Every so often, a book comes along that is greatly lauded and heavily promoted. Biblical Critical Theory is one such book. With a forward by the late Timothy Keller and four pages of endorsements from the great and good of evangelical apologetics such as Kevin Vanhoozer, Daniel Strange and Glen Scrivener, Christopher Watkin’s book was introduced to the world as the game changing, must read book of 2023.
Vanhoozer describes it as
“An important update of Augustine’s City of God.”
Strange declares that it:
“will become a seminal text. A foundation and frame for years to come. Absolutely essential reading.”
William Edgar promises us that
“This book is a feast. Chris Watkin accomplshes what few have.”
Watkin himself introduces the book as follows:
“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.”[1]
All of this presents me with a problem as a reviewer. Not only do I have to assess the book in its own terms, is it an interesting read? Is it true and helpful? Is it readable? I also have to assess it against the claims.
The term “Biblical Critical Theory” immediately draws associations with the recent emphasis on critical theory and Critical Race Theory. This is intentional. We live in a world where people are seeking to analyse culture in its widest sense critically and to find a lens through which to do this. Watkin’s underpinning thesis is that we need the Bible to do this. In fact, his argument is that we need the whole of the Bible to do so, we need to see how its whole storyline provides that lens through which we critically engage the world around us. This is, in my opinion, a sound thesis. In fact, it aligns with the underpinning thesis of Faithroots, that what we believe affects how we live. That’s why over the past few years on this site I’ve been seeking to introduce a wider audience to both Biblical and Systematic Theology.
The structure of the book is that Watkins starts with a systematic category, the Trinity, he starts with what the Bible says about God and then from there moves to introduce us to this God as the one who creates. We then follow through the overall plotline of the Bible covering the creation of humanity fall, Flood, Abraham and so on until we eventually arrive at Christ, his incarnation and the Cross. The final few chapters engage with the topic of eschatology, another systematic category but with a particular focus on the last book of the Bible, Revelation.
Here, is I think the first problem with the book. The result of this approach is that it feels bitty, bumpy and uneven. It’s important to say at this stage, that just as we need tools for engaging the culture, we also benefit from tools when reading Scripture. This means we need tools like exegesis to help us get into the detail of the text but we also benefit from tools like Biblical Theology and Systematic Theology in order to see how things fit together, to get the big picture. Systematic Theology does this by introducing us to the big themes, giving us a system as a lens through which to read things. Biblical Theology offers us a storyline, to show us how those themes develop and unfold with revelation. Watkin’s project would have benefited from a greater engagement with the latter, to give us a route map through the story, to show that it is one single story and how it fits together. This work has already been done, extensively by people like Vos, Goldsworthy and Christopher Wright. Their shared thesis is that Scripture tells the story, through covenants, and particularly The Covenant, of God’s people in God’s place/presence enjoying God’s provision and protection (his rule and blessing). Disappointingly, Watkins doesn’t really seem to grasp or make use of this which contributes to the disjointed feel of the book.
Rather, than helping us to see this world through the lens of Scripture, instead of offering us a worldview, Watkins offers us a series of mini-sermons. The focus is too narrow to give us big picture world view but at the same time, he is attempting to cover too much ground to enable deep and satisfying exegesis, either of the text or the culture.
The exegesis of the culture fails because, rather than really helping us to see what the dominant worldview or worldviews are in our culture today and how they’ve developed, Watkin engages with different aspects of culture. But it’s also the culture of his own experience, not necessarily the culture that your average man or woman on a council estate in Birmingham or In the bustling suburbs of Cairo or Beijing might experience. It’s the world of the University philosophy student. This means that Watkin also falls into that unfortunate trap of bombarding us with lots of quotes from different philosophers. This gives the appearance of intellectual weightiness but I’m not sure it really offers depth and understanding.
Sadly, that particular trap is a significant aspect of contemporary Christian preaching. We owe a huge depth of gratitude to Tim Keller for all that he has done in encouraging church planting, warm preaching, missiology and apologetics. However, I think there were two significant short comings in the model that Keller offered and Watkin follows both of them. This scattergun use of quotes is one.
The second particular failing is the desire to always find a middle or third way, a centre ground. For Watkin, this results in a heavy reliance of diagonalisation, the idea that, in diagram form, you can diagonalise or find a third option between two competing and contradictory propositions.[2] I want to suggest the following issues with this. First, it seems to me that it draws upon a low-cal version of Hegelianism, the philosophical approach where thesis and antithesis leads to synthesis. It’s not quite Hegel’s dialectic because often Watkin’s third way offers a different proposition again. However, there is a reminder here that whilst we are seeking to critically read the world through the lens of the Bible, we may fail to spot the world’s lens through which we are reading the Bible. Another crucial tool in reading Scripture is “hermeneutics” and I don’t think Watkin has paid enough attention to this either.
The second issue I have is that this diagonalisation is rather hit and miss. Sometimes Watkins identifies something powerful and insightful but at times it feels a little shallow and trite and I’m not sure does offer us much of an insight or alternative to what is already offered.
Thirdly, at times, this can lead to presuppositions about the world around us. There is a little of an air of superiority about “third way” approaches. The aim of this in Blairite politics was to present the proponent as above the fray. The result is assumptions about the views held by others that may not be accurate or fair. For example, is the Brexiteer really only focused on the particular of national identity in contrast to the Remainer’s generalised internationalism? Isn’t it actually the case that Brexiteers do have a sense of the general, their concern for freedom, correcting the democratic deficit and being part of a wider international community than just the EU? Doesn’t the Remainer have a concern for the particular whether that’s the specifics of European culture and institutions, the prosperity of local communities and even the needs of their Polish neighbours?
Fourthly, because of this, the assumption seems to be that there is always a mid-point between competing propositions, that we can always find the balanced compromise. Yet, isn’t it just possible that on occasions, one of the viewpoints might be right and the other wrong, that in fact, one of the propositions might even be the Biblical one! There isn’t a mid-point when it comes to antisemitism for example.
If we didn’t have the grand statements about this book being a ground breaking game changer, a must read, a successor to Augustine then I would assess it as an interesting read, if a little heavy going. It certainly improves towards the end as more of the Gospel is available for the author to draw on. However, it certainly isn’t that groundbreaking must read. It falls a long way short of that.
As I said at the start, I agree with the underlying thesis. We need to help people read the world around us through the lens of the Bible. However, first of all, I don’t think this book does that well and secondly, I think others have done it better already, whether Schaeffer in his trilogy or Wright in his ethical and Biblical Theological works.
Given that it isn’t a cheap book and is more a “difficult to pick back up” than “hard to put down” read, I would advise against investing in this one.
[1] Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, xvii.
[2] See Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, 14-21.
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