I'm about 90% done with it. I purchased it on Logos and use a TTS reader (Voice Dream) after I put it all in a Word Doc to listen to it.
I would say it is generally good but very Keller-esque in terms of looking for the subversive fullfilment in the various worldviews that exiist in the world in areas like politics, economics, etc.
From the Preface:
I would say it is generally good but very Keller-esque in terms of looking for the subversive fullfilment in the various worldviews that exiist in the world in areas like politics, economics, etc.
From the Preface:
From the Preface of Biblical CriticalTheory
The Twenty-Year Itch
For all my adult life I have been searching for a book that marries two of my deepest passions: exploring the subtle richness of the Bible’s storyline and making sense of how different people understand the world. After combing the bookshops and libraries of England for fifteen years in vain and finding nothing to scratch my peculiar itch, it began to dawn on me that I might have to write that book myself. The volume you are currently holding in your hands is my best attempt at authoring that book.
My search began back in 1998—though I did not yet know it—when I travelled down from Yorkshire as a fresh-faced undergraduate to study MML (modern and medieval languages, French and German) at Jesus College, Cambridge. What I found, both in the old books I was reading and the new friends I was making, were views of the world very different to my own. The MML course engulfed us in an invigorating and bracing avalanche of politics, philosophy, and literature, and in essay after essay I was challenged to make sense of how a parade of characters from the last seven hundred years of European history made sense of life: What drove the medieval knight to serve his lord with such blind faithfulness? Why was there so much delirious, drunken optimism at the beginning of the Enlightenment? Why did a certain type of boredom become fashionable in the nineteenth century? And why did some avant-garde writers welcome the First World War? Classicism, Marxism, Surrealism, psychoanalysis, modernism, existentialism, deconstruction—movement after movement blew swirling gusts of cultural theory across my desk, buffeting and stress testing my young Christian understanding of the world. I loved it! I felt like a calf being slowly fattened with a rich diet of half a millennium’s worth of wisdom and experience … ever aware that the day of slaughter loomed ominously on the horizon in the form of the end of year exams!
At the same time, another blizzard was also lashing me. Week after week my church was laying before us a feast of invigorating truths about the God of the Bible, helping us to shape a distinctive Christian attitude to life, the universe, and everything. I was constantly challenged by Christian women and men who thought deeply about the faith and about life. It was at church and among my Christian friends that I first discovered faith not as a set of ideas to believe but as a true story of the whole universe, a true tale of love, loss, promise, and costly rescue, in which we all play a role.
Caught in the crosswinds of these two gales, I started looking for a way to harness them together. The Bible surely had a contribution to make to the theoretical and societal questions that fascinated me in my university studies, but I was far from sure what that contribution should be. Thanks to the Aladdin’s cave of the Christian Heritage library housed in a twelfth-century Round Church in the heart of Cambridge, I began to assemble the first pieces of my jigsaw puzzle: Francis Schaeffer, Herman Dooyeweerd, Hans Rookmaaker. I was hooked.
The university also had its own suite of thinkers trying to bring theology into conversation with cultural concerns: Janet Margaret Soskice and Tim Jenkins alongside me at Jesus College and Sarah Coakley, whom I was later privileged to count as a colleague at Murray Edwards College. The internet—still quite a novelty in those late twentieth-century days!—yielded further exotic-sounding leads to pursue: Cornelius Van Til, John Milbank, Alvin Plantinga.
After a little reading I realized that what I was searching for was a Christian cultural theory. In my university studies I was becoming intimately acquainted with a wide array of cultural movements and social theorists: feminism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis; Marx, Foucault, Kristeva, Fanon. But the more I studied this broad range of theoreticians and theories, the more I saw that all these isms had certain important traits in common. They all began as something you looked at, reading and understanding (slowly, oh so slowly!) their main texts and theorists, but they gradually became something you looked through to bring the world into focus, to draw some aspects of the world into the foreground, and to leave others in the background or make them altogether unnoticed, like the doorknob you don’t “see” until it comes off in your hands! They each considered some attitudes and actions important, and others unimportant. Some ideas or behaviors were praised, others condemned. In short, they each made certain things visible and certain things valuable. Like a pointillist painting composed of thousands of tiny dots that, seen from a distance, blend together to reveal a tree or a river, each movement and gesture in these theories congealed into a way of thinking and living that encompassed politics, art, relationships, society, and the whole of life.
