Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

As James K. A. Smith points out, “It’s precisely when your ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal that you’re most prone to absolutize the temporal.

To live in God’s city here and now is to enjoy God’s limitless peace, love, and creativity; it is also to live a subversive, revolutionary life in this world as we repeatedly scratch the surface of the earthly city to reveal God’s goodness, truth, and beauty under its makeshift palimpsest.

During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again, other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” He asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law—each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional

Listen to a warning from the 1960s, sent from the pen of Jacques Ellul: “A while ago, people made the monumental error of saying that democracy, liberalism, competitive capitalism were all expressions of Christianity. Today they make the same monumental error for the benefit of socialism.”26 Let us not, in our own day, make a further monumental error by hitching Christianity to whatever political cart happens to be passing. Our grandchildren will not thank us for it.

The book of Revelation is calling Christians to a cultural disengagement: we have woken up to find the prostitute in our beds and the beast raiding our possessions, and we seem to be okay with that.

As Chesterton says, “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad” because they are “isolated from each other and wandering alone.

Esther Meek summarizes this uncontractual dynamic in the following way: “Law, so prominent in Scripture, is not to be understood as creating relationship. Rather, law nourishes relationship.”11

To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell.

We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk.

We should maintain what C. S. Lewis calls a “scrupulous care to preserve the Christian message as something distinct from one’s own ideas.

Not for the last time in these pages, we find that the subversive logic of love quietly enters—then devastatingly explodes—the matchstick scaffolding of simple binaries upon which the modern world hangs its most cherished values. Ask a lover if she experiences her passion to please her sweetheart as a constraint; ask her whether she feels like a dupe of someone else’s power games: she will either laugh out loud or look at you with profound pity.

This rebellion of the orthodox, or what John Milbank might call a counterrebellion, is neither straightforwardly conservative nor simply progressive: it seeks neither only to maintain nor only to overthrow. It is emblematic of the radical nature of orthodoxy in the last days: there is nothing quite so radically subversive today as sound doctrine and godly living.

This means that a biblical attitude to this world can neither be one of simple affirmation nor of straightforward condemnation. Wherever Christians look in the cultural world, they will find Hart’s palimpsests: no social movement, no artefact, no text, no church, no performance, and no academic discipline is free from the violence, selfishness, delusion, and rebellion of sin, however “Christian” they might appear, and similarly nothing in culture is so full of these things that it can fully erase the goodness of the original creation.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. . . . The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

It is just as matter of fact as the “there was” and “it was so” of verses 3, 7, 9, 11, 15, 24, and 30. God speaks, and it exists. God speaks, and it is good. Both ontology (the existence of things) and axiology (the goodness of things) are equally and inseparably dependent on the divine word.41

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true.

idolatry is disordered love

To live in the last days is to live in a series of overlaps and tensions, between the “now” and the “not yet,” between the “in” and the “not of,” between giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, all within a culture that thinks it is rejecting Christianity at the very moment it affirms its deep and irreducible debt to Christian figures.

This paradigm of the gift places us in the posture of recipients. We receive existence, we receive meaning, and we receive love. To be sure we are creative recipients, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, and receiving the gift of the universe certainly does not make us passive. But the fact remains that we are recipients nonetheless. The one thing we should not do with a gift is pretend we bought or made it ourselves. The giver is usually thanked, so our fundamental orientation to existence in the paradigm of the figure of gratuity is one of praise and thanksgiving.

Acts of faithful remembrance reach across the centuries without collapsing them. For example, the last supper is folded on top of the Passover feast, establishing a proximity across the centuries and retroactively reinterpreting the Passover meal itself as the foreshadowing of Christ’s death. Similarly, Psalm 22 is folded into Jesus’s experience and interpretation of the cross as if it had been written for that very moment—which, in fact, it had. In the pages of the Bible and in the Christian experience of time, promise and fulfilment kiss.

They are two sides of the same coin, nicely summed up in the Anglican prayerbook affirmation that to serve God is perfect freedom.

Blaise Pascal writes: Men despise religion, they hate it and are afraid it might be true. To cure that we have to begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason. That it is worthy of veneration and should be given respect. Next it should be made loveable, should make the good wish it were true, then show that it is indeed true.2 In

One of the crucial pennies to drop in the minds of those who find their way to faith in their adult years is often the realization that, if there really is a God such as the Bible reveals him to be, then he is smarter than I am and his judgement is more reliable than mine: if he and I differ on a matter, and if he is really God and I am really a creature, then it is more than reasonable to assume that he is correct and I am mistaken. To reach any other conclusion would require a bizarre routine of epistemological gymnastics. Either God is God and I am not, in which case his judgement is to be trusted over mine, or else God is not God, in which case there is no reliable way of satisfactorily arbitrating at all between what is reasonable and what is not.

Disordered loves, like addictions, also lead to all manner of personal and social pathologies: in Augustine’s terms “The punishment for every disordered mind is its own disorder.”69

They have put the kind of hope in their political leaders and policies that once was reserved for God and the work of the gospel. When their political leaders are out of power, they experience a death.”31 This loading of electoral fortunes with ultimate significance is what it means to bring religion into politics, and secular people can be guilty of it just as much as Christians.

Christians in the early church distinguished themselves in Roman society by their care for the poor and wretched. They adopted abandoned babies and bucked the trend of fleeing plague-ridden cities in order to stay and care for the sick. This so exasperated the Emperor Julian that he vented in a letter to Arsacius: “Why then do we . . . not observe how the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead, and the sobriety of their lifestyle has done the most to advance their cause? . . . It is disgraceful when no Jew is a beggar and the impious Galileans [Christians] support our poor in addition to their own; everyone is able to see that our coreligionists are in want of aid from us.”27

If I am a Christian, those who disagree with me are not by default intellectually inferior, they are not rationally benighted, they do not lack imagination, they are not narrow, weak, or juvenile, they are not medieval, and they are certainly not a virus. They have every chance of being my betters in all these respects. I simply cannot look down on them. It is crucial to emphasize that this is no clever rhetorical flourish. If I claim to be a Christian and do not acknowledge that my “enemies” are very possibly my moral and intellectual superiors, I have simply failed to understand the gospel of Christ. I am still operating according to the performance narrative, not yet according to the grace narrative.20

The cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk insists on what he calls “enlightened false consciousness” in which an individual or a group intentionally and ironically cultivates a state of consciousness they know to be false because it is advantageous to do so.35 Frankfurt school theorist Max Horkheimer argues for a similar idea: the bourgeoise embraces ideology out of cunning and a will to dominate, not because they are duped by it.36

We know love by what it does. God loved so he sent (John 3:16); we love so we obey (1 John 5:3; 2 John 1:6). When God loves, he does not act to acquire or accumulate; he gives his Son, his very self, for unworthy others (Rom 3:10–12). Trinitarian love is the Father sending the Son and the Son obeying the Father. God’s love “does not seek value, but it creates value or gives value; it does not desire to get but to give; it is not ‘attracted’ by some lovable quality, but it is poured out on those who are worthless and degraded.

Believers in the early church were not persecuted for worshipping God. They were persecuted for worshipping no god or emperor apart from God.9