Keller’s Formation: Christopher Watkin on Charles Taylor and Social Criticism

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Collin Hansen
In their booklet gospel centered ministry TGC co founders Don Carson and Tim Keller describe how the redemptive story of scripture or biblical theology culminates in Jesus Christ and His gospel and from Christ. That gospel then guides us in how we live every aspect of our lives. I have never seen a book do this more effectively than Christopher Watkins biblical critical theory, how the unfolding story makes sense of modern life, published by Zondervan, it is simply one of the best books I’ve ever read. Not that the book is simple, at nearly 700 pages, is profound in its depth of insight, drawing from observations of culture as well as close readings of Scripture. What Ken does not try to explain and defend the Bible to the culture. He seeks to analyze and critique the culture through the Bible. He writes, quote, There is nothing quite so radically subversive today. As sound doctrine, and godly living. Tim Keller wrote the foreword for biblical critical theory. And in this special season of gospel bound, we’re exploring in depth, several key influences that appear in my book, Timothy Keller, his spiritual and intellectual formation. We’re pleased also that this podcast is now a part of the ongoing work of the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics. What can teach us at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia? And I’ll ask you about the philosopher Charles Taylor, and social criticism which have played such a key role in Keller’s intellectual formation, especially since the mid 2000s. Chris, thank you for writing biblical critical theory. And for joining me on gospel bound.

Christopher Watkin
It’s a real joy to be here, Colin, and thank you for those really kind words of introduction.

Collin Hansen
There are many kind words of commendation of your book right here. On the back for anybody watching. There, it’s really been a very widely and widely commended book, and rightfully so. Alright, simple question right off the bat, what is biblical critical theory? And what is it not?

Christopher Watkin
Simple to ask, complicated to answer.

Collin Hansen
That’s why I’m on this side, Chris.

Christopher Watkin
It is, what the Bible itself does to culture. And what Christians for 2000 years have been doing to the cultures in which they’ve been living, I guess, would be the shortest answer to it. So if you take the Old Testament prophets, what are they doing in relation both to the culture of Israel and to the other nations around them, while they’re critiquing them from a point that’s outside that particular culture, from what some philosophers have called a standpoint of redemption, they look at God and His plans and huge sort of plan for the world and for his people. And they critique cultures through that lens. It’s what Jesus does in his parables. It’s what Paul is doing in one Corinthians one, when he talks about the foolishness of the cross being wiser than human wisdom, or the weakness of the crops being stronger than human strength. And it’s what Augustine does, really quite brilliantly in the city of God, where he takes the whole of late Roman culture. And he reads it through the whole of the biblical story. So the second half of the City of God is is Genesis to Revelation, and everything in between, as a way to understand and to frame and critique, late Roman culture. So that’s what biblical critical theory is, this is what the Bible does, it’s what Christians have done. But of course, you can’t mention Critical Theory today, without resonating with with current events and things like critical race theory, as well. So let me just say a little word on how it fits with that sort of thing. There’s the idea, since the enlightenment, of taking a critical perspective on the whole of society, in order to cast a vision for a better society, and this has always gone on but there’s a particular sort of way of doing that, that’s, that’s characteristically post enlightenment. And what it does, all of these different critical theories that that have after the enlightenment, they make you see certain things in society that you might have missed before, that could be power relations or oppression, or even things like you know, government red tape, that you might just not have been aware of. They make things really stand out to you. And they also make particular things valuable. They they show the value of certain things in society, and they also encourage you to condemn other things in society. So they make things visible and they make things valuable. And all different critical theories do this. I’m thinking of all your postmodern thinkers Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, all of those sorts of people have these critical approaches to reality that makes certain things visible and certain things valuable. And when you come to the Bible, you find that it is doing the same thing. It’s not copying them, of course, it proceeded. And there’s nothing derivative about the way the Bible is doing this. But you will notice things in reality, once you’ve read the Bible that you wouldn’t have particularly noticed before, the widows and orphans, for example, and their importance and their plight in society, something the Bible sensitizes you to. And you will find certain things valuable once you’ve you’ve been reading the Bible that you might not have found valuable before. So for example, the glory of God in creation or the value of God’s name, as the Bible puts it, isn’t it that might never have struck you as being particularly valuable before. And so the Bible is also giving you this critical perspective on reality. And just to round this answer off, one powerful argument that that I came across in a critique of Augustine by by a guy called Charles Matthews, is that the origin of all of this critical perspective on society, it is profoundly Christian. If you think what are the ancient society has prophets in its midst with an authority to critique the regime, you know, you’re not going to get a Syrian kings, allowing prophets to sort of walk among the people saying that the king is corrupt, that just doesn’t happen. This is a distinctively biblical thing from the beginning. And Matthew says that the first time in the history of Western cultural critique that you see someone taking the whole of a culture and subjecting it to a systematic critique is Augustine’s city of God. And so all of these broad cultural critical approaches draw to some extent on this Augustinian templates. And so there’s a sense in which the whole enterprise of critical theory is really radically biblical and radically Christian in its origin.

