#167 | Biblical Critical Theory, Pt. 2 | Christopher Watkin

Christians have for many centuries lived in a society that more or less agreed with us on most things, and that was shaped in a Christian way that had Christian instincts and Christian ways of seeing the world. What's new, I think, is that now we've got both of those at the same time.

So our culture is very profoundly Christian in its instincts and the ways that it thinks about things.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, 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 on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

Our last time together, we began a conversation with author and philosopher Christopher Watkin about his new book, Biblical Critical Theory. It really is a deep conversation about some of the big questions that sooner or later everyone faces. How do we view the world?

How do we account for the things that go wrong? How do we understand evil?

I mean, these are questions that everybody, and I mean everybody has to answer at some point in time, whether we're Christians or not. You have to give a reason for it. What do you do? How do you understand this? Or you just get on your phone and scroll and hope that it goes away?

Well, it doesn't. We are responsible moral agents and we need to understand how we became this way. How do we understand evil? Why is evil in the world?

How do we go about it? How have different thoughts affected us that how and shape how we view and understand the world?

You know, Watkins book is a deep dive into how the Bible answers all sorts of questions that we face in this modern world. And I have to say this, this is not an easy book. It's not. It's not a small book either. As I told you last time, it's about 600 pages plus.

And I would even say this, and I don't say this very often, it's not a book for everybody. Some of you probably don't need to read it.

But for those of you who are up for a serious challenge, who are helping to set the course for the way we think about things in this modern world as Christians. Well, this may be exactly the book for you.

The subtitle how the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture gives us a clue at gist of how big of a project this is. If you haven't listened to the last episode, please stop and go back and listen to that one.

Because this is not going to make much sense without that episode laying the foundation for what you're hearing today. Watkins argues that the Bible offers the ultimate critical theory that it critiques our status quo no matter what culture we're from.

And it actually offers a better story than the ones that we come up with on our own. It out narrates our narratives and how we understand the world. In other words, we tell ourselves stories and how to understand the world.

And this is the story that contains all the other stories and explains it better than all of the other alternative stories that helps us to understand how the world came to be and how we are to live within the world today. Of course, our temptation is to simply reject what the current cultural solutions are out of hand.

To miss that they might be pointing us to something with a little bit of truth in it, even though they might be doing it wrong. That's where we pick up the conversation today. Why we need to use the approach of this third Way.

As you're going to hear, there's a different way that Watkin prefers that we describe it. But let's dive back in to my conversation with Chris Watkin.

But before we do, these conversations can't happen without your involvement, without your support. We do. We need you.

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Or if you've got your phone in front of you, simply scroll around on this podcast and you'll see in the show notes a link that you can click to get there. And without further ado, let's get to my conversation with Chris Watkin. Happy listening.

In talking about this idea of Third Way, you referenced Tim Keller quite a bit and he actually wrote the foreword to your book and he's been known to advocate for this third way. Why is the Third Way so important for us today in our current cultural moment?

I would tweak the language a little bit to begin with. I think part of the reason that Third way often gets misunderstood is precisely cause it's called Third Way.

It makes it sound as Though it comes along after the dichotomy, it would be more precise to call it a first way. So the image of God comes first, and then the modern world sort of rips apart these two anthropologies.

What you want to do is get back to the first way, rather than bringing along some sort of third way that tries to mediate between them. I suppose the first reason why it's important is the same in any cultural moment, because it's biblical.

And you're always going to be wanting to judge whatever culture you're in by the yardstick of the Bible, whatever that culture is saying. And so that's the fundamental bedrock reason why I think this is really important, because you're always wanting to go back to the Bible.

Perhaps one reason why it's important for our particular cultural moment that we're living in right now is that we seem to have got addicted to these dichotomies in a quite unusual and quite dangerous way. You know, some people say it's because of social media and that helps to polarize us.

And look, I don't know why, but I think it's hard to avoid the fact that our politics is very polarized in a way that it hasn't always been. Bipartisanship seems dead in the water in a way that it's not always been.

The means of gaining and keeping power seem to be the rule book seems to have been thrown out of the window somewhat in a way that it's not always been so.

These dichotomies are particular, I think, in oursis, and it's not just politics, I think culturally as well, a strong argument to be made that we live in a particularly dichotomized society.

To the extent, therefore, that Christians are to seek to bring every culture and society and look at it through a biblical lens, that we want to be focusing on these dichotomies and showing how they are damaging and unnecessary often.

