Dr. Chris Watkin: Episode Description
On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Dr Chris Watkin about his latest book Biblical Critical Theory. They also discuss why Dr Watkin studies medieval languages in French and German, how Dr Watkin became a Christian after growing up a “happy Atheist”, The intellectual critique about Christianity being just about blind faith, choosing to see meaning in the face of anguish instead of nihilisim, whether Dr Watkin believes tackling big ideas and concepts is God’s chosen commission for his life and how critical theory is appropriately applied to the Bible.
Episode Summary
- What Biblical Critical Theory is about
- How Dr Watkin became a Christian after being a “Happy Atheist”.
- Why Dr Watkin studied medieval languages in French and German
- The intellectual critique about Christianity being just about blind faith
- Why Dr Watkin chose to see meaning in the face of anguish instead of nihilism
- Whether Dr Watkin believes tackling big ideas and concepts is God’s chosen commission for his life
- How critical theory is appropriately applied to the bible
Dr. Chris Watkin: Episode Transcript
Sponsor Announcement:
This podcast is sponsored by Australian Christian College, a network of schools committed to student wellbeing, character development, and academic improvement.
Introduction: Welcome to The Inspiration Project where well-known Christians share their stories to inspire young people in their faith and life. Here’s your host, Brendan Corr.
Brendan Corr
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast. I have a personal delight today of speaking with Dr. Chris Watkin. Dr. Watkin is an associate professor in French studies at Monash University and his research is attempting to help people understand how they make sense of the world around them. He is the writer of a number of very prominent books, including Phenomenology or Deconstruction?, Difficult Atheism, and his most recent publication, Biblical Critical Theory. The current way in which Dr. Watkin is working is to explore the different ways the modern West has made sense of the ideas of freedom and liberation. Dr. Watkin, thank you so much for your time. It’s a personal delight to have the chance to speak with you. I’ve enjoyed reading some of your work and it’s very deep, very provocative.
Dr. Chris Watkin
It’s very kind of you to say that, Brendan. It’s lovely to be with you here today. I’m really looking forward to it.
Brendan Corr
I’ve been interested in sharing my own personal thoughts with you about your original studies in linguistics, right, in French and in German, medieval languages?
Dr. Chris Watkin
Yes. It was a literature-and-philosophy-heavy degree, so we did German and French language, and then we looked at German and French literature and philosophy as well.
Brendan Corr
So that’s the pathway that’s led you to the work that I know you best from, Biblical Critical Theory, which is a comprehensive evaluation of the narratives in forming current culture. Is that a fair way to describe your work?
Dr. Chris Watkin
Yes. You’re right, it’s a book that you can prop a door open with. It’s not a small one, and the aim really is to move from Genesis all the way through to Revelation, hitting as much of the biblical story as possible without making the book ridiculously large and looking at modern culture. So post-17th century Western culture through the lens of all the different moments in the Bible story, and to see how these different parts of the biblical story help us to understand our culture and also suggest possibly how that culture might’ve gone astray.
Brendan Corr
I want to come back and dig a little further with you about the propositions or the proposals that you put in that bit of writing your book, but maybe you can share with us a little bit about how you ended up just going off to university to study medieval languages and philosophy in German and French. It doesn’t necessarily seem people would’ve been knocking the door down for that undergraduate work.
Dr. Chris Watkin
I have no idea why, Brendan. I don’t know why everybody doesn’t want to do this. Look, I’ve always loved big ideas and all the big questions, life, the universe, and everything, and so I’ve always had a real soft spot, I guess, for philosophy because philosophers ask those questions, and I think originally that was probably what drew me, part of what drew me to Christianity as well, that Christians also don’t shirk those big questions, don’t entertain ourselves to death but we face life and certainly the Bible faces life with all its difficult and profound questions. And so I’ve always seen an affinity, I guess, between philosophers and Christians as two of the very few groups in society that are asking those big questions today, and I saw this degree as an opportunity to pursue those big questions. Both the French and German traditions have a huge wealth of thinking about all the big, deep questions of life and huge literary traditions. It was just a joy if I’m honest with you. It was an absolute joy to spend four years of my life just reading what people from the 18th century and the 19th century thought about life, what they thought its meaning was, what they tried to do with their lives, and the more you do that, I suppose, the more you realise that the way that you see the life, you see life, whoever you are, is not obvious. Not everybody has always looked at the world the way that I do. People have seen things very, very differently and it really helps you to reflect on your own position and to question yourself, I suppose.
Brendan Corr
Were you hardwired that way, Chris? Was that something that you were aware of while you were at school that you had this draw to big ideas and big stories?
Dr. Chris Watkin
I don’t think I put it as strongly as being hardwired. Life is complicated, isn’t it? How we get to where we end up I think is always much more complex than simply I always wanted to do this and I ended up doing it, but I have always been drawn to big questions, the deepest ways of thinking about life. What is the meaning of life, I suppose, is the deepest you get. So yeah, I’ve always enjoyed thinking about that sort of thing.