Collin Hansen
And one of the things that Tim Keller has said about us bringing together the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, as we are trying to do in our day, collaboratively, what Augustine did in his, and you just exactly laid out precisely what what he has in mind for that, which is I think, why other people like Kevin Van Hooser, have described your book as an important update of a city of God. This next question, I think we’ll jump on to just elaborating on that last point that you just made, I want to go deeper on this quote, you say, we live in a peculiar moment in history when our culture’s assumptions and values retain a deeply Christian imprint. But when the teachings of the Bible are largely unknown, misunderstood or condemned, this makes for a strange and at times amusing situation in which society increasingly sets itself against Christianity, but does so by using distinctively Christian arguments and assumptions and quote, later, you’re right as if Paul, the Areopagus, people of modernity, I see that in every way you think yourself is very religious, but your religion is very Christian. I wonder, maybe combine a little bit about how does one go about just setting out to write a book have this kind of scope and magnitude? And what are you trying to help expose, in terms of this contradiction of our particular age, in hopes of leading people back to Christ?

Another little question, they’re all gonna be like, This is what happens when you write big books get big question.

Christopher Watkin
Is what happens when you come on gospel bound? Isn’t it? Let let me let me do my best. Let me scrabble around to try and find something. So the the first half of the question is getting at the idea that we both back in a situation that we’ve seen time and again in the history of the Christian church, and we’re in a really new situation, and both of those things are true. So the the old situation is that, in a sense, we’re back to Rome. And back to the early centuries of Christianity, because for a while, in the West, in a nuanced way, Christianity has been a hegemonic ideology, if you want to put it that way, that Christianity has been either the, the thing that you’ve got to sign up to to get on in society, you know, for many centuries in the modern era, always been widely respected. You know, people have had a lot of time for Jesus, at least as a moral teacher, if nothing else, and that is now vanishing. And we’re back to being a sort of minority under suspicion, I suppose, whose intentions for society are regarded as predominantly malevolent by a significant number of people within society, which is just how it was in the early centuries of Christianity. And there’s nothing new about that. It’s just the return, if you like to the Christian norm. But there’s something really really different as well, which is that our society as it stands today, Western society, as it stands today has so been built on assumptions that take root in biblical soil, that it can’t jettison Christian influence without renouncing it’s very self and it has no categories. No way to do that. Tom Holland is really good on this in Dominion. Glen Scrivener is really good. You had him on the show, haven’t you? Glenn? Scrivener is really good on this. In the air we breathe,

Collin Hansen
both of it veteran and gospel bound. Yeah, big questions. Fantastic.

Christopher Watkin
Yeah. And so democracy, equality, freedom, all of these things, all of these hills on which the modern West is willing to die, drink so deeply from the biblical well, that you can’t disentangle them. And so we’re living in this really strange period, where on the surface, society is increasingly rhetorically rejecting Christianity, but it’s doing so from a standpoint that is saturated with Christian assumptions. And that’s really quite tricky for Christians to navigate. It’s a complex situation that we haven’t faced before.

Collin Hansen
You mentioned that we haven’t faced before. One of the ways I describe the challenge of the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics is that we are literally facing a situation that no one in the history of the church before our times in the West has faced before. And I don’t mean that to sound arrogant. And I don’t mean that to sound a historical, or meant to say that, that we need some sort of new strategy other than the ordinary means of grace and good faithful ministry, like always, from God’s word, and by God’s Spirit for God’s glory. That’s not what I’m trying to say. But there is a unique challenge that has not been faced of a culture that has moved away from Christianity, and is blaming Christianity for holding its further progress back by using Christian arguments that would be inexplicable, without Christianity. That is unique.