And also just painting and setting forth for people a more healthy biblical vision for society which isn't captivated by these dichotomies in the way that our society seems to be at the moment.

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But what you've done is to shine a light into the Scripture and again, going back and forth between our contemporary cultural moment. But looking at your book, I'm trying to think of the pastor, the leader, what they do with this, because it is very academic.

Even though you did a great job of interweaving contemporary illustrations. I mean, you even have Winnie the.

Pooh characters particularly close to my heart.

I mean, you started calling a philosopher Eeyore. I was like, where are we going here? But it was great. And then I actually loved your questions.

I have never encountered questions at the end of a chapter which made me actually, I mean, really stop and think. You kind of sometimes just skip through them. Yours is like, no, take it one minute.

Explain it like you're explaining it to a 10 year old in 100 words or less. And I'm like, what? What did.

Suddenly I'm setting my timer on my phone, trying to figure out how to do this, but I'm trying to break it down into like a church member. Because some people are extremely intimidated by this. They think it's not for them. But it is, it really is.

Because you're helping people name their worlds. You actually allude to that with Adam in the garden when he has to name the animals.

Why is that such an important thing for people to see in their understanding of culture?

Now, are you asking why is it important for them to see the dichotomies.

To name their world? In essence, to name their world.

Well, I suppose to name some of these to, to make it visible. Now, language is really powerful, isn't it?

The words that we use to talk about life shape our sense of life, shape our sense of what's possible and what's good and what's bad. And so language matters. And I think, therefore, for Christians, the language we use to talk about our world will determine what we think of it now.

We live in it.

And so we want always to be seeking to use biblical language and biblical categories when we engage with our world, not necessarily to talk to people who have no biblical background, because that might not make a huge lot of sense to begin with.

But in our own thinking, we always want to try and begin with biblical categories, because otherwise you're eating at a table that's been set by contemporary culture with its menu, you know, its categories, its language, and that may or may not be biblical, but you want to let the Bible set its own table and say, well, if we were to strip it down and begin with only biblical language, how would we talk about what's going on?

I think there's real value in that exercise because it makes you look at things afresh and it makes you question the commonplaces and the linguistic habits that we've got into. Travis, can I jump back? I know this is probably not what you're supposed to do in a podcast, but can I jump back to my previous answer?

Because I'm thinking, what are people going to think when they hear me talking about, let's get over these dichotomies? And I think there's one way that that could be misheard that I think is really, really dangerous, and I just want to try and correct it.

So I was saying in the previous response, try and mediate, or let's try and sort of get past these dichotomies. And I can hear a Christian sort of screaming at her radio or, you know, her smartphone at this point. Well, hold on.

The Bible is full of dichotomies like heaven and hell, for example, you know, God and creation. Like, you can't get rid of all dichotomies because then you got rid of the Bible. And first of all, yes, absolutely.

But secondly, I think it's therefore becomes a question of where your fundamental dichotomies are.

So Christianity, absolutely Biblical Christianity, is founded on some basic dichotomies, like there's God and then there's everything else, the creator, creature distinction, as theologians call it. That's a dichotomy, yet you don't mix that.

And secondly, the final destination of, as Augustine would say, the two cities, eternal destruction and eternal life. That's a hard dichotomy.

But what that means for the Christian is that within the cyculum, within these days in which we now live before the final judgment. There can be and is nuance and no hard dichotomies.

And that can only be true for the Christian because our dichotomies find themselves outside of the here and now.

The creator creature distinction is not a feature of late modern culture, for example, and we're not yet at that moment of final division and dividing the sheep from the goats. And what that means is that everything that I encounter in culture today is going to be a mixture.

There's going to be some good in it, because the beauty of creation and being made in the image of God hasn't utterly been erased. It's been palimpsestically written over by sin and obscured and twisted by sin, but it hasn't been completely erased.

But neither is anything in this world here and now, utterly, inexhaustively evil in every possible way that it could be. So everything's a mixture, but it's only a mixture on the basis of those fundamental dichotomies, the structure.

And the reason that that's important for the Christian is that I can have a working sense of good and evil, but I don't have to find them in the here and now. I don't have to find my measure for what's good and evil here and now. And so I can find nuance in culture.

Not that everything is 50, 50, not that everything is half good and half bad, but everything's a mixture in the last day. Because, you know, as Christ himself says, nothing is good, no one is good but God alone. And therefore no human institution is utterly.