Brendan Corr
Were there any seminal experiences or things that were pivotal in your development, your childhood, or your adolescence that helped open that world for you or at least hold it as a possibility for you to explore?
Dr. Chris Watkin
That’s a really interesting question. I’ve never thought about that. Do you know, I don’t know, Brendan? There’s no one sort of moment where the universe opened up to me and I sort of looked into the abyss and thought… And it’s nothing like that. No, I think I may have to disappoint you by saying I’ve just always been interested in it, but there’s no sort of one-trigger moment that suddenly sent everything off.
Brendan Corr
Not a disappointment by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a reflection or an interesting reflection as to how you’re making decisions about what electives to take at high school. You’re making decisions about where to next and the options that lie before you, partly I guess because you were growing up in an environment, in a culture where it was possible for you to entertain those intellectually nourishing, stimulating options.
Dr. Chris Watkin
Absolutely. Yeah, no, I was fortunate to be able to choose what I did. So in England where I did my education, you choose three subjects to focus on for A-level when you’re 16, and I could have chosen sciences. I loved science, I was fascinated by the physical world, but you sort of had to focus one way or another and so I did French, German, and English literature. Yeah, as I say, I could have gone a different way and I think I’d have really enjoyed going a different way. I love physics, maths, and chemistry, but I chose languages, and I’m glad that by God’s grace, I’ve been able to serve and help people by going that way.
Brendan Corr
Were there any particular obstacles that you needed to meet, face, or challenge, or was there warm encouragement from the people around you to stretch your wings, and plot your course?
Dr. Chris Watkin
I’ve been really fortunate, Brendan, I think, in that I haven’t faced any huge challenges. My parents were incredibly supportive all the way through school and university, and I was able to go through university without needing to work to earn money which I recognise is a huge privilege and something that most people are just physically not able to do. So I consider myself to have been very fortunate in the way that I’ve been able to pursue the degree that I did without having to fight against anyone or anything.
Brendan Corr
You’ve mentioned already that faith is a part of the way you see the world, the way you understand the basics of reality. Has that always been the case? Were you surrounded by faith as a child? Did you get confronted with the claims of the truth of Christianity?
Dr. Chris Watkin
Safe to say no. I had a bit of an inoculation against faith as a child, so I grew up as a happy atheist. No God-shaped hole, no existential sort of angst, no desire for transcendence, nothing of that, just really happy, to be honest, with the life that I had. Didn’t have a space for God, didn’t really feel the need for God. I did go to Sunday school once when I was a child and it was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. I was quite a shy child and I was just thrown into this room with all these people who knew what they were doing, and we were colouring in pictures of something I didn’t understand and we were told a story I didn’t understand. Oh, I hated it. It was so stressful, and then the next week I wouldn’t even go back into the room. I got my mum to take back the library book that I borrowed. So that was my experience of church as a child. And then I came back to God when I was about 15. So we went with school on a trip to the battlefield of the First World War, and it’s very hard to visit those battlefields with rows and rows and rows of little white crosses as far as the eye can see without thinking about death and where all those people are now and whether their sacrifice had any meaning and whether indeed you can use words like sacrifice or whether it’s just nature taking its course. Is there anything beyond stuff happening in something like a world war? And so I got thinking and a friend who was on the trip invited me to come to church with her. I went mainly because she was a friend and you’re young and you try different things out. So there wasn’t any particular attraction to Christianity at that point, but I went along. I think about a year later, it may have been two years, I don’t remember, I got to the point where I couldn’t walk away from Christianity but I didn’t believe it yet. I think the reason I couldn’t walk away was that I saw the way that the Christians loved each other. I don’t think I’d have used that word at the time, the way they related to each other in the church, which was just extraordinary. I’d never seen anything like it outside of a family setting. They really loved each other, and yet they had, a lot of them, very little in common with each other. There was just an intoxicating quality of the relationship between them. And then again, the Jesus that they kept talking about from the Bible was just perplexing in the sense that he would say some very profoundly wise and sensible things, and then on the next page he suddenly claimed to be God, and there were wise people. There were people who claimed to be God. They’re not the same people. The people who claim to be God are in institutions and the people who are wise enough to know not to claim to be God. And so I couldn’t put him in a box. I couldn’t work him out. And then a little while later, I think, I realised on the first Christian summer camp that I went on that I was a Christian. I heard the Bible taught and I thought, “Yeah, this is the way things are and it is a very exciting way for things to be and I’m very excited by it.” So I don’t know the moment that I became a Christian, but I know the first time that I realised that I certainly was.
Brendan Corr
I think that’s a really lovely dual account of your encounter with truth in its reality form, but also the promise of Christ, by you’ll know they are Christians by my love. That experiential component that was part of your being found by God or coming to God is lovely. You made an interesting statement a little bit earlier in our conversation that it was the intellectual rigour or the veracity, the truthfulness of current claims, and Christianity’s engagement with those big questions that were part of you being drawn to and then finally convinced by that. That would not necessarily be a Christianity that a lot of people would identify with. One of the critiques of Christianity has been that it is about blind faith, that it’s been about simple notions that don’t stand up intellectually. What answer do you find for those people that have that objection?
