says, look, you've got to notice this in society. And again, the Bible is Also making things visible.

You know, you may have seen a thousand sunsets in your life, but never have thought the heavens declare the glory of God. I'm seeing something of God's glory in those colors in the sky.

And then, you know, you read the psalm and it says, notice this, like when you see your next sunset, remember that is showing you God's glory, and it is made visible for you in a way that just may have flown under your radar previously. And the third thing that critical theorists do that the Bible also does is they make certain things valuable.

And one characteristic example of this from 20th century critical theories is that many of them really prize the transgression of norms. If there's a norm or a traditional, chances are we ought to destabilize it or transgress it or upset it in some way.

That's a characteristic, a signature move of these critical theories. And the Bible similarly teaches us what to value in the world.

So my pre Christian self would have looked at you askance if you'd have said, you know what? In your life, serving other people is something that you should really seek to do. It's one of the things you should really value.

I'd have said, like what? What universe are you living in? Why on earth would that be beneficial to me?

But then you can't read far into the New Testament or the Old without seeing that this is something that God and Jesus really, really value. You know, the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

And then in Philippians 2, you know, Paul says, have this same mind in you that was also in Christ Jesus being a very nature God and so forth. And you say, okay, well, I've got to rewire my thinking then, because serving other people is clearly something that's very, very important for God.

And if it's important for him, it ought to be important for me. So this thing should be valuable. And so on.

All these different points, the Bible is performing these same moves as these critical theories are doing, making things viable, making them visible, making them valuable. And that's the sense in which there is a critical theory in the Bible.

I called it biblical critical theory rather than Christian or theological critical theory, because I think because of the spell that that first Bible overview cast on me that I haven't recovered from yet. The treasure is in the text. It is the Bible story itself that is the powder keg that sort of explodes into culture.

And, you know, theologians can be helpful in pointing us to certain bits of The Bible, but where it really gets exciting, where the blood really starts racing and the heart really starts beating, is in the biblical text. Now, I really wanted to make that the heart of the book. Not this or that theologian, however you know, worthy they are. But.

But just to, in a sense, to get theology out of the way and let the reader encounter the texts face to face, you know, get their nose dirty in the Bible. And so that's why it's biblical rather than, you know, Christian or theological.

And finally, I think that the reason that the title is a bit perplexing for some people is that there's a different sense of critical theory that's risen to prominence in our society, in Western society, particularly U.S. society, in recent years, and it sort of sucked all the oxygen out of the bigger sense.

So when people think of critical theory today, it's usually certainly in the news media, it's usually Frankfurt School critical theory, which a bunch of German and Austrian philosophers early in the 20th century who were using Marx to try and read culture. You know, we get this term cultural Marxism. That's what they were trying to do.

And even narrowly the idea today of critical race theory, taking ideas from Derrick Bell at Harvard in the late 20th century and other scholars, and trying to read race through this critical lens.

And I think quite understandably, because that's the only sort of critical theory that really gets talked about, that's what most people think it is today.

And so they read the title Biblical Critical Theory, and they think, I'm doing Christianity as Marxism, or I'm doing critical race theory through the Bible or something like that.

Part of the reason for choosing the title is to push back against that narrower sense and to make a case for this broader sense of critical theory for our understanding of society, partly because I think if the narrow sense is the only sense we've got, we're going to find it very hard to understand what the critical theorists themselves are talking about.

It's like you cut anything out from the broader ecosystem in which it flourishes and that nourishes it, and it becomes really hard to understand what that thing is. We don't exist. Ideas don't exist in isolation. They have histories.

And so if we just focus on the Frankfurt School thinking that it sort of parachuted out of the sky at some point with all these weird ideas, it just becomes really hard to engage with it meaningfully and to understand what it's saying.

And so I do want to say that this broader sense of critical theory, this post Kantian sense of what these different critical theorists are doing is really important. And if we only have the narrative sense that I think we're selling ourselves short in our cultural critique.

So my time has come Lay my weapons down every avenue Run dry and simple Plank. And I can't wait to find the reasons I can't wait to feel the seasons on my face on my face, on my face.

There's so much that you cover that I think it's almost shocking to the system for so many Christians. Even as I was walking through the book and reading through it, I see how you walk through.