But I was puzzled. Why wasn’t the Bible among them? There was feminist social theory, subaltern social theory, and queer theory. Why not biblical social theory? The Bible certainly had the resources to elaborate such an approach, and I was increasingly convinced that it would have something fresh and surprising to contribute to many of the debates that were raging in the “theory” books I was reading in my courses. Indeed, as I increasingly found out over the years, great strides have been made, both historically and in our own day, towards elaborating just such a biblical “theory.” Among all these commendable attempts, I have found none so brilliant nor so elegantly crafted as Augustine’s magisterial City of God.
I remember where I was when I first read The City of God: enjoying a family holiday in a marvelously unrenovated house in the Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington. The house was filled with a delicious silver and leather smell, with original 1930s light switches, polyester bedsheets, a radio as big as an oak coffin, and a postwar decor that lent the place an almost magical air. Perhaps the feeling of being somewhere old but still lived-in helped me to appreciate how Augustine’s City of God has stood the test of time and still speaks so powerfully in our own day.
Half of my excitement arose, if I am to be honest about it, from the sheer fact that I was reading Augustine at all. I readily confess that many of the references and names went straight over my head, but running right through this long book with its litany of characters was an unmistakable, glittering, compelling architecture. What so beguiled me—and beguiles me still—in The City of God is the coherence between the precise dissection of Roman culture in books I to X and the grand sweep from Genesis to Revelation in books XI to XXII.
The first part, in which Augustine weighs Roman culture on the scales and finds it wanting, is accomplished with an effortless efficiency. Like an expert judoka, Augustine makes Hellenic culture fall under the weight of its own contradictions and absurdities. It is clear that he has a respect for Rome. He knows its culture from the inside: its writers, its poets, its orators, and its deities. He knows why it sparkles, why it causes pride to swell in those who love it. He can be brutal and even sarcastic about the Roman gods, but never flippant or careless. He had, after all, taught rhetoric in Carthage and Rome. He commends Cicero as “a man most skilled in the art of governing a commonwealth,” “a most distinguished orator,” and “a distinguished man and by way of being a philosopher,” and he acknowledges the virtues of Rome where he finds them. When he critiques Roman culture—as indeed he most certainly does, mercilessly, precisely, with satire and hilarity—it is Rome’s internal contradictions and non sequiturs that he parades: one porter is sufficient to guard a door, but apparently it requires three gods, one for the door, one for the hinge, and one for the threshold; the gods who were supposed to protect Rome themselves needed protection by the temple guards when Rome was sacked; if the time of birth determines one’s destiny, why do some identical twins have such contrasting fates?
In the second part, the north African bishop launches into a journey that takes his reader from the fall of the angels and the creation of the world, weaving its way through the biblical storyline twist by twist, past the kings and prophets, the cross, resurrection, and ascension, until it explodes in the rapture of the new heavens and new earth. There is something breathtaking, something intoxicatingly vertiginous, about this all-encompassing sweep from creation to new creation, like suddenly realizing that the cities and towns where we have made all our fondest memories over the years are part of the same glorious kingdom. The connections between the parts are surprising and illuminating, adding a compound richness to the whole. Perhaps it is the literature student in me, but I find that each moment in the Bible’s plotline gains immeasurably from being set in its narrative context. We like being taken through a story from beginning to end, don’t we? Who, after all, just watches The Empire Strikes Back without caring what came before or after, or who is content to read just one act of a Shakespearean tragedy?
As I came across more books on the Bible and culture, I found many insights, some of which I have included in this volume, but never again did I feel swept off my feet as I did in that first heady encounter with The City of God. In the present volume I have attempted to take the biblical-theological structure that I find so compelling in Augustine and use it as a way to frame some contributions to a biblical social theory for today. As I have written this book, time and again this structure has itself enhanced what I have intended to say and revealed to me new connections between ideas. My hope and prayer is that the reflections in these pages can challenge and encourage others who, like I did, feel caught in the crosswinds of Bible and culture. And perhaps, for just a few, it may turn out to be the book you have long wanted to read.
Watkin, C. (2022). Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. Zondervan Academic.