Christopher Watkin
It is unique, but it’s not. This is gonna sound weird. It’s not unique in being unique in the sense that every, every period in Christian history has new challenges to face. If you think of Augustine in the fifth century, like no one had faced the sack of Rome, exactly from a Christian point of view, where people are saying Christians are to blame for the collapse, since they

Collin Hansen
only knew that the church had only known the Roman Empire in its hundreds of years of history. Yeah.

Christopher Watkin
So we have new things to face in the same way that every generation in the history of the church has had. And

Collin Hansen
that’s a great way to put it. It’s new, but it’s not the only new thing that churches faced before. We’re not doing the same thing. Yeah, exactly. We’re doing the same thing. We’re not We’re not saying exactly the same things Augustine did. But we are trying to attempt the same response that he attempted in his generation to his condition. Therefore,

Christopher Watkin
you can look at the way that he tried to come to terms with something that was new, and learn from that, or how we can come to terms with our different thing that is equally new. Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Collin Hansen
Well, we mentioned that what we’re looking at here is also a lot of the influences that you share with Tim Keller ones that I’ve covered in Timothy Keller, his spiritual intellectual formation. Chief among them appears to be Charles Taylor, a lot of what I just said in that last statement. Of course, as you know, Chris comes from Taylor. Let’s just talk about a basic issue there explained Charles Taylor’s notion of a social imaginary. And I want to know specifically though, how it differs from the concept of worldview.

Christopher Watkin
It’s an incredibly helpful idea, this idea of a social and non generic, because it I think it includes what we’re getting at when we use the word worldview, but it but it also includes other things. That worldview doesn’t really function without but that we often forget. So the way that a world view is, but it’s a caricature of it. is often that the way that we engage with the world is all through concepts and ideas. And its ideas that drive everything. And then everything else follows in the wake of ideas. And Charles Taylor, quite helpfully points out in his book, modern social imaginaries. And then he comes back to the idea of the social imaginary. And in other books, that we were really more complex beings than that ideas are really important. And they do shape us absolutely. But they’re not the only thing that shapes us. And that there’s a way of, he calls it the sort of sense of how things go in the world, our orientation in reality, our sense of which ways open, which weighs down, if you lie, isn’t just about ideas. It’s about habits and assumptions and stories, images, even about objects in the world, and the way that we set out our cities and our buildings and things like that. And those things are not a rational, but they can’t be reduced to simple ideas. And so his idea of a social imaginary is the way that we look out at the world, the way that we engage with the world, the assumptions that we have about the world, that includes the ideas that we have about the world, but isn’t just the ideas.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, it’s been life changing, I think paradigm shifting for me, and much more inclusive, I think, of other concepts, as you mentioned that what we think of as worldview, I think we think of worldview as purely conscious. This is what I think about the world we’re a social imaginary is many unspoken assumptions, I think, which are often the most powerful, and in a culture shaping of us.

Christopher Watkin
I think that’s right. But I think we also need to be careful of dichotomizing, the two things so that you either plant your flag on the ideas side, or you plant your flag in the stories and images and habits. Right, absolutely. And that’s such a caricature, again, of how we think I think we need to have a way of understanding human engagement with reality that doesn’t try to push ideas to the side as if they were unimportant. But that doesn’t enthrone them as the only conduit between humanity and reality either. And that’s one of the lovely things about Charles Taylor. He’s not down on ideas. But he shows that our engagement with reality isn’t just about concepts.

Collin Hansen
Yes, absolutely. It’s a great way to put it, Chris, you capture another element with this book that is core to what we’re trying to accomplish together and what we’re pursuing together with the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics. And that’s where you say that your book is not trying to show that Christianity is true, but that you hope readers will reach a point where they want Christianity to be true. Explain what you mean by that?