I mean, you start in Genesis and then you build a case piece by piece. As you're looking at the different genre, I mean, you go through the fall. You're talking about Babel, you're talking about the covenant.

I mean, you're, you're moving us through the Scripture and you're weaving in this contemporary cultural framework at the same time where you are using the scripture and the power structures and the plausibility structures. If I could go that far, you can correct me and showing this. As you said, I love how you use three V's.

By the way, the preacher in me was like, hey, that'll preach, that'll preach.

Those three V's really do come alive because you help people to see the contemporary culture through the lens of scripture and how many of the issues that they faced at that time are not so different from the time that we're in right now. And I think that's where people, they get that part of it. They might get lost in the terminology critical theory. They get.

They weirded out because of what you just mentioned. But when you start helping people to see, I can show you our world through the lens of the Scripture.

That awakens the imagination in a greater way to see also, as you said, the viability and how the Bible really does out narrate. I want to stop on that for a moment, talk about what it means.

You alluded to it again with Augustine, but what does it mean that the Bible out narrates our world?

There are certain narratives in our society that try to explain pretty much everything, including Christianity.

So that the Freudian, for example, would say to you, I can tell you what Christianity is actually better than Christians can themselves, because it's all to do with projecting a father figure into heaven and it's sort of sublimated desire for the Father and so forth. And I can tell you a story about Christianity that really explains it at a fundamental level. The Darwinist could do the same.

You know, Christianity has arisen as a, I don't know, sort of a survival structure. And there are evolutionary reasons why this would be a good story to believe in in order to survive.

And so I can tell you what Christians believe better than they can explain themselves. And there are a number of these stories in society, all trying to out narrate the others.

In other words, trying to fit all the other stories within their framework.

Say I'm the big story and all the other ones fit in inside me and I can make sense of them all actually really better than they make sense of themselves. Northrop Fry, the literary critic, has a very interesting argument. He says for the longest time that was the Bible in our society.

The Bible was a story that made sense of all the other stories, the story inside which we live.

But sometime, Perhaps in the 19th century, the Bible stopped being that and it became a story that we scrutinized rather than the glasses that we, that we viewed the world through. And other stories came to make sense of the Bible. And that's the position in which we find ourselves today.

You know, any number of people will queue up to tell you what the Bible really is and how it really came about and what's really going on with Christianity. You know, from, I don't know, Dan Brown down, you know, this is the real story. But the thing is the Bible also does that to all the other stories.

The Bible tells this grand sort of sweeping story of, of the universe that explains why other people are telling the stories that they are and why they think the way they do. And you know, as, as Augustine does with Rome.

The sort of, the claim is that the Bible actually explains Rome better than the Romans can, better than their own story. And it explains late modernity better than the story that late moderns tell about themselves.

And that's, that's what out narrating means, making sense other stories of other positions better than they're able to account for themselves. Pointing out the contradictions or the blind spots or the holes in other stories.

Explaining why on the premises of those stories there must necessarily be those holes and then showing why there aren't similar holes in one's own story.

Yes, to those who don't believe, this is the hour. Hour. You see, they will make ladders out.

Of obstacles and stepping on some roadblocks, sleep over the lines that say we.

Won'T cross, but you can't nothing. They won't scale otherwise if it to hold us. You actually do something that I had not seen before. I'm sure others have heard of It.

But this term diagonalization, that was a new term for me. And you show these things that seem to be contradictory at face value, and then you show how the Bible connects the two.

Can you help us to understand more about what this diagonalization means? Because I had to read it twice before I really understood it. Maybe four or five times before I really.

Before I really got what you were trying to lay down there. So explain to us diagonalization. Did I even say it right? Diagonalization. I feel like I'm in Finding Nemo. You know, like. Like anemones. See?

Anemone diagonalization.

You got it. That's. That's exactly the way to pronounce it. It's a long word, but it needn't be. And in a sense, the word itself isn't important.

Like, you can call it what you want. The important thing is to put a label on it so that you can identify it.

Because I think it's something that Christians have done in cultural criticism for millennia.

I think it's something that Augustine does in the City of God, but until you stick some sort of label on it, it tends to just pass you by and you don't recognize it.