Dr. Chris Watkin
Look, I’m sure that there are flavours of Christianity where that’s the case. I’m just, again, I suppose the word is fortunate never to have been brought up in that sort of Christianity. So the first Christianity I had contact with when I was still asking questions and not sure where I stood was a Christianity that was asking questions at a much deeper level than anything else that I’d ever encountered in life and much deeper than my friends, and that was sort of opening the Bible and reading it very carefully and taking it seriously and trying to work through how the Bible could be brought to bear on those questions. So there was always, I suppose, a high bar from that point of view. Then when I went up to university, the church that I went to was influenced by figures like John Stott and C.S. Lewis who thought extremely profoundly about the modern world from a position of trying to take the Bible seriously and bring it to bear on the world, and so that’s always the Christian air I breathed, I suppose. Yeah, I’m aware, because people have asked the question that you’ve just asked me before, that there are types of Christianity that try to shut down thinking, but it seems to me that that’s neither very helpful nor is it really what the Bible does. You don’t see Jesus or Paul telling people to stop thinking. Jesus tells provocative parables precisely with the purpose of making people think and making people slightly unsure of where they stand so that they ask deeper questions.
Brendan Corr
Yeah, I get what you’re saying, and I couldn’t help but think when you were sharing your own story, Chris, of the experience of C.S. Lewis, who I think described himself as a reluctant convert. I don’t know that you would use that same phrase, but the idea is that for whatever capacity you have to think, Christianity holds an answer. When Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” that will be true at whatever level of engagement you can manage.
Dr. Chris Watkin
And I think, yes, I completely agree, Brendan, and I think that the same phrase, I am the way, the truth, and the life also primes you to think that the response that Christianity gives you is not going to be a simple one. It’s not these three points are the way, the truth, and the life. This simple sentence is the way the truth and the life. There’s nothing more complex than people. If Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” in a sense there’s a beautiful simplicity to that because all God’s promises are, yes, in him, everything goes through him. There’s a simplicity, but it’s not simplistic because the richness of the response that Christ gives to these deep questions of life I think is more complex and more multidimensional than you could ever get with any sort of abstract philosophical answer to them, simply because people are more rich and diverse and sort of multilevel than any abstract idea.
Brendan Corr
I found it a personal delight when I was reading your opening chapters and the proposition that personhood, personness is the basic essence of reality because that is God. God is a person, and it frames everything, and that complexity of personality does permeate truth and allows things to be held in a creative tension that is not completely discreet or able to be demarcated. It’s a wonderful insight.
Dr. Chris Watkin
And I think it’s a balm as well, isn’t it? There are very few people in society today who don’t want to care for people and the weakest and most vulnerable among us, the people the Bible would call the widows and the orphans, and there are very few people who don’t want to say that people have dignity. All people have dignity regardless of how much money they earn or regardless of how well they play sports or whatever. The idea that the deepest reality in the universe is not a force or an impersonal equation or whatever but is actually personal is just one of the biblical foundations. There are others for say that regardless of what I think, people actually do have dignity. So if everybody in the world said people are worthless, on Christianity they would still have dignity, doesn’t matter what we think. There’s something outside us that ascribes dignity to people. That’s so precious.
Brendan Corr
It is indeed. I’m also struck, Chris, as you relay your own experience of the eminence of grace, the fact that you were led. I mean, you had this experience of going and seeing those fields of white crosses and being confronted with the futility of life and the scale of loss and the questions about meaning. There would be other people, other hearts, other minds that would see that and would be confronted with the anguish of it and the futility and the nihilistic, be persuaded that way. You were led the other way. You were led to find something bigger than that.
Dr. Chris Watkin
It’s interesting, isn’t it? I wonder if those two reactions are quite as opposite as we might think though. In order to feel the weight of the nihilism, there’s got to be a sense that nihilism’s not just normal. It’s like Pascal’s point that you can only be wretched if you ought to be something more than you are. I think his example is a rat is not wretched when it scrapes around in the rubbish looking for something to eat, and I think again Pascal’s example is but a queen would be wretched if she was scraping around in the rubbish looking for something to eat because a queen ought to be grander than that. And so I don’t think you can be hit by nihilism without a latent sense that there should be something better or bigger or more meaningful than this. And so I think almost you could say being confronted with the nihilism of the universe, you’re already halfway to grasping onto some greater meaning. I think it’s the person who would look at the crosses of the First World War and see the millions of people who died and think, “Yeah, whatever. Just more stuff.” That’s a lot further away from faith than someone who would just be struck by the meaninglessness of it all.
Brendan Corr
Which is some of the argument, isn’t it? There’s quite a surge of reflection. I want to ask you a little later on about the nature of Western civilization and what the West holds. There have been a number of commentators who have identified that those values, the very valuing of human life as something that should not be scattered as a sea of white crosses on a field are intrinsically Christian in their information.
