And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.”[1]
Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.[2]
all modern and contemporary thought is, as such, positively and negatively determined by the relation with Christianity.[3]
This is a book for thinking Christians who want to understand and change our society. It provides patterns and examples of how to bring the Bible to bear on some of the key assumptions, debates and issues of our age, and equips the reader to apply these patterns in new questions and contexts. At its heart lies a central conviction: explaining the bible to the culture in which we live is not enough; Christians must also explain the culture in which we live in terms of the bible. These chapters offer one local but foundational contribution to that epochal task: they explore how to think about our culture through the lens of the biblical account of the Trinitarian God and his act of creation, using biblical ways of thinking to meet the challenge of engaging in authentic, positive and constructive dialogue with the great ideas and values of our time.
In order to meet this challenge two things are necessary: we must develop a nuanced grasp of the patterns of thought that structure the biblical account of the Trinity and of creation, and we must develop a penetrating appreciation of the concepts and stories that shape our contemporary culture. In other words, we must develop the capacity for what John Stott in The Contemporary Christian calls “double listening”:
We are called to double listening, listening to both the Word and the world. […] We listen to the Word with humble reverence anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we have come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathise with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.[4]
Both are indispensable for Christians who want to understand and help shape our culture. Neither is straightforward however, and both can be misunderstood, so a word of explanation on each is in order as we begin our journey of double listening.
Listening to the Word
Many people today think that, when Christians speak of bringing the bible to bear on public debate and intellectual endeavor, they are arguing for a podium-thumping, verse-toting, finger-wagging, nay-saying handbrake on innovation and progress. But such pick-a-verse politics is a caricature of a full-orbed Christian intervention into the intellectual and social issues of our day. It fails to understand that the bible not only offers a set of truths, stories values, but it also unfolds what we might call recurring “moves”, “patterns” or “shapes of thought”. These can include patterns of God’s behaviour repeated in different contexts, recurring ways of thinking about the relation between God and the world, or repeated ways in which God’s plans surprise his people. In other words, we need to pay attention not only to what the bible says, but how it thinks about what it says and how that thinking shapes our own thought and lives from top to bottom. Put another way, the bible should not only be read as a set of ideas and stories that Christians think about, but a set of patterns and dispositions through which we think about everything and through which we live the whole of life.
It is when Christians start thinking and acting through the bible in this way that we can provide genuinely fresh, distinctive and constructive contributions to intellectual debate and social change. If Christians are to provide such a distinctive voice in the public square, it will not do simply to sprinkle a little biblical fairy-dust on ideas and policies that have been developed with little or no attention to the bible at all, nor will it do simply to weave some key “dog whistle” language into a way of thinking and living that is, at its core, a pale imitation of the world around it. If Christians are to provide a voice worth listening to in public debate and intellectual life—a voice worth listening to because it articulates distinctive ideas in a fresh way and because it speaks out of a deep and sympathetic understanding of the challenges and opportunities that our culture faces—then we must bring to the table something more than a re-packaged and warmed-over repetition of what our society already thinks and feels.
Now of course we cannot think through the bible without also thinking about it. We cannot learn how to think biblically without seeking to discern the meaning of particular verses and passages, and much of this book is devoted to just that task. The choice between understanding biblical passages and thinking biblically is plainly a false dichotomy. Nevertheless, it is possible to understand many verses and many passages of the bible without thinking biblically and without bringing biblical patterns of thought to bear on the intellectual and social questions of our day. To do so is to judder to a premature halt along the road of developing a Christian mind and voice, and the current book has been written to provide roadside assistance to just such an intellectual breakdown.
To advocate a sensitivity to biblical patterns and shapes of thought is by no means a plea for going behind the text of the bible to find a secret or hidden code beyond its pages or written between the lines, indeed much damage has been done to the church and much dishonour brought to God by misguided claims to have found the true or deep meaning of the scriptures beyond their manifest message. There is nothing esoteric in this approach because the moves, patterns and shapes of thought explored in this book are not behind or above the text at all but can be seen in chapter and verse.
Nor is there any claim in these pages to have discovered something new in the text of the bible. In giving names like “diagonalising” and “U-shaped dynamic” to the biblical moves identified in this book, I am only seeking to draw out with clarity the implications of a way of thinking that lies waiting for us in the bible. The sort of full-orbed Christian interventions into intellectual and social issues outlined in these chapters follow, very imperfectly, in a long and venerable tradition of Christian thinkers and reformers. The work and lives of Augustine and Calvin, to take but two of the best-known examples, show how an understanding of biblical moves, patterns and shapes of thought can generate cutting-edge, incisive interventions into intellectual, social and political issues.