So the reason to call it diagonalization was just in a sense to put, you know, when you have a scandal in the hospital and you drink a dye beforehand so you can see things that would remain opaque otherwise. It's just like a dye to show this thing up. Let me explain it in terms of an example, because I think that's probably the clearest way to do it.

So in Genesis 1, there's this wonderful picture of human beings created in the image of God. And there are two aspects to that image, and they're both beautiful and wonderful. The first is that it gives human beings an amazing dignity.

Of all the things in God's amazing creation, only one thing is made in the image of God. So, you know, Beautiful School of Wales is not in the image of God.

That glorious sunset we were talking about a moment ago isn't in the image of God the greatest symphony ever written, isn't in the image of God, the greatest painting ever painted, etc. Only human beings are in the image of God and say, wow, that is huge dignity, a huge sort of precious thing that we are.

But there's also a sense in which that very same image is really quite humbling for human beings because we're in the image of God, which means we're not God. We're not. If you want to put it this way, we're not Top dog in the universe. That place is reserved for God alone. And we are his image.

And so our identity is derivative and contingent on his. We're not self defining, we're not self sustaining, we're an image of someone else, of God.

But what modern anthropology does is it sort of takes these two biblical principles and rips them apart from each other. And so you'll have some modern anthropologies that go really hard on the humbling of humanity side of things.

And they will say things like, however uncomfortable it may be to us, we've got to face the fact that we're really just machines. We are extremely complicated machines, but at the end of the day, we're just machines.

And there are key moments in modern thought where this comes through really clearly. So first chapter of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, that great foundational text of modern political thought.

He says we are cogs and springs and strings and wheels, really human beings. And then Julientrie wrote a book called l'homme Machine, the man machine, the human machine.

So there's this strand of thinking that says really we're just complicated machines or really we're just animals. There's nothing qualitatively different.

And there's a sense in which, that grasps in a, in a distorted way something of the truth of Genesis 1 in that, you know, human beings are on the creature side of the creator creature distinction. We're not God created on the same day as the other animals.

That there's a, there is a certain, you know, there's an animality about the, the description of human beings in, in Genesis 1. There's a creatureliness about. And then there's another strand of modern anthropology which really figures humans as gods, essentially.

And John Milbank is brilliant on this in the early chapters of Theology and Social Theory where he traces the way in which the God of voluntarism. So a God whose will is unstoppable and unquestionable becomes the norm for human beings in modernity. So this go to voluntarism, for example.

If he wants 2 and 2 to equal 36, 2 plus 2 to equal 36, he can, because nothing can stand in the way of his will, not even the laws of logic.

And Milbanke argues now, I think it's a persuasive argument that there's a certain modern anthropology that puts humans in the place of that voluntarist God. You must decide the meaning of your life for yourself. You must decide your fundamental identity for yourself.

In other words, your will is the only thing that shapes reality in this voluntarist sort of way, and the only thing that should shape reality for you. And so therefore modern anthropology has these two ungainly streams to it. You're a machine. Oh, and also, by the way, you're a voluntarist God.

So go and live your life in psychological peace trying to conjure with those two incompatible anthropological elements. And then the modern Christian cultural critic comes along and diagonalizes those two streams of modern anthropology.

Not by saying, oh, we need to meet in the middle. Then perhaps we're half animal and half voluntarist God. Let's split the difference. No, the Christian cultural critic says, wait a minute.

These two incompatible, seemingly modern anthropologists have actually dismembered a beautiful biblical, harmonious whole, the image of God.

And they've hacked off these two limbs, the creatureliness and humility of human beings on the one side and the exalted, dignified status of human beings on the other side. They've hacked off those two limbs and then they set them in opposition to each other.

So now you choose, are you an animal, are you a machine on the one hand, or are you a voluntary Scot on the other hand? And so the way to diagonalize them is to say, well, let's not start with that opposition.

Let's start with the beautiful harmony of the image of God that has this principle of humility and this principle of exaltation in it, but manages to conjure with them in a way that they're not in opposition to each other. And so it's, if you like to remember it's the opposite of dismember, to remember the biblical truth and to say this dichotomy is false to begin with.