Dr. Chris Watkin
Yes, they have. I think you need to be careful about that. So the people like Tom Holland in Dominion and Glen Scrivener in The Air We Breathe have made this argument that the values that we recognise as universal human values today, human dignity, equality, and freedom, actually sunk their roots in a particular cultural compost, if you like, which was the cultural compost that was full of the Bible of Jewish and Christian thought, and I think just historically speaking, it’s very hard to refute that. It is de facto the case that those societies that have valued human dignity and the intrinsic value of human life the most, and equality and freedom and so forth happen to have been those cultures where Christianity has helped to shape those cultures. But I think what you don’t want to do is suggest that you can’t value human life without that Christian influence because I think the Bible itself would say, for example, that verse in Ecclesiastes, God has put eternity in people’s hearts. God has given us a sense. As Romans 1 says, it’s not a sense that’s beautifully pristine and shining in us, but nevertheless, we do have a sense of how God has made the world, as Romans 1 says, his eternal power and divine nature, and so you wouldn’t want to suggest that there’s no inkling as to the value of human life without specific explicit teaching of Christianity. And so I think what I’m saying is don’t push that argument too far.
Brendan Corr
Yeah, I hear what you’re saying there. That’s very good. Setting up a straw man to critique a non-Christian perspective or to defend the Bible and its place and neither would you want to diminish the individual moment of personal revelation that comes and say, “Oh, my response to that was simply cultural in its formation,” and not to recognise that the Spirit of God in grace was able to do something specific, individual.
Dr. Chris Watkin
That’s right. It’s the idea, the theological idea that I think does reflect something that the Bible is talking about, although the Bible doesn’t use this language of common grace. God gives grace to everybody. None of us are quite as evil as we would be if we were just left to our own devices, regardless of whether we’re Christians or not. That is because God is kind to us and holds back our destructive impulses, and I think we need to let common grace have its say in those debates about values.
Brendan Corr
Very good. Before I do dig in specifically to some of the things in your book, do you carry a sense, Chris, that this is your vocation, that God has shaped you and crafted you and given you capacities to wrestle with big ideas and express them with power and persuasion and that’s his commission for you?
Dr. Chris Watkin
I don’t think I’d use that language. So I enjoy it. It seems that when I do it, people get helped and served and so that’s fantastic, but I think it’s always dangerous to second guess God’s plans. So for example, if my wife were to be injured in a horrific car crash today and to need my full-time care, that would become my vocation. That’s me. From that point on, I’m all in. And so if I hold onto an idea of the one thing that I know that God has called me to is to write these books, and then something happens like my wife becomes in need of full-time care, where does that leave me? And I think I’ve presumed upon knowing more about God’s will than I actually do in a case like that. So I enjoy it. It appears that what I do is useful, and I will keep on doing it as long as God puts me in a place where I’m able to do it, and if he changes that then we’ll reassess.
Brendan Corr
That’s a very good caution not to absolutize the current way in which God might be using you or opening opportunities for you and to enshrine that as the be-all and end-all. So you’re living more in the notion of 1 Peter 4:10, “Whoever speaks, let him speak, whoever serves.” It’s recognising that God remains providentially sovereign.
Dr. Chris Watkin
That’s right. God sees the end from the beginning and I don’t. So it’s his job to work out what my vocation is at any point and I’ll try my best to discern it and follow along.
Brendan Corr
Be faithful. That’s great. Well, I wanted to start with a particular engagement about your biblical critical theory treaty by asking the question about whether most people would know or be familiar with critical theory in something that maybe wasn’t obviously aligned with Christian thinking. Critical race theory is the flavour of the day or part of common parlance right now and it’s not necessarily seen in a positive light. So maybe you can help unpack what is critical theory and how is it appropriately applied to something like the Bible?
Dr. Chris Watkin
Yeah, sure. First of all, I guess the question of whether or not it’s seen in a positive light is very much a political question, isn’t it?
Brendan Corr
Yeah, where do you stand? That’s very true.