You know, we've seen this in the church in recent years, haven't we, that the Church, insofar as it is a human institution, is a flawed institution. And many of its leaders have shown themselves to be profoundly flawed. Everything's mixed in this present age.

But that doesn't mean that I have to say, well, everything's just relative and there's no good and evil at all, because I have dichotomies that are outside the current cultural moment.

The problem is, if you don't have the creator creature distinction, and if you don't have a final judgment, then you have to find your measure for what's good and evil in the present age. Otherwise, you don't have a measure for what's good and evil.

And you do become, you know, the relativist for whom every position is just as good as every other. That's where your dichotomies come in. So it's, in a sense, you're making imminent, you're making here and now.

This basic structure of good and evil that Christians find outside the here and now.

And that's one reason, I think, why, for example, our politics is so dichotomized, because people are investing it with this ultimate religious significance and they're getting their measure for what is good and evil from within the political world in a way that Christians don't have to do and shouldn't do.

If we've read the Bible carefully enough, because we'll know that there is a measure for good and evil, but it's not riveted into a particular political party of any stripe in this world, doesn't mean they're all 50, 50 half good, half bad. There's still differences.

You can still say, I much prefer this party to the other, but it does mean that none of them gives me my measure for what is good and evil. So that's the rather labored footnote that I wanted to give.

We do have dichotomies, but they're very different to the sword of dichotomies that are ripping our society apart at the moment.

And Christians can only have nuance in our engagement with contemporary dichotomies because we have these other fundamental dichotomies that structure our view of the world.

One more note, one more breath one.

More go Is all I get this time around.

One more night to sing a song See the light dance along an empty floor I've come to know.

Quite well.

Something that you did that I was quite surprised by is you actually talk about sin and judgment, which I was surprised. Most books that I would think of this type of stripe just encountering don't talk about this type of thing.

This is very different because you've gone from the secular academic world and you've really brought the Bible to bear upon again.

You out narrated, I would say, and help us to see that why is that concept so important for us to keep in mind this idea of sin and judgment as we do our cultural critique?

The knee jerk response is because it's there in the Bible. We want to bring the whole of the Bible to bear on the whole of culture.

And it's not our job to decide which bits of the Bible story we want to keep and which we want to get rid of. And so that's the sort of entry level answer.

The slightly more developed answer is that you can't make sense of, well, either the Bible or contemporary culture really without some sense of where things have gone wrong.

And so if you excise sin and judgment from the Bible, you've got a sort of I guess a meaningless story in the end, just a wheel spinning in the air with no friction in reality. Like if there's no, there's no sin in judgment, then why did Jesus need to die? And then why is the resurrection such good news?

And what's the final judgment all about?

Like the whole house of cards comes tumbling down if you don't have a robust biblical sense of the human offense against God and God's anger at that offense. And I don't think this is sort of an alien idea. You know, all the critical theorists have a sense of what's gone wrong.

They've just got different senses to the Bible sense and often more superficial senses as well.

So there's often a diagnosis of the problem in sort of non biblical critical theories that say, look, it's to do with the way society is structured or to do with power relations in society.

And if we just get that right, then, you know, they wouldn't put it in these crass terms, but essentially we'll get the paradise on earth that we long for. We just got to educate people differently, get education right, or get the structure of society right, or get the economy right, or whatever it is.

You know, this was the sort of ideology of the French Revolution.

And why the, one of the reasons why the guillotine was so attractive is that if we can just start from a position where everything's right, you know, then, then the golden age will be ushered in if we just, just get rid of the people who think wrongly.

You know, I know it's not great to kill them, but the prize that we're aiming so for is so much greater, so much more to be striven for that it's, it's worth, you know, cracking a few eggs to, to make the omelette. But the Bible says that you're only scratching the surface.

You can do what you want with education and it's good to try and make it better, and you can do what you want with the economy and society.

It's good to try and make them better, you know, but in that old hackneyed but really helpful phrase, the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. And you know, you're never gonna really address what's wrong with society and the world unless you bring it down to the level of the human heart.

It's an internal problem to all of us, not an external problem out there in the world.

And therefore I think this biblical diagnosis of the hill that needs to be climbed to make society better is much grimmer in many ways it's a more sober, it's a darker sense of the challenge that faces us because in a sense, the challenge is us. Like there are no, biblically speaking, there are no good guys out there trying to save the world.

People are doing wonderful things, but that's not the solution because those people themselves are carrying around in their hearts this sinful nature, as the Bible puts it, as well.

