Category Archives: Critical Theory

The Church’s Need for Systemic Repentance: CRT and other Chimeras of Natural Theology

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Since Critical Race Theory (CRT) isn’t available as an analytic tool for Christians doing the work, in the ecclesial context, towards working through the racial complex; and if the Gospel itself is Self-sufficient, as the Power of God to do so; this still means that Christians have the responsibility to develop grammars and strategies, rooted in the kerygma itself, that help facilitate a genuinely Kingdom oriented telos (or purpose). Clearly, in my view, appealing to a correlationist frame between a genuinely Gospel oriented praxis, and secular is a non-starter. The particularity of the Gospel is scandalous to the world’s wisdom, so much so that it thinks the Gospel is both foolish and weak. But Christians find their being in this foolishness and weakness; we find our lives in its cruciformed shape; and we live and move out of this orientation. In my view then, appeal to CRT as an analytic tool for attempting to engage in “race relations” in the church represents a copout. It is the hawking off of the church’s responsibility to the world, and asking the world to do the work (i.e. provide the “tools” and “ways”) of figuring out a way to reconcile the races.

I do think there are legitimate racial disparities and even so-called inequities in the world writ-large. And insofar as the evangelical church reflects, and even follows the world/culture at large, and she does in significant ways, these disparities and inequities get smuggled into the ecclesial context. But this really reflects a deeper problem; it is a problem of allowing a natural universalizing theology to shape the church. In other words, the problem, in nuce, is that the evangelical churches (among the other churches) have so collapsed or immanantized the culture into the fabric of the Church, that the very Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ, can no longer be heard. Indeed, the culture so saturates the Church that the Church actually believes it is open to her Lord’s voice, when in fact the voice they are actually hearing is the broader culture’s. This is the deeper problem, and the ongoing racial, and other problems in the Church are really only symptoms (serious ones) of this sort of primal problem wherein the Church at large has conflated the culture’s voice with the Lord’s, thus making the latter self-same with the former. Until this is identified for what it is, as the Antichrist of natural theology, the idea that racial reconciliation, or any other sort of reconciliation might happen, in meaningful ways, will remain a chimera of a never ending story of purely horizontal horizons.

John Webster offers some pertinent insight on Karl Barth’s moral theology and ethical anthropology with reference to the Liberal Protestant church of Barth’s German/Swiss day. Webster writes:

A large part of Barth’s distaste is his sense that the ethics of liberal Protestantism could not be extricated from a certain kind of cultural confidence: ‘[H]ere was … a human culture building itself up in orderly fashion in politics, economics, and science, theoretical and applied, progressing steadily along its whole front, interpreted and ennobled by art, and through its morality and religion reaching well beyond itself toward yet better days.’ The ethical question, on such an account, is no longer disruptive; it has ‘an almost perfectly obvious answer’, so that, in effect, the moral life becomes too easy, a matter of the simple task of following Jesus.

Within this ethos, Barth also discerns a moral anthropology with which he is distinctly ill-at-ease. He unearths in the received Protestant moral culture a notion of moral subjectivity (ultimately Kantian in origin), according to which ‘[t]he moral personality is the author both of the conduct with which the ethical question is concerned and of the question itself. Barth’s point is not simply that such an anthropology lacks serious consideration of human corruption, but something more complex. He is beginning to unearth the way in which this picture of human subjectivity as it were projects the moral self into a neutral space, from which it can survey the ethical question ‘from the viewpoint of spectators’. This notion Barth reads as a kind of absolutizing of the self and its reflective consciousness, which come to assume ‘the dignity of ultimateness’. And it is precisely this — the image of moral reason as a secure centre of value, omnicompetent in its judgements — that the ethical question interrogates.[1] 

I would contend that this mode has taken over the evangelical churches of North America, and the West at large. It seems that the mainline and/or progressive churches have now come to set the ethical space for much of what used to be considered the conservative evangelical churches. They all are operating with this same sort of allegiance to cultural relativism, and the turn-to-the-subject in the name of Jesus Christ as ultimately determinative for what it means to be socially activist and engaged. She can no longer, by and large, hear the voice of her Lord; because her Lord is in point of fact her own voice projected out as the living Lord’s (see Barth’s appropriation of Feuerbach). What the Church is in need of before anything else is systemic repentance. She needs to be willing, corporately, or as large bodies as witness bearers to the rest of the Church, to recognize her sin of syncretism, and cry out for the Lord to ‘liberate’ her from her cultural bondage; just so she can actually hear the lordly voice of the risen Lord once again, afresh and anew every morning in His great faithfulness.  