Christopher Watkin
Well, I can see that question, setting off alarm bells in some listeners heads. So let me first of all say that I am not saying that it doesn’t matter whether Christianity is true or not, it will be very hard to read passages like one Corinthians 15 Your Bible and come away with the idea that it doesn’t matter whether Christianity is true. So that’s not what it’s about. The idea, however, is that in a society, where Christianity is one of the options that people see out there, among many others, that people are not really going to be bothered, whether it’s true or not, and therefore bother to try and work out for themselves whether it’s true, unless they can see some value in it being true. What difference would this make if it were true. And this is where an apologist like Blaise Pascal with his policy, so brilliant, because he shows the skeptic who doesn’t care whether it’s true or not, that they should care whether it’s true or not, because of the difference that it makes. And he shows how it’s an incredibly 21st century approach. If you think about it, he says, We’re lost in distraction, were distracting ourselves through our lives, can’t focus on anything you could be writing today couldn’t be and, and that he’s showing how the God that set forth in the Bible. It rescues you from a whole host of dangerous and destructive beliefs. And so he says, and again, this this is so incredibly contemporary, that we have a tendency to see human beings either simply as animals, ephemeral, you know, basically machines, no dignity, no worth. Just, you know, cranking out life day by day and then dying and there’s no meaning to it all. All he said is, if we don’t hold to that view, in the modern world, we tend to lurch to the opposite view, which is to see human beings as little gods, defining the reality around them defining the meaning of their own existence. And he, as he quite rightly points out, that’s a really uncomfortable, precarious, dangerous situation to be in. And you know, lurching from the idea that I’m nothing I’m an animal to do, I’m everything, I am God. And he shows how the gospel rescues you from that predicament by saying, you’re, you’re made in the image of God. And that means that you’re you have dignity, but you don’t have deity. And both of those are good, you know, you’re in the image of God. It’s a huge dignity. The other image, you’re not actually God. And that is also good news. And and so he speaks into these modern tensions, that a good news word, a Healing Word, a peaceful word, that comes from the Bible. And it’s that sort of approach. I think that that helps you to see that no, it matters, whether the Bible is true or not, it’s important to investigate whether it’s true or not, because its implications for the our health, our peace, our orientation in the world are whether we understand and engage with and enjoy ultimate reality or not, is all in the balance. And so it’s not a trivial question, whether it’s true or not.

Collin Hansen
Right? Well, I think you just covered in that answer as well, I was going to ask you about what you describe as the post Christian dichotomy, what you described as both too great and too humble, a vision of humanity at the same time, you just covered that right with, made in the image of God, but not God.

Christopher Watkin
Yeah, and this is something that I think, you know, the Old Testament prophets, when they look out onto a world of sin, they’re not gleeful, either, they’re sorrowful, there’s a pathos to their reaction to sin and God’s judgment. And I think this is one of those moments in the modern world that really should evoke pathos and sadness and compassion from Christians when when we see you know, so Thomas Hobbes in the introduction to his book Leviathan, which is one of the founding texts of modernity and of modern political theory, it he just comes straight out with it says, basically, we cogs and wheels and springs, that’s all there is to human beings. And you know, so don’t fool yourself thinking there’s anything more. And then you’ve got other positions that try to elevate humans to the point where we’re doing things that traditionally God alone has done, you know, defining reality in our image defining good and evil, defining the meaning of our own existence. And to live on the horns of that dilemma, as the modern world is forcing many people to do is agonizingly heart rending, it messes with humanity to try and have to juggle with those two things. And and I think that as Christians, the the joy and the peace, and the wonder of being in the image of God is that you’re lifted off the horns of that dilemma. You’re neither a machine, nor are you. God Himself, thank goodness. And, and the word therefore, that the Christians can speak into these tensions in modern culture is is a really constructive, helpful piece bringing one I think.

Collin Hansen
Look, Chris, I’m looking for two short answers, and a little bit hard, short answers on the next two questions. This is from in biblical critical theory, how the Bible is unfolding story makes sense of modern life and culture from Zondervan. All right, you did not introduce your concept of diagonalization in this book, but as with some of your previous work, it’s pretty core. Briefly explain what you mean by diagonalization.

Christopher Watkin
I hear you call in short answers and prepare, getting into lecture mode. And so what do I mean by diagonalization? Okay. It’s the idea that the modern world again and again, takes biblical truth and rips it apart. And sets one part of biblical truth against the other image of God will be one where either animals or we guard, it does it sometimes with justice and love. God is both just and loving. They’re in beautiful tension. They’re beautiful harmony, they’re not in tension with each other. But so often in modern political discourse, you’ve either got to be on the hard justice side, or the self compassion side, aspects of God’s character ripped apart, set against each other as if you got to choose one or the other. And diagonalizing you’re saying no, you don’t don’t have to choose one or the other. They’re part of a rich, complex biblical harmony. And we shouldn’t rip them apart to begin with. Was that shotgun? Oh, that’s

Collin Hansen
great. That was, that was really helpful. I’ve read, of course, your previous works on this. And that actually taught me more of what that what that means. But that’s such a good way of explaining it. Now, I don’t recall if this is in your previous work, so you’ll have to forgive me for this. Explain the difference between the N shaped dynamic and the U shaped dynamic.