And I think we've seen that in recent years, you know, even some of the, the most revered Christian leaders and end up damaging themselves and wrecking their churches. And like, that's not just getting the right leader is not the solution. There is only one solution, and his name is Jesus.

Because nothing else gets deep enough to deal with this fundamental human problem, which is sin. So it's a bleak diagnosis, but I think it's also a diagnosis that stands up to scrutiny in the.

You know, Chesterton said, didn't he, it's the only empirically verifiable doctrine sin. But you know, in the sense that, you know, all these church scandals sort of show that none of us are simply part of the solution.

None of us are simply the good guys doing the right thing.

And I think views of society that say, you know, there are the good guys out there and there are the bad guys, and we just hope the good guys win because everything that they're doing is great strain to make sense of the whole of reality.

You have to have quite a selective view of reality to think that the only problem is education or some groups of people out there who are ruining it for everyone else. And I think that the biblical view of sin just rings truer if we open our eyes and don't look selectively at what's going on in society.

So for all those reasons, I think sin is really, really important to have as part of a full orbed approach to cultural critique. You can go too far, can't you? You know, some Christian cultural critique seems, seems to know only Genesis 3 and no other chapter of the Bible.

And all you're ever doing is, is denouncing and condemning and rejecting culture and that, that's not biblical.

I just want to have fun Clap my hands Turn around now and dance, dance, dance I just want to have fun Clap my hands Turn around now and dance, dance, dance I just want to have fun Clap my hands Turn around now and dance, dance, dance I just want to have fun Clap my hands Turn around now and dance, dance, dance I just want to, I just want to pop.

Well, you're, you're talking about this Idea of sin, but I mean, not idea, the concept of sin.

And then this idea of freedom and autonomy, you bring that out in a way where you really zoom in on Babel early on and our desire for autonomy apart from God.

Just this idea of casting off restraints of being and making a name for ourselves and doing basically the end justifies the means, whatever we need to do in order to get there. And then you delve into the world of technique. And it's interesting that you brought that out.

I wanted to talk about that for a moment because I don't think many leaders in our churches think about this concept of technique because it's best practices. Whatever I need to do to get him to Jesus, to get him in there, that's what I need to do.

But in doing so, they employ means that become actually very dehumanizing in the process, because people become products to get to glory rather than understanding the fully embodied self of who they are. But can you talk to us or explain to us a little bit about what is the bad of technique and what is the good of technique?

And even just what is technique might even be a better way to start off before we get any further into it. Go ahead.

I'm getting it from a French, a Christian, Protestant, French theorist in the mid 20th century called Jacques Elaut. And he, he wrote three books on technique. The. The most famous of which is the Technological Society.

And he, he goes into huge depth about this thing that he thinks fundamentally characterizes modern society. And I think he's got a really good point. He says it begins before modern society with ancient magic.

And he says what magic tries to do is shortcut processes. It tries to get you the result right here, right now. And in a sense, it's an ethic of efficiency. What's my quickest way to get what I want?

Well, say a magic spell, go to the shaman, whatever. That's the way to shortcut doing it the hard way. And he says that this same instinct of technique fundamentally characterizes modern society.

So it's all today about efficiency. What is the most efficient way to get done, what I need to get done?

And part of his critique of it is that the tragedy of this is that efficiency, which is a means, not an end, has itself become the end. What we seek to do now is become more efficient. Why? Well, because that's more efficient. Yeah, but why are we trying to be more efficient?

Because that's more efficient. It's a means in ends. Clothing, I think, is the way that I put it in the book today.

And you can see this in caricatures of the profit motive in business. Why do we make more profit? Because we want to make more profit. Well, why? Because that's what we're about. And it becomes circular.

This paradigm of efficiency he is arguing, sort of, it's just, it's the air we breathe. Like that is default mode for us now. How can we get it done in the quickest way possible?

And I think the point that you're making is that that has crept into church culture as well.

You know what to put it in this crust way, what magic spell can I say in order to get where I want to get to grow my church or to do whatever it is, doesn't have to be going to church. It can be whatever. Ellul is saying that the huge danger in that is that you lose any sense of greater ends.

The efficiency works reasonably well as a means, among other means. It's not terribly healthy if it's the only means.

But it's a terrible end because what it does is it begins molding human beings around the goal of efficiency itself. So it takes human beings out of the center of things and we, then you and I, become means to the end of efficiency.

And that dehumanizes us in all sorts of ways. And you know, the lifestyle of productivity is one of the, one of the ways in which this happens. I see my life as about becoming more productive.