[1] John Webster, Barth’s Moral Theology: Human Action in Barth’s Thought, 35-6.

Christian Atheists, Woke Christianity, and the 19th Century as its Antecedent

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Having historical perspective can actually change your life, but only as a subset of having eternal perspective; insofar that genuine human history is Christ’s history for us. As such I like to study church history and historical theology, among other histories, in order to gain this sort of perspective; particularly when it comes to ideas. I have been reading through James Ungureanu’s most excellent book (published PhD dissertation) Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict in order to help me get the sort of historical footing I think is so pivotal towards understanding my place in the stream of ideas and movements thereof. Ungureanu is a historian of science, but with a theological twist. In his book he offers a seismic perspective on how the so-called ‘conflict thesis’ (or warfare thesis) developed between science and religion. What he demonstrates is just how much of this ostensible warfare is really an anachronistic imposition upon the past; i.e. that this so-called conflict, and the people it is typically assigned to, as its progenitors (Draper and White), is fake news. Be that as it may, in order to establish his thesis, James must do the deep-dive archeological work of uncovering the artifacts of history that others have moved quickly past (without making the proper connections etc.).

I want to simply pause and share a morsel of this artifactual work that implicates our current cultural moment, in regard to the socio-politico-religio sitz im laben we inhabit as Christians in the Protestant West. For some reason, most likely because of historical illiteracy among the masses, the Young, Restless, and Progressive seem to think they are engaging in something fresh and new; in regard to the liberal nature of the sort of activist and ‘woke’ Christianity they are attempting to live out in the churches and in the streets of America and across the Western globe. This all has ideational and historical antecedent that I’d propose most are ignorant of. It has already played out before. The young (and the historically ignorant) are simply playing out what has already been played out in the history; and to its adherent’s eternal destruction. Ungureanu writes of what was known as ‘new theology’ (or religion without theology), and its historical landscape this way:

The previous chapters give some indication of the vast changes Christianity experienced during the nineteenth century. Advances in natural and historical sciences, intentional or not, seemed to many a direct assault on traditional Christian belief. Debates about the character of Christian faith raged both inside and outside the church during the century, and out of these debates emerged new ways of thinking about the nature of faith, the historical Jesus, the character and authority of Scripture, the truth of revelation, and the future of religion.

While the nineteenth century was undoubtedly an intensely Christian era, it was also a time of much doubt and disillusionment. As scholar of religion Linda Woodhead has put it, the nineteenth century witnessed the “reinvention” of Christianity. Those who rejected traditional Christian belief, but who claimed to remain theists, often adhered to some form of liberal theology. This new or “reinvented” Christianity was part and parcel of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. For the religious liberal, there was an “acute sense of the need for a reformation of Christianity,” an attempt to accommodate Christianity to the modern era. Recognizing that advances in the sciences and historical-critical scholarship had supposedly contradicted established religious ideas, many attempted to ameliorate the emerging malaise by readjusting or reconstructing the meaning of religion. As we have seen, nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism generally responded to higher criticism and scientific naturalism by transforming rather than abandoning the faith. By the last decades of the century, the New Theology or “new religion” movement had found numerous supporters on both sides of the Atlantic.

What this “new” or “freer” religion looked like, however, was deeply contested, as we saw in the previous chapter regarding the “Quadrangular Duel” between Herbert Spencer, Fredric Harrison, James Fitzjames Stephen, and Wilfrid Philip Ward. However the “new religion” was conceived, many men and women in the nineteenth century believed that the reconciliation of science and religion depended on it. One important strategy used by liberal Protestants and religionists at the end of the century was turning “theology” into a pejorative. By contrasting the ideal of a free, progressive scientific inquiry against the authoritative, reactionary methods of theology, religious liberals imagined dogma, not faith, as the true obstacle of modern thought. Conflict occurred, they believed, not between scientific truth and religious truth, but between scientific truth and religious truth, but between contesting theological traditions. If religion would only rid itself of dogmatism and ecclesiastical authority, science and religion would be in harmony. The distinction between, and separation of, religion and theology was thus incredibly important—indeed, everything hinged on it. Many liberal Protestants believed the separation of religion from theology was the best approach to bridging the schism between modern thought and ancient faith, and thus for bringing about reconciliation between science and religion. The separation of religion from theology of course antedates the late nineteenth century. As we discussed earlier, a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers used this distinction in their effort to construct a “rational” or “natural” religion. But the distinction was tainted by a strong anticlerical polemic that largely remained in effect into the next century, when mainstream Protestants were beginning to adopt more modernist ideas. By the late nineteenth century, however, this anti-Catholic polemic has transformed into a Protestant self-critique, and subsequently into the “Protestantism minus Christianity” narrative we have seen in the work of Edward L. Youmans and the scientific naturalists.[1]