Christopher Watkin
This is wonderful, not not the words, but the truth that they’re trying to point to. So in almost all world religions historically, and certainly, in the modern secular world, the idea is that you get what you pay for you, you have to earn your status. And you sacrifice to the gods, you give the gods something that God pays you back, you kill an animal, then it rains, whatever. And in the modern world, you you get where you are by your marriage, you work hard, you get the reward, no, no garbage in, garbage out. And it’s just the assumed way that everything works. Now, of course, it works well if you have certain privileges and the opportunity to work hard in a particular area. But it’s an incredibly iniquitous paradigm for people who, for whatever reason, are disabled in a particular way. It’s a very brutal way of running a society. A glowing and glorious and delicious exception to this is the way that God relates to his people in the Bible. Because he doesn’t say you’ve got to earn your status with me, if you perform really well, then I will be your God. And if you don’t, then I will crush you. What he does is he makes a covenant with His people, where all the pressure, if you like, is on his his side. So you see, when he, when Abraham is asleep, and God, the pillar of fire walks through the middle of the animals that have been cut out what God is saying is, I’m taking it upon myself to keep these promises. You know, Woe to me, if I don’t keep my covenant to you, Abraham, oh, and by the way, you’re asleep. So there’s nothing that you are doing to earn this status with me. And to know that your status comes from a God who has chosen to covenant himself to you, not because you’re good, but because he has decided to do that is just so deeply liberating, and are inspiring. And so the the U shaped dynamic is the idea of the the left hand side of the you that the downstroke is God, first of all, reaching down to us before we’ve even given him a thought and coming to us in grace with wonderful gift. And then that the right hand upward stroke of the U is as responding to him in gratitude. The end shape is the opposite. First of all, we reach up to God, we offer him something we prove our worth and our marriage we perform for him. And then the God may or may not choose to bless us or society or the market or whatever may or may not choose to bless us as a reward, but it’s something we’ve learned. So n shaped dynamic un what you get U shaped dynamic, it’s a gift.

Collin Hansen
And what your book does is it walks through using those two core concepts throughout the entire book. So there’s a narrative thread not only through the biblical theology, but also those kind of the diagonalization how the culture or cultures tend to split biblical truth and biblical truth cuts between them diagonalize them and then same thing of how the world our natural tendency in sin is the end shape, dynamic, and making religion in our own image. Whereas the tendency of God biblically, the pattern is always the U shape. It’s a wonderful concept is what part of what makes the book so, so coherent, despite all that it covers and its size. Okay, now the big question, looking for a smaller answer. Why do you describe secularization as a Christian heresy? This is fascinating.

Christopher Watkin
Ah, okay. This is Charles Taylor again, to certain extent. The the idea of, there’s only one God, but anyone regardless of who you are, there is one God who made everything and rules over everything. And all the other gods are idols. is quite a distinctively biblical idea. So in the ancient world, each territory, each people would have their God and they’d sort of get along together. You know, they fight each other in your mind God’s better than your God. But there’s still a sense that you’ve got your God. And the Romans didn’t particularly object to other people’s gods, providing that they also said that Caesar was a garden and whatever other gods you worship, that’s fine, you just add Caesar to them, which is the reason they have such a problem with with the Jews and then with the Christians. But the Bible wants to allow that, you know, Isaiah mocks idols, he says, you know, you burn half of your log on the fire and out of the other half you make a god and decides to worship you What a ridiculous behavior. And so the the Bible is radically de mythologizing. In that sense, if you take the sort of polytheistic ancient world, and the the idea of of stripping away a lot of the superstition around in societies that is a biblical idea. And so what the Enlightenment is doing, in a sense, is it’s taking that biblical impetus, that critique of idolatry, that cultural critique, that’s there in the Bible, and it’s turning it around and trying to apply it to Christianity itself, and to say, you know, in a way that that atheists are quite fond of saying, Why do you not just go one god further, you know, you already don’t believe in almost all the gods just go on further and don’t believe in the gods you do believe. I think the problem with that idea and where it falls down is that the very impetus for D mythologize ation, who relies on the idea of a standpoint outside the status quo for which you can critique the status quo, and you can’t have that without a transcendent God. And so it becomes slightly self defeating and bootstrapping, if you try and do it for organs, and so it’s secularization is a Christian heresy in the sense that it is taking that biblical move of D mythologize ation, and it’s trying to turn it on Christianity itself. But for the reason I said, it’s, it’s not easy. You can’t just turn it on Christianity itself and expect it to work as it does within a biblical framework.