And I can become really, really productive if I dehumanize myself in significant ways and if I become a slave to that ethic of productivity.

And therefore, you very much put the cart before the horse and you end up seeing human beings as a means to the end of greater efficiency and greater productivity, rather than seeing efficiency and productivity as part of your toolbox of means along with others, to the end of a flourishing human life. And so that's, that's his critique, part of his critique of modern society. I think he's incredibly powerful. Look, I, I see it in my own life.

I'm not sort of talking as someone who's, thank goodness that I don't, you know, get sucked in by this productivity idea and this efficiency idea. No, I, I, this much it's a struggle for me.

I would be surprised if it's not a struggle for everybody today because it's so ingrained in the way that we're catechized in modern society. I want to grow, I don't know what it is, my personal brand or my footprint online or whatever it is. And that becomes the end.

And I Become a means if you like. I commoditize and marketize myself. This is the whole social media thing, isn't it?

In order to make myself into a means to achieve that end of increased efficiency and increased productivity. And you don't have to read far into the Bible to get the sense that that is not a flourishing human life. That is not how God wants us to be.

We are not a means to that end.

I roll my boat across the moat.

That you live inside of. I'll cut the boats to keep you closed out from the light up right.

Through your doorway in spite of what you told me so you ain't got to live lonely. You ain't got to live lonely. I've had this conversation about technique before. Alan Noble talks about it in his book, you are not your own.

And I remember getting into a conversation because I've seen this happen in churches where even the staff become this. We got to get them in the door. We got to get the program. I mean, it just becomes production, production, production.

And then I hear people say, well, we don't have any. We don't need technique. But there is an aspect where we do need to be good stewards. We want to be faithful with what God has given us.

And we don't throw technique out at the door, because if we. We just say, oh, I want it to be altruistic. I just want to love. I want to be able to do all these things. That's just not where we're at right now.

I mean, even you as a professor have to produce, you have to teach, you have to write. We have to all do all these things, and we are to bear fruit. By their fruits you shall know them.

How do we keep that tension between bearing fruit and being faithful stewards? And this idea of dehumanized machines that are just there to produce the first.

Piece of the jigsaw is making that temptation visible by talking about it. I think the greatest danger is if you don't even realize that's the air you breathe.

So, you know, we read some of the old writers, people like Kant and David Hume, and we'll just be astonished at how they can go, you know, in the space of a couple of paragraphs, from brilliant philosophical insight to some of the most odious racism. And we will say, like, how did they not see that? And I think one of the reasons is that that was just the air that they breathed.

Like, that wasn't visible to them as something that was. Was odious and obnoxious. And I fear that the technique is like that for us.

You know, our great, great, great grandchildren will look at the books we read and write and look at the, I don't know, the Christian ministries, and they will say, how can they not see that they're sacrificing themselves and their humanity on the altar of this thing called, oh, perhaps it'll be even worse for our great grandchildren, I don't know. But, you know, the principle's the same. If everybody around you reflects that same ideology to you, it just becomes invisible.

So the first thing is name it, read some lo, see how it works. But the second thing I think is George MacDonald's explosive power of a greater affection, isn't it? It's no point just knowing what the problem is.

You've got to put something better in its place. And I guess one way to do that biblically, is to center. Well, first of all to center God, and then secondly to center human beings and relationships.

Back to Genesis 1, isn't it? Human beings are in the image of God, that that's where God invests his dignity, not in structures or programs, but in human beings.

And so in the same way that the mantra for the Watergate investigation was follow the money like, let everything else fade into the background. Let the money lead us to what's going on here.

And I wonder if a Christian, that the mantra needs to be, you know, it's people stupid, or follow the people. Like, it's the people who are in the image of God. And it's.

It's relationships, a relationship with God first of all, and then relationships with other people that seem to be privileged. Certainly in the Genesis 1 account, it's. It's so drippingly, relationally rich, very little about structures.

And so to purposefully prioritize and center people, human beings in our thinking and also in our language, I think we airbrush out the humanness out of our language. Very often there's a way of talking, and it happens in universities. I'm sure it happens elsewhere in society.

We've started talking about spaces, what's happening in the student space, what's happening in the education space. And, you know, in a sense, that's just innocent language. You've got to use some sort of word.

But it is very interesting how that takes the human beings out of the situation, makes it structural, makes it an object, you know, Whereas if we were to say, what are we going to do with the people in our classrooms? How are we going to teach these human beings? That would give you a different predisposition, a different set of sensitivities to the question.