Dr. Chris Watkin
That’s part of the problem. It’s become so politicised and so polarised, this debate around critical theory that it’s very hard to sort of see the wood for the trees anymore. Look, my argument in the book is really that both historically and logically, Christian faith provides the best basis for doing what we call critical theory. Let me just walk through why I think that’s the case because that might sound strange to people who’ve only come across critical theory as this sort of thing on the news that pops up and people either love or hate and then it sounds quite provocative to say that that is fundamentally Christian. So I owe your listeners an explanation of that. So first of all, historically, just look back to the different ancient civilizations and think about which of them entertained a critique of power within society. So ancient Babylon, and ancient Assyria, you don’t find the emperors and kings willingly entertaining people who say, “You’re making bad choices.” Those people were killed in Babylon and Assyria. And yet in the Hebrew nation, we find this very particular institution which is the institution of the prophet. Now they’re not officially sanctioned. There’s no school of prophets. You don’t have to go to Prophet University to become a prophet. Some prophets are shepherds. Some seem to work in the royal courts. Everybody in society seems to be eligible to be a prophet, and there’s only one instance of it being passed on in a line of succession from Elijah to Elisha, I think. So it is really anarchic, this institution of prophecy, and one of the things that the prophet does is they pronounce God’s judgement upon the political leadership of the nation. So the other nations are judged absolutely, but a lot of the invective goes towards the kings of Israel and Judah, and yet there’s a place in Hebrew society for this institution. Now prophets aren’t always liked. Once in a while, they’re killed, but nevertheless, they’re recognised as, if you like, a legit part of society in ancient Israel, and that’s just odd. That critique of that sort should be tolerated is not usual in the ancient world. And then you go into the New Testament period and you see just more of it. The volume gets turned up. Jesus rips into the Pharisees, the leaders, the authority, religious authority figures of his day like he rips into nobody else. And so there’s this tradition of critique within the Bible. And then you get into the early centuries of the Christian tradition and you see it carrying on. So I’m thinking particularly of Augustine’s amazing book, the City of God. Charles Mathewes is an Augustine scholar. I think he’s based at the University of Virginia, a very respected, sort of world authority on Augustine, and one thing that he said in one of his books really struck me. He said that the city of God is the first example that he’s aware of in the Western tradition of taking a whole culture, which Augustine does with Rome, not just a little bit of it but the whole of a culture, and subjecting it to a systematic critique from a position outside of it, which of course for Augustine is a biblical standpoint, and to the extent that that is true, the city of God is the origin of the enterprise of systematic cultural critique in the West. So historically speaking, when we talk about critiquing society, we’re drawing necessarily upon a heritage that is Christian. But I think there’s also a stronger argument to make which is that Christianity provides you with the sort of basis you need to make cultural critique meaningful in the sense that in order to say the way things are in society at the moment is not right, things need change. And everybody says that, don’t they? Nobody sort of goes on Twitter and says, “It was good actually. Let’s just carry on.” Everybody thinks things about any changing one way or another. In order to do that, you’ve got to have somewhere to stand outside the status quo from which to judge the status quo. If what there is is all there is, why is it not okay? It’s just everything. It’s just it is what it is. How could you judge it on the basis of anything other than itself because there is nothing else? Christianity, of course, provides you with that place to stand because we know that the way things are now is neither the way that they were originally intended to be, Genesis 1 is not Genesis 3, something catastrophic happened after the original creation to stuff things up basically, and we know that how things are now is not how they’re going to be. Colossians 2, I think it is, Ephesians 1, God will gather everything under Christ. Everything will be reconciled to him. Right at the end of Revelation, of course, there’s the Final Judgement when nobody will get away with anything that they thought they’d got away with during this life. And so that the Christian can say the way things are now is not how they should be, and that’s not just my feeling, it’s not just that it makes me feel bad, not just that it sets off certain chemicals in my brain, but objectively, regardless of what I feel that the way things are now is not as they should be. That gives you a very powerful foundation for cultural critique because it’s not just I don’t like this, and then someone else comes along and says, “Well, actually I quite like it.” And then where do you go from there? The only thing you can do there is who can shout the loudest put the most money behind their position and eventually produce the most firepower in order to silence the opposition. That’s not a very healthy society. And so there’s a sense that pops up in secular cultural theory once in a while that you do need this sort of place to stand, and one of the clearest places that it pops up is towards the end of a book called Minima Moralia by the Frankfurt School critical theorist, a guy called Theodor Adorno, and he’s talking about the enterprise of cultural critique towards the end of that book. He says, “Look, what we need is a standpoint of redemption.” Now he’s not a Christian. He holds no brief for Christianity whatsoever, and he’s not using that argument, to be fair to him, to say we all need to become Christians. He has a way of thinking you can get that standpoint of redemption without becoming a theist or a Christian. But nevertheless, the fact that that’s the language he reaches for to say, “This is what we need to legitimate the enterprise of cultural critique,” I just think is really interesting. It shows you that logically if you don’t have somewhere to stand that’s different from the status quo, when push comes to shove, all you can really do is say, “I don’t like this,” and hope that enough people agree with you.
Brendan Corr
Yes. This makes sense. I’ve heard you talk in other contexts around the value, the inherent value of there being the fact of sin, that sin is not just evil manifest, it is a failing to achieve the ideal, the good, and that notion of we’re not simply trying to eliminate the things that we don’t like or that we don’t approve of. There is a teleology. There’s a purpose that we’re striving for, and every age, despite their best intentions, will fall short.