Collin Hansen
Very helpful. Let me ask you next next couple questions about Tim Keller. So again, we’re doing a special season on influences on on Tim Keller here. And my book is covering his spiritual intellectual formation. But he I know he’s influenced you. I’d love to know a little bit about that relationship and what you’ve learned from him.

Christopher Watkin
And you want to shut down so much to say, I first came across Tim Keller, it must have been, I don’t know, 15 years or so ago. I was actually taking a course back in Cambridge, that was led. And it was such a privilege to be out led by Carl Truman in Doncaster. And I went up to Doncaster after one of his talks. And I said, you know, I’m doing philosophy, who should I read? Who should I listen to? And he scribbled down on a bit of paper, which, sadly, I’ve lost this name that I’d never heard of. He said, You should listen to this guy, Tim Keller. He’s doing some really interesting stuff in New York. And I said, Okay, fair enough. Then I went and googled him and got some talks, I think, oh my goodness, that the cultural incisiveness and the way that he’s bringing the Bible to bear on late modern culture, in a way that’s not leaving the Bible behind, but he’s actually pressing more deeply into it was, was just so eye opening. So a lot of the cultural critique that I’d come across, gave left you with the impression that the better cultural critique you do, the further you pull away from the Bible. It’s almost as if there’s a spectrum between sensitive cultural critique on the one hand, and deep Biblical understanding and faithfulness, on the other hand, and I’ve never really been satisfied with that. I think, you know, like, that’s not what Augustine is doing. Like, why can’t we do both? And then the more I listen to Tim Keller, the more I thought, hey, this is someone who is doing both like he’s, in order to do better cultural critique, he’s taking the Bible seriously. Yeah. And, and, you know, as you listen to him, you pick up the moves that he makes, I don’t think he labels them. But you know, the idea of diagonalization is is right there in the way that Keller will often set up opposition’s in late modern culture, and say, the Bible refuses that dichotomous choice, and it actually gives you a richer way of engaging with reality than either of those two ridiculous reductive ideas. So there’s, there’s so much not only in what he says, but in the way he handles culture that I’ve just found, you know, immensely formative and helpful over the years.

Collin Hansen
And you’ve done a good job of explaining why we call it the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics and what We’re hoping to make normative is that association in the church with the will go authority with insightful and deep cultural critique, keeping those things with an evangelistic goal. Now, you do not follow Tim’s exact pattern of subversive fulfillment. Borrowing again from our friend Daniel strange. Could you explain how you differ? I note in here, I’ll just quote the way you describe in the book, I propose to reframe the schema in terms that remain closer to the flow of Paul’s thought, one diagnosis of cultural values to a presentation of the scandalous cross, three of the cross rejected as the antithesis of cultural values, and for the cross revealed as the fullness of cultural values. Why do you disagree with him here?