And I think as well, we can overlay our humanness with lots of language that instrumentalizes humanity. So we talk about producers and consumers, for example. And again, I don't want to say never use those words. There's a usefulness to them.

But unless we come back to the fact that what we're really talking about is human beings made in God's image, if we don't have that, as if you like the compass that orients us in everything that we think about.

So we're not talking about, I don't know what, what you call it, bums on seats for churches or whatever it is we're talking about human beings made in the image of God.

Keeping that human language central, I think is one guardrail that we can use, and I'm sure there are many others to try and stop ourselves defaulting into this structural, dehumanized, efficiency and productivity paradigm. Keep the human being central.

Got the feeling in your bones make you feel right at home how the desert does it well keep me dancing till I'm dead Cause I could run a mile like this that overheads feels like this the sun has got me on my track I ain't never looking back I ain't looking Talking about humanity, you get into Exodus and you talk about the emancipation narrative and you drew out how that is so influential in so many different groups today and they, they use that terminology. Isn't though, because so many of those groups are co opting that language for themselves, but yet they're forcing.

I mean, you're, you're talking about language in our culture today. It's one of the most divisive things that you can say is what do I use for my pronouns? What do I say about this? Who do I say about that?

Everybody's worried about what word you say to a person. Even when I've been on Zoom Calls, people have their chosen pronouns of what they want to say. How do we keep this narrative of Exodus valued?

But how can we help other people see that narrative? Number two, how they're playing it out.

And number three, how do we keep the biblical categories without co opting or compromising the faith so that we don't enter into that fallen system? I think that's my question. There's a question in there somewhere, Chris. There's a question in there somewhere.

And I think the fact that it is such a hard question to ask points out something really important and interesting in itself. It's that our cultural moment is a really Complex one.

And it's perhaps one that we haven't quite faced before in the way that we have now that we are doing now. So Christians have been a minority and a distrusted and perhaps hated minority for plenty of Christian history, like late Roman Empire.

We've got no problems with being the bad guys. We have resources in Christian history to work out how to do that.

And Christians have for many centuries lived in a society that more or less agreed with us on most things and that was shaped in a Christian way, that had Christian instincts and Christian ways of seeing the world. What's new, I think, is that now we've got both of those at the same time.

So our culture is very profoundly Christian in its instincts and the ways that it thinks about things. And one of these is the value of emancipation itself.

Not every ancient culture was jumping up and down in glee at the idea of freed slaves and of slaves making their way out of a nation that was enslaving them and then gaining a new identity out in the desert. Like, that wasn't a Babylonian narrative, that's not an Assyrian narrative. That's like disaster, you know, go and kill them. We don't want that.

And yet there's one ancient culture that builds its sense of who it is upon this emancipation narrative. The Exodus, you know, I am the Lord, you, God, who brought you out of Egypt on eagle's wings and so forth.

And that is such a refrain in the Old Testament. This is who you are, you are the emancipated one. And that is wonderful. And that is a huge blessing.

And so this idea of building one's identity upon a fundamental act of emancipation has become again, to use Glenn Scrivener's term, the air we breathe. It's just become, well, of course, to us now.

We are the ones who have become and are increasingly becoming emancipated in all sorts of different ways. That is our hard baked as our sense of identity. Now, that idea didn't come out of nowhere.

If we'd been Assyrian, we wouldn't have defaulted to that position. And so there's something very deeply biblical, very deeply exotic about that instinct that we have about ourselves.

And yet Christians today are framed as the enemies of that story very frequently. And that's the difficulty to navigate for Christians because you don't want to sort of throw everything out and say, no, emancipation is terrible.

You know, we shouldn't be emancipated because that's, in a sense, that's our idea. Like, that's the Bible's idea like it was brought into the tradition through the Bible.

Nor would Christians necessarily want to say that all the many and various ways in which that narrative is being played out in society today are all thoroughly biblical themselves.

And so you can't just embrace everything in the terms that they're offered to you, and you can't really just reject everything in the terms that they're offered to you as well, because the Exodus is a foundational biblical event, and we are the ones who are set free from sin.

You know, this Exodus imagery ripples through the New Testament as well, and it so fundamentally shapes Paul's idea of what salvation is and what the cross has achieved. And so we find ourselves as Christians in society today, being beaten over the head regularly with a stick. But it's our stick.

Like, you took that stick from us, we gave you that stick. And that's really hard. That is a very complex position to navigate. And there are no easy ways.

