Christopher Watkin Against the Pagans
by Andrew Moody, TGC:
Review: ‘Biblical Critical Theory’ by Christopher Watkin.
Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture is a tricky book to categorize: it’s part biblical theology, part worldview survey, part apologetic, and part primer on Christian ethics. In the introduction, Christopher Watkin offers the alternative titles of Know What Follows from What You Believe or perhaps The Bible: So What? (2).
Those titles make it sound very general—like a book about the Bible and all its implications. Actually, it’s even more broad-ranging than that. Biblical Critical Theory isn’t just a book about what the Bible says and means, it’s also about the alternatives. It’s both an attempt to show off Christianity’s riches (3) and an exposé that demonstrates how Bible-rejecting cultures and ideologies represent “reductive and partial simplifications of a more complex biblical position” (262).
Watkin takes his cue from Augustine’s City of God as he seeks to “out-narrate” paganism (21)—first laying bare its failures and then setting forth biblically described reality as the truth pagans are really seeking.
Biblical Critical Theory exposes and evaluates the often-hidden assumptions and concepts that shape late-modern society, examining them through the lens of the biblical story running from Genesis to Revelation.
Deconstructing Narratives
To achieve this purpose, Watkin works his way through Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, highlighting the themes and implications of the Bible (what he calls “figures”) and then showing how each comes with failed alternatives. Here are three examples:
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