Christopher Watkin
I’m, I’m not completely convinced that I do comment. I, I perhaps use different words, but I’d be interested to see whether he thinks he disagrees with what I’m saying. I suspect that, although the words we use my benefit, I’m not sure that we look. So let me let me explain what I said. And then you can you can tell me whether you think Tim Keller would say something, they go for it. So. So it’s the one Corinthians one paradigm. And what Paul is doing there is he’s hitting two things really, really hard. And the brilliance is that he’s hitting both of them. The first one is the antithesis between the gospel or the cross, and the culture. So he’s says Greeks look for wisdom, Jews demand miraculous signs, we preach Christ crucified, foolishness to Greeks, and weakness to Jews. So he’s saying, if you continue looking for wisdom in the way you’re looking for it, dear Jews, you will not find it in the craft. That’s not your view of wisdom, there’s an antithesis, this is not what you’re looking for. And he’s also saying, if you’re looking for strength, in the way you think that strength is manifested, dear Jews, you’re not going to find it in the crops. So he’s hammering antithesis, there’s an antithesis between gospel and culture. If that was all he’s doing, it would be pretty unremarkable. But he’s also, this is absolute genius. He’s also showing how that very same grace that the Jews think is weak. And the Greeks think it’s foolish, is actually the fulfillment of everything that they’re mistakenly searching for, in the way they’re searching for it. So towards the end of that passage, he says, the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, he’s using the Greeks own word, you want wisdom, you want real wisdom, you will find it in the place, you’re least likely to look for it. So his challenge to the Greeks is, if you’re willing to come to the place, you’d least think of finding wisdom there, you will find its fullness. And so he’s hammering fulfillment, if you really want the fullness, the depth, the riches of wisdom, you want to get serious about searching for wisdom, you need to come to the cross, and then you will find the fulfillment of fullness of everything that you’re searching for. And so he does, he puts together what contemporary cultural critique, often tragically separates. So we’ve got our antithesis, people, we there must be clear blue water between the Bible and the culture. The Bible is not just some sort of warmed over version of the culture running on the cultures, coattails trying to be, you know, down with the Romans off down with the late modern people, we’ve got it, we’ve got to show that they’re different, which is true. And then you get the other people saying, no, no, no, the Bible is the fulfillment of all the cultural narratives. And what we need to show people is that what they’re really searching for, is actually found in Christ. And if that if they just got a little bit further, they’ll find a find it in him. Which is sort of true as well. But what Paul does is he shows you that you can’t separate those two. You can’t just be an antithesis, person, or just a fulfillment person and remain biblical. If you follow the one Corinthians one pattern, you are hard on antithesis, you’re 100%, all out on antithesis, and you’re also fully leaning into fulfillment. And that’s his brilliance. And that’s how he cuts across a lot of the missteps of Christian cultural critique today, because you don’t have to choose between antithesis and fulfillment.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, I think maybe the only area that you might differ, as I think Tim spends a little bit more time on exposing the weakness and folly of the cultural antithesis on its own terms. I think that’s probably the only area where there’d be disagreement, but you probably do plenty of that too. So that may be the only difference.

Christopher Watkin
Look, it’s fair to say that he also does it a lot better.

Collin Hansen
Well, I mean, I teach I teach in cultural apologetics and so I’m working with my students. through preaching, how do you incorporate the elements of subversive fulfillment in preaching, because you may think that there’s no pattern. But when you’re introduced to the pattern, you can see that there’s a way to make these arguments. And your book does a good job. That’s why I wanted to talk about diagonalization want to talk about the N shape and the U shape, because there are these patterns that can be helpful at diagnosing. And then they can help give you a structure when you’re teaching when you’re working through these things. So anyway, so it can be helpful to know it’s not just, it is an instinct. It’s like what Tim car talks about preaching Christ from the Old Testament, it is an instinct. But it’s also a learned effort. exegetically cultural analysis, same thing becomes an instinct. But there’s also typically a method of doing it.

Christopher Watkin
And in the book, I tried to make that method visible. So it’s certain that you know, Paul is doing that Augustine is doing that Christians have done for 2000 years at the Old Testament prophets are doing, but it sort of passes under the radar a lot. And so I tried to stick labels on it and say, let’s call what they’re doing this. And the importance is not the label, the importance is trying to bring to the surface, the moves that they’re making over and over again, so that we can learn them, and try and use similar moves in the way that we engage with culture.

Collin Hansen
One last question, Chris, which is probably too big to be even possible. But you know, hey, we’re already way into this interview. So why not just you know, keep escalating things?

Christopher Watkin
Just Just don’t say that you want a one sentence answer?

Collin Hansen
No, I don’t I don’t, I don’t just play prophet for a second. Modern day Prophet, you’ve covered a lot. You covered a lot of historical ground in this book. But I wonder what’s next. And I’ll put it this way to you. I mentioned this. Let me give you an example. So did an interview with Ross Douthat, the amazing columnist for the New York Times he’s been a guest couple times here on gospel bound and, and with me, and I asked him, we were talking about all the dynamics in the church and culture and politics in 2016, in the United States, and it was quite a quite a moment. And I said, what’s keeping you up at night? And he said, none of that stuff. That stuff doesn’t bother me at all. I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about my girls and smartphones. And I think in a lot of ways, he was ahead of his time and understanding that, like, Yes, I’m not so much worried about what happens in the Vatican, I’m worried about happens with my girls and smartphones. So in light of that, you can take this positively, negatively, you can do both. What’s getting up in the morning, and what’s keeping you up late at night?