There's no one sentence way through that in a biblically faithful way. You can just say, oh, reject the whole thing, culture's corrupt, and just sort of try and burn it all.

That doesn't work because this idea of emancipation is so thoroughly biblical.

Or you could say, well, let's just fall in line, and whatever it is that our particular culture happens to be saying to us at 6 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, then let's do that.

Well, that's not really biblical either, because the Bible rubs up against every culture, and if it didn't rub up against every culture, it'd be locked into one particular culture. And that would open the door to all sorts of obnoxious imperialisms and colonialisms.

You know, if the Bible identified itself fully with one particular culture, it would mean it was alienated from all the others, and it will be culturally specific, which gloriously it isn't.

So you find yourself having to do the long work and think it through carefully and pick your way through this cultural landscape in ways that don't easily condense themselves into tweets or slogans because of this ironic situation that we both find ourselves in, you know, Steve McAlpine's term as the bad guys.

But the reason that we're the bad guys is because we've been judged by fundamentally biblical standards and found wanting by the way in which those standards are deployed in society.

Chris, this is so good, but I know that we're coming to the end of our time. What do you hope that the Lord does with this book?

I have been asked that question a couple of times I find it really hard to answer, mainly because I don't know, like, I don't know what, like, that's his job in a sense. Like, I, I wrote it and it blessed me to write it and I'm very grateful that, that it's been published.

But now, now it's out of my hands and, you know, if he wants it, you know, in an Isaiah sort of way, to sit on a shelf and not get read, then that's, you know, he's the Lord. So, so in a sense, I, I don't want to prescribe what, what I, what I think it should do.

Let me answer it in terms of how it's really blessed me and how it's helped me.

I think writing the book has helped me to find a way to be on the front foot in cultural debate, not to feel that the only posture that Christians can take in contemporary culture is one of being attacked, to offer a trenchant and nuanced and robustly biblical critique of modern society and also to unfold a better vision for society, a better vision for everyone, not just for Christians to find that posture. It's also helped me to bring those two worlds I was talking about way at the beginning of this, this time together into conversation with each other.

Like, what, what would the Bible say if it had a seat at the table of these critical theories? How would it shake things up? What would it do differently?

I hope it can encourage other Christians, as it has me, to see beyond the dichotomies that we've been talking about quite a lot today and to see that they're not necessary and they're not final and that there is a better way that's not just a wishy washy, meet in the middle way, but a thoroughly biblical way to engage with these dichotomies that are really ripping our society apart. Like, they're not good, they're not doing us as a community, as a people, you know, as nations, any good at all.

Like, I don't think anybody thinks that they're fantastic, but the Bible offers a way to understand them and to critique them and to offer something better than them. And I just think that's really healthy, really exciting as well.

What's one final thought? Oftentimes we like to end our show because we are Apollo's water, We want a water faith.

And we jokingly say that we want to give people a water bottle to sip on in the week. What's a water bottle that people can sip on as a result of this conversation?

Well, if I were to give you an ocean, I'd say, go and meet the City of God, Bethesda. You can't carry that around with you and start dip into it. But I think the essence of the City of God is the power of the whole biblical story.

So if you haven't done a Bible overview, grab one. Grab Nancy Guthrie's series of talks on her website. I think that the Chosen One is one of the. She's brilliant as a leading you through the Bible.

And I think she's got a book called Better Than Eden, which is a Bible overview as well. Grab yourself a hold of that. Bourne Roberts, God's Big Picture, Graham Goldsworthy's Gospel and Kingdom.

These books that try and walk through the main points of the story of the whole Bible are just incredibly invigorating and nourishing and give you a framework then into which you can add more detail later, give you the map that you can then walk in. So I would say if you've done a Bible overview, do a different one. Go deeper, add some detail.

If you haven't done one, just, you know, before you go to bed tonight, grab yourself a Bible overview and go through it, whether it's a sermon series like Nancy Guthrie's talks or whether it's a book.

Thank you for coming on the show. And I do, I recommend the book. I mean, it's not one that you're going to read really quickly. You're going to have to take your time and chew on it.

I think going through a small group and sitting down, walking through it. The questions are excellent. And I feel like we've only, I mean, we've really only scratched the surface. We've gone into Genesis and Exodus.

There's so much more. And I'd love to have you back on and we'll talk more about it because I just think there's so much here that so many people will want to unpack.

But Chris, thank you for your ministry. Thank you for the book and thank you for coming on Apollos Water.