Earlier I may have laid too much emphasis on the young, but millennial and younger seem to have taken a certain reception of the mainstream progressive liberalism Ungureanu refers us to. But as noted, all of the ‘new’ developments have been around for many centuries, in their most modern instance, though, as we find it in the 19th century. If you have had any exposure to mainline Protestantism the ‘feeling’ that Ungureanu narrates for us in its historical iteration is a known quantity; in other words, these things are not foreign to you.

One problem with thinking this way is that progressives and the ‘new religion’ seems to think they can escape dogma and ecclesiastical authority. But as should be apparent this sort of movement away from such realities doesn’t actually remove them it only creates a vacuum wherein new dogma and ‘ecclesiastical authority’ emerges; even if it only masquerades as their negations. The issue of dogma and authority isn’t a matter of if there is going to be such components, but whether or not the dogma and authority are good. When we look at how this new religion has been fleshed out in the broader culture today it is clear that in fact a hyper-dogmatic and hyper-authoritarianism has replaced the old dogma and ecclesiastical authority. Wokeness, which is the new religion of today (that finds correspondence with the feeling of the 19th century iteration), has all sorts of dogmas, and authority figures that intend on keeping people in line with their works-righteous and liberating view of salvation.[2] This is what happens when we do a religion minus Christianity; or more pointedly, minus the orthodox and risen Christ who is homoousios.

[1] James Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 216-17.

[2] Think, Liberation Theology and its neo-Marxist and Critical Theory nexus.

A World Ruled by the Vagina Rather than the Penis: Critical Theory’s Oedipus Complex

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I am currently, for some reason, reading Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Kobes De Muz. Her whole premise is that White male evangelical masculinity, typified by John Wayne, and now emblemized by the Donald, is the source of all the evil we see in the American West. I am also, alongside her book, reading Stuart Jeffries’ stellar book: Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. Jeffries, in a very well-written way, is describing the histories of the German dudes who developed what we call, today: Critical Theory. I just came across a passage that summarizes De Muz’s whole book quite well:

As an adult, Fromm became steeped in the work of the nineteenth-century Swiss Lutheran jurist Johann Jacob Bachofen, whose 1861 book Mother Right and the Origins of Religion provided the first challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy that patriarchal society represented a natural state of affairs and thereby validated capitalism, oppression and male hegemony, as Fromm’s biographer Lawrence Freidman argues. Reading Bachofen also encouraged Fromm to reflect that the mother-child bond was the root of social life and that in a matriarchal society there was no strife, conflict or even private property, reflections that were decisive for his developing socialist humanism. In Bachofen’s description of matriarchal societies they functioned as what Fromm called ‘primitive socialist democracies’, in which sociability, generosity, tenderness, religiosity and egalitarianism prevailed.[1]

This is the ethos that De Muz is attempting to promote, as the alternative to what she would like to deconstruct: i.e. White [evangelical] patriarchy. This is the ‘positive’ side of critical theory. It has identified the negative side that requires deconstruction as: White patriarchal society, given greatest expression in Western Capitalism. Once it’s ‘all burned down,’ the prescription, according to De Muz, and other critical theorists (like Antifa, BLM et al.), once we get through the revolutionary stage, is to rebuild the global society based upon a matriarchal model wherein equality and equity rules and reigns supreme; a society ruled by the vagina rather than the penis, to put it starkly. Somehow, this sort of re-normed society breeds equality for all, and a utopia the world can finally thrive in. It is, as Fromm would have hoped for, a socialist immanentized eschaton wherein all is beautiful and good. But we have to get through the birth pangs first; you know: burning down cities, livelihoods, lives, so on and so forth. Then mama bear will come in and fix it all. Be warmed and filled.

[1] Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London/New York: Verso, 2017), 50.

Critical Theory Living in the Grand Hotel Abyss versus the Gospel in the Living Christ

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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.