Dr. Chris Watkin
I think that’s absolutely right. Look, if you don’t have a positive vision to offer, then just take your place alongside all the other armchair critics who are pointing their finger at things in society. But the deliciousness of the Bible is that it doesn’t just sit there and wag its finger. It does, I suppose iconically in the Book of Revelation paints this, just this beautiful, this meltingly beautiful picture of the new Jerusalem that’s a different way that society can be done with God at its centre. Just the picture of beauty and flourishing and joy and harmony that there is there I think is as important in terms of cultural engagement as being able to say the way things are now is not the way that they should be because if that’s all you can say, then where do you go from there. So what, what are we going to do about that? We’re just going to sort of fold our arms and curl our lips and sneer? Well, that’s hardly going to help anyone. So you’ve got to have a positive vision.
Brendan Corr
This leads to the notion that you’ve described or unpacked in a way that there’s the phrase out-narrate, that there is this meta-narrative, this big story that is a better explanatory tool for what is than alternatives. It isn’t just a competitor, it embraces all that that story tells and more. Is that sort of how you see Christianity and the proposals in the Bible?
Dr. Chris Watkin
I think so. I think certainly that’s how Augustine sees things in The City of God. When you get to big views of the world that encompass everything, you can’t just say… There’s no objective place to stand to say this one’s right and that one’s wrong because they all explain everything. So what are you going to do? One way of trying to grapple with that is to look at the stories they have to explain to each other. And so there are lots of secular stories out there that will try to explain Christianity better than Christians can explain it themselves is the claim. So psychoanalysis will say, “Yes, well, you think there’s a God, but let me tell you what’s really going on. Actually, you’re projecting a father figure.” It is more complex than that, but essentially you need some sort of transcendent idea of the father and so you’ve invented this idea called God. The philosophy of Darwinism would have its own explanation for Christianity, how it’s evolutionarily advantageous, and so forth. And so they all try to explain Christianity as part of their own story. They try to out-narrate Christianity, but of course, Christianity does that as well. It doesn’t just sort of sit there in the corner waiting to be animated. It explains why people would be desperate for there to be no God and would go to great lengths to invent stories that paint God out of the picture and so forth. And so you’d look at these stories alongside each other and look at how they explain each other and look at the, I guess, the explanatory power that they have in relation to the way that we see the world. And so a lot of these stories will either go hard on humans being basically nice and benevolent, and we just got to get education right, and then people will be free to be themselves, and if only we can mix the formula correctly in society then everything will be wonderful. Other stories go really hard on human depravity and evil and say, “You’re never going to get people to be nice to each other. You’ve just got to scare them into submission. Unless there’s enough fear in society, you’re going to get anarchy.” And there’s a historical genealogy for each of those positions. You can see how they sort of develop. But the wonderful thing about the Bible is that it’s sort of more pessimistic than the deepest pessimist and also more wild-eyedly optimistic than the greatest idealist. The pessimists or the cynics will say, “People are fundamentally flawed,” and the Bible will come along and say, “You’ve got no idea how bad we are. We are unable to change our hearts. Our hearts deceive us. We are powerless before our own depravity.” There aren’t many people painting such a bleak picture, even among the Hobsians who say that there’s a war of all against all unless we’re too scared to do what we really want to do. And then the Bible comes along and sort of has a look at these idealists who are saying, “We just got to get education right, and then society’s going to be wonderful,” and the Bible says, “That’s a very small vision. Let me show you a reality where we get new hearts, where there’s no longer any mourning or crying or pain because the old order of things has passed away. Let me show you a perfect society that’s not just pie in the sky but is actually on its way.” It makes the greatest secular idealism look like a quick sketch on the back of a napkin. The amazing thing about the Bible is it does both of these and they’re not in conflict with each other. It’s not that you’ve got half cynicism or pessimism and half idealism, that Genesis 1 and Genesis 3, both of them unload both battles, Christian view of the world. And so when people do terribly wicked things, the Christian grieves and weeps but she’s not shocked, but that doesn’t challenge our view of the world, and when people do the most gloriously wonderful self-sacrificial things that the Christian rejoices and is happy, but again, that doesn’t rock our world because that’s right there in the Bible. And so the Christian can play this whole keyboard of the human experience in a way that I think it’s really hard for secular philosophies to wrap their head around because they either go mainly on the people are fundamentally good line or mainly on the people are fundamentally stuffed up line.
Brendan Corr
I think it was Chesterton who argued this line, wasn’t it, that we need the full expression of pessimism, but the full-on, high volume and to its max, both of them operating at full blast. That’s what Christianity holds.
Dr. Chris Watkin
Yeah, and I think that’s what we see on the news, isn’t it? People are pretty crummy a lot of the time, and people can torture babies. That happens. People can kill each other. If our view of the world can’t cope with that, then we’ve got a problem. And yet people can go into war zones to rescue people and lose their lives when these people, they’re not their family, they’re not the same ethnic group, there’s no… People are capable of the most wonderful acts as well, and so it just resonates. It just fits with what we see around us, what we read in the paper, and what we see online.
Brendan Corr
Chris, I wonder whether you’ve done reflecting, I certainly have asked the question for people like yourselves who are able to unpack apparently simultaneously a different view of culture and a different view of scripture, which is the one that’s informing the other. Are you bringing a theological view to your sociology or a philosophy or a philosophical view to your theology, or is it not important to make that distinction?