Travis. It has been an absolute joy and I do say that to everybody, but it really has. I've loved it. It is fantastic.

I knew that you'd say that to me if I didn't get in there first. So he has.

The Bible offers something better, something better than all of the stories that any other culture can offer. It's the power of the biblical story that upends all the smaller stories and it gives better answers.

To critique our culture's answers is huge and it's encouraging. Because our culture doesn't want the Bible to be involved in that conversation. It won't let it to be in that conversation.

So we have to show them first of all, their own view on where it falls short. And then we can show them a better view that the Bible presents.

Of course, that means that we have to know that story to allow ourselves to be shaped by it.

And too often, like Watkin himself, we know that it's the one story in theory, but we really don't see how it fits together, how it tells the story of God, the God who works in our world and loves us enough to become one of us, to fix our problem. And that's just massive.

And even our big problem, our huge problem that stares us in the face, the big elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about, and that's that we are separated from God and all the smaller problems that that big problem causes. We are at enmity with God and with others.

Now, Watkins suggestion to get a hold of a book that gives an overview of the sweep of the Bible story is a great one. We highly recommend it. We will have links in the show, notes to the ones he recommended.

And to know this, my conversation only scratched the surface of the book. It's that comprehensive. We live in a very tricky time. That's no secret.

Christian beliefs are both hated and at the same time are the very basis for the critiques that are used against us. And in the next several weeks, you're going to be hearing from Daniel Strange, you're going to be hearing from Glenn Scrivener.

As we look and see that our whole entire Western civilization was shaped by these thoughts that the Bible offers. And when we try to kick the Bible out, we are putting a saw to the very branch that we're sitting on. That's what we're doing, right?

I mean, seriously, that's what our culture is doing all the time. And that means we need to be all the more careful and all the more vigilant in how we discuss and how we converse, how we talk, how we love.

And we need to know, really the Bible story. We have to be able to probe down deep, to go deeper. It is forming us before our. I mean, is it forming us before our culture stories?

Are we asking the questions so we don't just accept the air we are breathing? What are the foundational, these separate beliefs, these dichotomies that the Bible shows us?

And can we tell the difference between what is true and what is false? How do we make sure that we don't turn a good thing, practical solutions to life's issues and problems into merely technique that dehumanizes us.

You know, that's one of the things that I've seen in the church today. We talk about Jesus and we say, hey, let's just get Jesus, and we follow Jesus and we love Jesus.

Jesus is the reason that we're doing what we're doing.

But I see that some of the methods that the church has unconsciously adopted actually ends up dehumanizing the very people that Jesus is redeeming and trying to grow to become more like him. And we need to be able to root that out.

Because as believers in Jesus, if we're going to have credibility in our world, we need to be able to offer a better vision of the world and how we are to live. And it's very hard to do that when we're caught up in the very same things and doing the very same things that other people are doing.

The people of the world, the unbelievers, we have nothing to offer them that they might be able to see and grab a hold of. And I'm not saying that we're better than them. I'm not saying that.

I'm not saying that we don't have problems and we don't struggle and we don't deal with issues. That's not what I'm saying at all.

But I am saying that it is difficult when you have church going through the services, going through the motions, and it seems that we are just getting people in, we're getting them out, we're talking about Jesus. But the very process and the means that we are employing actually dehumanizes the very people that we're trying to minister to.

And actually we lose credibility because the gospel doesn't seem more attractive to them.

So when we start to shift our thinking, when we rethink our lives and our priorities according to the Bible's story and even the means that we employ, we can begin to reimagine what it might look like to reimagine pursuing Christ's mission in our strange and contradictory world. We can offer answers that the world around us desperately needs. Then we can redeploy. We can get after it.

We can pursue it with all of our fabric, all of our being, as we continue to preach Christ crucified and we love them, and we show them the truth of Christ in our lives and that there is hope and that with God, there are second chances with God, that he can change them, that he could forgive them.

And he can give them a better way to live because he gives them himself and he shows the depth of his love for them through the sacrifice of himself on the cross. It's awesome. So what conversations do you have from this conversation?

In what ways do you want us to tackle how the Bible story rubs against your situation? We want to hear from you so that we can better help you to water your world. You can find us on our Facebook page. Just write us, post us or email me.

Just go ahead and email me travispollo's water.org about what we can do to help you and what questions you have. I want to thank our Apollos water team for making this a reality so that we can water your world. Be sure to rate us wherever you get your podcasts.

I want to thank our Apollos water team for helping us to water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered Stay Watered everybody.