Critical theory (and its subset: Critical Race Theory [CRT]) is all the rage these days, even for many Christian traditions. A denomination as evangelical and American as the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has recently adopted CRT as a “critical tool” to help analyze how racism functions within their denomination, in particular, and in the world at large. But this post is not about the SBC, per se, but instead I simply intend on juxtaposing the necessity of the Gospel, as God’s “analytical tool,” over-against CRT as that tool. This is a bloggy blog post, so don’t expect too much. But I want to highlight the origins of critical theory, and its origins in the Frankfurt School, and dip into what its intention was all about back in the day.

Walter Benjamin, the catalyst for the development of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School, was one of the early and formative “founders” of this school of thought. Here is how Stuart Jeffries describes Benjamin’s work:

Writing his childhood memoirs, then, was for him part of a more general literary project that was also a political act. A political act that was the basis for the Marxist-inflected, multidisciplinary work called critical theory that Benjamin’s fellow German Jewish intellectuals would undertake during the twentieth century in the face of the three great (as they saw it) benighted triumphalist narratives of history delivered by the faithful proselytisers for capitalism, Stalinist communism and National Socialism.[1]

The ideology that stands behind, and that is intertwined with the development of critical theory is Marxism; which we know is an atheistic ideology which attempts to think reality in terms of a crass materialism. As such, any theory developed out of this type of soil will necessarily find its nourishment therefrom, and any insights it might be able to garner about the status of ‘reality’ will be formed in the crucible of a purely horizontal world that is necessarily antagonistic to the economy of the God of the Bible. Jeffries goes further, and describes just what critical theory’s goals are, per the Frankfurters:

If Critical Theory means anything, it means the kind of radical re-thinking that challenges what it considers to be the official versions of history and intellectual endeavor. Benjamin initiated it, perhaps, but it was Max Horkheimer who gave it a name when he became the director of the Frankfurt School in 1930: critical theory stood in opposition to all those ostensibly craven intellectual tendencies that thrived in the twentieth century and served as tools to keep an irksome social order in place – logical positivism, value-free science, positivist sociology, among others. Critical theory stood in opposition, too, to what capitalism in particular does to those it exploits – buying us off cheaply with consumer goods, making us forget that other ways of life are possible, enabling us to ignore the truth that we are ensnared in the system of our fetishistic attention and growing addiction to the purportedly must-have new consumer good.[2]

We might be able to read that and think as a Christian: wow, that doesn’t sound so bad, in fact it sounds an awful lot like what Christians would like the world to understand about what the Kingdom of God has brought, and will bring.

But the ‘abyss’ is always in the details, isn’t it? As Jeffries notes, critical theory’s aim is to offer an alternative universe[s] for the world to potentially think from, and live within. Yet, as we alluded to earlier, critical theory’s north star is really formed by the super nova of an abstract (i.e. godless) nothingness. Jeremiah, as a mouthpiece of the living God, describes that this way: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” This is the abstract humanity, and attendant noetic capacity, that critical theory has to work with as it attempts to imagine and offer the world a different way to think about how life ought to be lived as a society of people. In other words, the way forward, for the critical theorist can only get as far as an unredeemed, slavishly horizontal imagination can take it. It is building a bridge to nowhere, because it fundamentally and intentionally starts from nowhere.

My question to Christians who are attempting to appropriate critical theory as a critical tool for discerning what has gone wrong with the current systems in the world system is: why have you doubted the power of God; more pointedly, why have you doubted the sufficiency of the Gospel (Rom 1.16)? God already has a plan, an economy, a societas that He has given for us, of Himself in Jesus Christ. The prophet continues: “I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.” If God alone searches the heart of humanity, if He has done so in great concentration in the humanity and cross of Christ, what does critical theory have to offer; that is as far as discerning the fault lines of a fallen humanity that He hasn’t already sought out and destroyed in the broken, and now resurrected and ascended humanity of Jesus Christ??

Apparently, Christians who are into critical theory are first into natural theology. Ironically, I know plenty of people, Barthians even, who think critical theory offers a viable way forward for Christian engagement with culture. What if critical theory, itself, is so tainted with the primal problem of humanity, you know “fallenness” and everything, that it needs to be put to death, right along with the rest of the broken creation? Indeed, it clearly is part of the creation that has been put to death in the flesh (sarx) of Jesus Christ (Rom 8.3). I have no idea how Christians, of any stripe or tribe, believes they have the ontological and epistemological wherewithal to chew up the ostensible “meat” of critical theory, and spit out its “bones.” Where is its meat derived from; from the eyes of faith, or by sight? I say by sight! And Christians don’t walk by sight, but by the faith of Christ! So, let it be written, let it be done.

[1] Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London/New York: Verso, 2017), 21.

[2] Ibid.