Dr. Chris Watkin
I think it’s a really complex question, and I’m just trying to think through it in terms of Augustine in The City of God. Look, there are different building blocks that I think you need to get in place to have an adequate answer to that question. Let’s just try and throw a few of them in the wall. I think first of all, none of us come to the Bible as a blank slate. So we’ve all been categorised into a particular cultural view of the world and that catechesis has been constant and often very aggressive. So everything that we are taught as babies and then children is bringing us into a particular view of the world that our parents largely hold. Everything that we see online, all the adverts that we see as we walk around the city, wherever we live, all the interactions that we have with other people are all shaping and forming us, and for those of us who live in Australia and similar countries, they’re shaping us into a really quite particular, and in many ways peculiar, Western view of the world and teaching us to value particular things that not all cultures have always valued and to shun and decry other things that not all cultures have shunned and decried, and so we all start from somewhere. None of us come to the Bible completely clean culturally, and so we’re necessarily going to read some of our cultural assumptions into the way that we interpret the Bible. Now the question is not do we start from there, the question is what do we do with that, and I think there are particular ways in relation to reading the Bible that that needn’t mean that you end up with some sort of wishy-washy relativism where the Bible just means nothing in itself and everybody just brings their own ideas to it and nobody ever takes anything away from it. I think first of all, that’s not the way we read any other book. You wouldn’t say that about Shakespeare. You’d say that your cultural lenses filter your view of Shakespeare to a certain extent, but I don’t think anyone would say the text itself means nothing at all and it’s only what you bring to it that you take away from it. So the sort of entry-level to this, you just treat the Bible like you would treat any other text and don’t deny to the Bible the courtesy that you would give to any other text or to any other person speaking to you. As I’m speaking to you now, you’re not saying, “Well, your words could mean anything at all.” That’s not very nice to me and I’m not assuming the same of you either, and so you’re just to extend the Bible that same courtesy. I think what the Bible has going for it though in contradistinction to other books is two things. First of all, it is itself multicultural, if you like, that it’s written over a period of centuries in different languages within two different cultures. So there’s the culture of a nation being slaves in Egypt, moving out of slavery to a self-governing setup in the Promised Land, and then later on in exile, a very different cultural context, and then under Roman occupation in the New Testament. And so the Bible is not monocultural, and if you believe that the problem is being locked into a particular cultural outlook, well, then the Bible doesn’t have that problem, almost uniquely among books because it wasn’t written within one generation and one cultural context. The other factor I think that gives us great hope in reading the Bible that we’re not just looking at a mirror and seeing our own ideas reflected back to us is the promise of God’s Holy Spirit to help believers interpret the scriptures. Now, this is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s not, well, I’m a believer, therefore everything I think about the Bible is necessarily going to be true because I’ve got the Holy Spirit. I don’t think that’s the way the New Testament conditions us to think about reading the Bible, but nevertheless, the ministry of the Holy Spirit does guide the first apostles into all truth and they’re able to set it down. And then when we read, if we read seeking to obey Christ and seeking to follow him, we do have the Holy Spirit. And so I think for those two main reasons, almost the Bible more than any other book gives us hope that we’re not just in an echo chamber of our own ideas when we read it.
Brendan Corr
In a similar way, I’m conscious, we spoke earlier about some of the writers, Tom Holland and those sorts of folks, who have identified the biblical basis of Western society that needs to be recognised and preserved and respected at least, if not re-established. Then there are writers like Carl Trueman in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self who have tracked those biblical principles to enable the development of a culture that overturned Christianity and introduced the postmodern era. How do you understand those points of argument that Christianity and the biblical basis for culture were to be valued and the argument that it actually enabled the demise of Christendom?
Dr. Chris Watkin
I guess it goes back to the answer from a little while ago which is that the Bible expects human beings to be capable of great good and great evil, and it expects human beings not to be comfortable with the idea of there being a personal God who makes demands of us and makes promises that he wants us to trust. If that is the case, as the Bible suggests that it is, then it would be no surprise if we take biblical truths and try and wriggle out of them or twist them against the Bible and try and draw out of them arguments that seem to defeat the faith. It would be odd if that didn’t happen if we are as the Bible says that we are. And so the trajectory that Trueman charts in that book, and there are other possible ways of telling that story as well, it’s sort of, well, yeah, that’s the sort of people that we are, isn’t it? If the Bible is correct, that’s sort of the way you’d expect it to play out.
Brendan Corr
So in a similar way, as the physicist will say, what sort of universe would we expect if these principles were in play, that’s the world we’ve ended up with. You’re arguing the same thing with our humanity, our relationships, and our culture.