I think the reason that I prefer that example to explain it is that I think a lot of people have got the idea that diagonalization, or what's sometimes called the third way, is about splitting the difference. It's about saying we're half machines and we're half gods. I don't even know what that means. That doesn't even make sense.

And so it's not some sort of woolly cardigan and slippers wearing compromise where you try and sort of meet in the middle. Whatever opposition you've got, whatever dichotomy you've got, let's try and meet in the middle. It's not.

That is, let's try and find the biblical truth that the different holes of this dichotomy are misrepresenting and. And dismembering. And twisting.

Talk about deep. I mean, it's so much that's there. I want to go back and listen again. And I'm the one who did the interview and had the conversation.

I just found myself going, huh, wow. Yeah. What? That's incredible. I need to stop and think about this for a little bit. I mean, it is all the time.

And I have to tell you, Chris was as gracious and humble of a guest that I've ever had. You know, what you don't hear is all the stuff that happens when we first get on and set up the background conversation.

I was really impressed with him as a person, as a Christian, because he has a genuine interest in what we are doing and even stopping to pray for us. I was really genuinely blessed. And I know that there's a lot to take in with conversations like this.

And I know that some of you feel like it's over your head and you're like, I don't have a clue what he was talking about today. And you wonder how this matters for the life that you live.

You wonder, how can we give any credibility to some of these thinkers that Watkin talks about? After all, many are opposed to or seems like everything we believe is Christians, right?

You know, it all comes back to the stories that we use to frame how we see the world. What Chris points us to is the fact that everyone is trying to figure out how to live in the world, how to make sense of it. We all are.

And the Bible deals with the same kinds of issues that other religions and philosophies do. We should actually expect that because we all face the same kinds of problems and the same kinds of decisions and desires.

The difference is in the solutions that we look to. When people look for solutions to common problems and leave God out, well, you know, guess what? They're going to come up with problematic solutions.

If Watkin is right, that critical theory is at root upending the status quo and social norms, that it makes things viable or believable, visible and valuable, and we think he's right in that, then the Bible offers the most important, most robust and most compelling critique of not just our culture, but all cultures. Just like the example of St.

Augustine and giving a better narrative a story account of Rome than Rome did of itself, so too, does the Bible do a better job of telling a complete story about our modern reality than any, and I mean this, than any of the various critical theories or subjects or narratives or stories out there People like Watkins are telling the academic world, hey, wait a minute. You aren't letting the Bible speak to this, but it does a better job than you do.

His process of diagonalization helps us to see that there's a reason that contemporary understandings of humanity are self contradictory, that they are bound to cause problems because they pit dignity and humility against one another in a cage match. See, the world splits our humanity in a way that Genesis says that it can't be split. You can't do it. You can't take wet away from water.

See, they make us, make us out to be machines on the one hand and God's on the other. And when we take an aspect of who we are and set it in opposition to another, we are bound for trouble.

Because God made us in his image dignity, but he also made us. We are creatures and therefore we should have humility. We should. The Bible does give us a better account of who we are and we can trust in that.

That's the best thing. That's the thing I want you to take away, is that God speaks to us and shows us who we are and how we are to live.

And Chris just showed us in a really kind of high academic way, according to the way that the world critiques us, especially the, the higher academic philosophical world. And he shows us with their own ammo how the story of Jesus finds its target. You know, next time we continue the conversation with Chris.

Talking about a third way approach is crucial, even if the terminology may be a little bit flawed and you'll understand when you get there. We need to think about the fundamental dichotomies we believe in as Christians compared to the false ones.

And we need to avoid the trap of efficiency and the tricky place Christians find ourselves in culturally. All that and more next time. And would you do me a favor? Would you rate this podcast?

Wherever you get podcasts, I know it's not a big deal to you and you're like, eh, I'll get to it. Can you do that now please, and write a review and just say how awesome this show is?

If you don't think the show is awesome, then don't leave a review. But you're listening. So you do think it's awesome. So stay here and make sure that you rate us.

It means a lot to us because that's the only feedback that we really have is that in downloads or you contact us online or we read these comments when we see your ratings. It means a lot. I want to thank our Apollo's water team for helping water the world for Jesus.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's watered. Stay watered, everybody. Satan.