Christopher Watkin
Okay, so I had a very wise pastor, when I was living in the UK, and he was fond of saying, The Bible makes it very clear how the story will end. But it doesn’t give us the next step. So we know where we’re heading. Eventually, we know how it will all play. But we we don’t know in a sense that the road straight ahead of us and how we get there. And in a sense, the best way, I think, to be ready for whatever the next step is, and anyone who tells you that they know with certainty what’s coming down the road in five years time, I think needs treating with a pinch of salt is to keep our eyes focused on that eschatological unraveling. Think of it as riding a bike. How do you stay on your bike and not fall off? Well, you don’t look straight down at your feet. If if you look right in front of you, you’ll tend to fall off the bike, the way that you keep the balance is by fixing on something ahead of you. And then you know, your body does the rest in you keep yourself on the bike. And I think there’s a sense in which living the Christian life is very similar. I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the next few years. And I don’t know what well, very few people were predicting the war in Ukraine. Very few people were predicting Coronavirus, stuff like that is going to happen. We just don’t know what it is. But the way to be ready for it is not to obsess about what’s going to happen next year, is to keep your eyes on the final things not as a way of escaping the here and now but as a way of orienting yourself in the here and now in a way that’s going to put you in a posture that’s ready for whatever comes. And this This again is is what Augustine’s doing. So there’s an immediate crisis that he’s facing. Rome has been sacked. People are blaming the Christians panic stations. What does he do? When he tells the whole Christian story from Genesis to Revelation, you can think, you know, what is he doing, he needs to address the situation that’s right in front of him. But he realizes that the way to do that is by setting it in the context of God’s big unfolding story. So he does deal with Zuckerberg, he doesn’t ignore it. But he shows how it’s contextualized and relativized. In the big overarching story of God’s redemptive plan for the world. And it’s, it really is hilarious. There’s this guy called muscle Linus, who writes August in this letter, like help the sack of Rome, what do we do? Augustine replies, with this 1000 page book, the city, whatever Masterline has thought that Augustine was going to say he probably wasn’t expecting that, but isn’t really a reply, because it shows that you can’t get a handle on the present, without having the big story, that things don’t make sense, outside that big story. And I think again, that’s what a lot, a lot of our cultural critique stumbles, because he thinks that in order to be relevant, you’ve got to deal just with with the now but you can’t understand the now. It’s got no meaning no frame, unless you can understand how it fits into the big rhythms and patterns of biblical revelation. And that’s what Augustine brilliantly gives us a pattern for a

Collin Hansen
lot of cultural critique is small sample size. It’s talking about radical changes, because of some sudden recent shift. And the fact is, when you take the larger sample size, you do start to see the more important changes. And then you take another step back, you look at it from the cosmic, biblical perspective. And you see the real story there that makes sense of the others.

Christopher Watkin
And it also just one word on that calling, because I can imagine some listeners thinking, so you’re saying that the things happening now don’t matter, that we should just, you know, sort of lose ourselves in some people who dream world of creation and fall and sort of lose our elephants. And I think someone like Bonhoeffer is really, really helpful on this because he would say, No, it actually makes the present count more, he dignifies the present, to put it in this broader context. And he talks about a better worldliness. Now. It’s by having your your your mind and your disposition full of these big overarching storylines, that you can actually become more use in the present. And you can see the importance of the present in a sharper way doesn’t dole you to understanding what’s going on.

Collin Hansen
That’s lovely. I’m going to end here with my favorite quote, from biblical critical theory. And just to say thank you, Chris, for writing such an amazing book. Here it is. The Christian should not tread some imaginary, safe manicured bourgeois path between pessimism and utopianism, taking care to fall for neither. In fact, she is both more pessimistic than the pessimist and more utopian than the utopian. She was more pessimistic than the pessimist because she recognized the Senate the heart of the human problem cannot be expanded and expanded by any education, social reform of cash injection, or medical intervention. She is more utopian than the utopian because she believes in the radical transformation of the human heart began in this life and completed in the next she has a dream. She believes in a reality without mourning, crying and pain. Yes, reality without death, where every tear will be wiped from the eyes of those who belong to Christ. Her multi lens biblical anthropology gives her a sober optimism, a realistic romanticism and a critical idealism. On that note, Chris, thank you.

Christopher Watkin
It’s been a huge joy, Collin. Thank you so much.