Dr. Chris Watkin
Look, it seems to fit. Yeah, it would be hard to think that we were the sort of people the Bible says we are and then to sort of have some Christian ideas and then everybody suddenly think, “Oh, this is so brilliant. Let’s just hang on to these and never move away from them.” Each generation will say, “Yes, our fathers and grandfathers had it perfectly, and we don’t want to change a thing.” That’s not how we roll, is it? Every generation wants to mark itself out from the generation of its parents, and there’ve been really interesting literacy studies of this. There’s a lovely book called The Anxiety of Influence which is basically every generation wants to show that its previous generation didn’t have it right and you got to listen to us. Nobody makes a reputation, do they, in literary studies or elsewhere by saying yeah, “Things are just fine, just keep them as they are.” And so given that that is who we seem to be and who we see generation after generation to prove ourselves to be and that the Bible predisposes us to expect that sort of thing, making a name for ourselves in the language of the Tower of Babel, that’s the sort of people we are, then yeah, that’s the story that Carl Trueman tells is sort of how it’s going to go.
Brendan Corr
So rather than some of those works that are nostalgic about Christendom and the power of Western civilization rooted in Judeo-Christian values and almost hearkening back to those times, or at least that way of viewing culture, are you optimistic? Is it something that you aspire to for the future of our community, our world, our generation?
Dr. Chris Watkin
Let’s just say a quick word about the nostalgia first. I think that the nostalgia reflex is more complex than we often give it credit for. So I don’t think people actually want to go back. We selectively understand certain parts of the past through the lens of the present and project onto the past I think a weight that the actual past is not able to bear. And so I think there’s a lot more to nostalgia than simply wanting to turn the clock back. It’s a bit of a simplistic idea that all that we need to do is go back to a previous point. There was no golden age, and I think again, the Bible predisposes us to expect that. This side of Genesis 3, there’s no high point that if we just get back to there then it’s all going to be great. That’s not the shape of the people who called the story. So is there hope? Well, yes, there’s a Christian sort of hope which is neither the armchair cynicism of all politicians are corrupt, and if you’re on the left, capitalism is just draining society of all its morality, or if you’re on the right, whatever it is these days, the woke agenda is destroying. So there’s not that cynicism, but neither is the sort of wing and a prayer, Hail Mary sort of hope that you sometimes get, if we could all just love each other and these sort of John Lennon Imagine type hope. It sort of sounds okay, but how on earth… That’s not what people are like. That’s never been what people are like, so why do we expect that people are suddenly going to fundamentally change and society’s going to be wonderful? But the sort of hope that you get in Christianity is a hope that can look the bleakness of reality in the face. It can look those rows of white crosses in the First World War in the face, and it doesn’t have to pretend they’re not there and it can weep at that, and yet in the midst of that, it can hold out a concrete, visceral hope for the fundamental change, the inbreaking of which we see already. When Christianity is working along a biblical pattern, I think we see something of the hope being manifest. So for example, during the Great Awakening in the UK, back in the day when under Whitefield and Wesley crime rates dropped, alcoholism dropped, and I’m not suggesting that Christianity is always an unmitigatedly beneficial force in society. Christians in the name of Christ have also done a lot of evil. John Dickson’s book, Bullies and Saints, I think is really, really helpful in facing that and coming to terms with that as Christians. So don’t anybody hear me saying Christians are always wonderful and they always do wonderful things, isn’t it great? Nevertheless, there is historical evidence to show that Christianity can benefit, does benefit society, and that from a Christian point of view is just the first fruit. It’s just the shadows, the incoming, to switch the metaphor from the shadow to the little rays of light before the glorious sunrise. There’s a hope that’s a here-and-now hope. It’s not just pie in the sky when you die. Christianity done properly benefits society, and we can look at the past as an example of that, if people love each other and build community and help each other and use their money and their time to support each other, that’s good for society. And yet, that’s not the only hope. It’s not just a let’s try and make things a tiny bit better type of hope, which the more you think about it and the more you dwell with that sort of hope is actually sort of a council of despair. Is that all we can do? But it is an unstoppable juggernaut of hope also coming when we will get new hearts and every tear will be wiped away from our eyes and so forth. It’s the combination I think of those two that’s the distinctive of the Christian hope. It’s not just let’s sit tight and wait for the apocalypse, but it’s not let’s just do a tiny bit now because that’s all we’re ever going to achieve either.
Brendan Corr
Yeah, and that’s a beautiful circle back to the experience you had as a teenager where you encountered the profundities of eternity, but you experienced a community that was committed to one another and were making life in the here and now something quintessentially better in their love with one another. Those two parts of Christianity, that full of grace, full of truth, that we’re called to live out, the full measure of the stature of Christ. Dr. Watkin, it’s been an absolute joy to spend some time with you. I thoroughly appreciate the way God has used you to shine some of his light into the areas of the world that we occupy sociologically, and we’ll continue to pray that he strengthens you for that. I look forward to hearing a bit more about emancipation and freedom for freedom’s sake, he made us free, and it’d be great to hear some of your thoughts on that. But for today, thank you for your gracious presence.
Dr. Chris Watkin
It’s been an absolute joy, Brendan. Thank you so much for your wonderful questions.