We can begin to get a handle on what such an approach looks like by considering Alvin Plantinga’s four sub-categories of a full-orbed Augustinian Christian philosophy.[5] They are
- Philosophical theology: “a matter of thinking about the central doctrines of the Christian faith from a philosophical perspective and employing the resources of philosophy”[6]
- Apologetics: a negative apologetics that defends Christianity from its detractors[7] and a positive apologetics that gives theistic proofs or arguments for the existence of God.[8]
- Christian philosophical criticism: a critique (in the sense of a fair and balanced appraisal, pointing out good points and bad) of the cultures and thought-forms that exist in society today, “discerning the spirits” and “testing the provenance of the bewildering variety of ideas and claims with which we are confronted”[9] and passing this knowledge on to the rest of the Christian community
- Positive Christian Philosophy: “thinking about the sorts of questions philosophers ask and answer from an explicitly Christian point of view”,[10] questions like the nature of duty or human flourishing, and the pursuit of love or beauty.
According to Plantinga, the Christian church is currently weaker in the areas of philosophical criticism and positive philosophy, and these are the areas that provide the focus of this book.
The combined tasks of a Christian philosophical criticism and a positive Christian philosophy can be thought of as a biblical “theory”, in the sense in which we might talk about “feminist theory” or “eco-theory”, a term to which we shall have occasion to return below. A theory, in this context, is a way of addressing all the facets of contemporary culture and society with a particular set of convictions, concerns, values, questions and ideals. For Carl Trueman, professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, if such a Christian theory is to be written it must begin with Augustine’s City of God:
the range of [Augustine’s] thought, from psychology to politics to grace makes him a unique source for Christian thinking. A Marxist friend once commented to me that The City of God was the only book in Christianity that could function as Das Kapital does in Marxism – a touchstone tome for the development of critical thinking about the whole of life. […] Written as Rome, the eternal city, burned at the hands of the Goths, The City of God is in places a superb reflection on the relationship between earthly and heavenly kingdoms […]. If Christians really want to develop a critical theory that allows for engagement with contemporary culture, they would do better reading Augustine than Derrida.[11]
Trueman is correct in highlighting The City of God as a singular and remarkable source of Christian reflection for critical thinking about the whole of life. In this classic of Western literature (written by a man of African origin, let us not forget) Augustine brings the whole of the Bible’s storyline to bear on the whole of late antiquity, from its religion through its philosophy to its politics. Weaving together a deep understanding of the ideas and narratives of Roman culture with a grasp of the patterns of the bible’s storyline, Augustine shows how the Bible accounts for the culture better than the culture can account for itself. The City of God stands as perhaps the most impressive edifice in double listening during the two thousand years of church history. There is, however (as Trueman would heartily agree) a source deeper in richness and broader in scope than The City of God for shaping a Christian theory in the rapidly changing twenty-first century Western world. We should begin not with Augustine; we should let Augustine lead us to where Augustine himself began: with one eye fixed on the Bible and the other scrutinizing our culture.
Trueman’s advice is a corrective to the widespread assumption that the best way to understand and shape contemporary culture is to read only contemporary authors. In fact, reading nothing but the latest books can be the very worst way to understand contemporary culture. As C S Lewis pointed out in his famous essay “On the Reading of Old Books”, every age has its blind spots and characteristic mistakes, and if we only read contemporary books then “[w]here they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already” and “[w]here they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill”. The remedy, for Lewis, is “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds” by the reading of old books.[12] It follows that one of the great advantages for the Christian seeking to understand and shape our culture in the light of the Bible’s patterns of thought is that the Bible was not written in the last decade, and that it therefore does not share the blind-spots of our particular culture. It was, in fact, written over a period of more than a millennium to and about communities that are by turns nomadic, agrarian, monarchical, exiled and occupied. This cultural and historical diversity means that the Bible—in contrast to almost all current theoretical approaches—is not hidebound to any single age or any single cultural context, least of all our own.
Listening to the World
When it comes to the task of listening to the world we find that the stakes are very similar. Just as there is a danger of wielding particular biblical verses and passages in isolation from biblical ways of thinking, so also it is possible, in listening to contemporary culture, to hear only a series of isolated soundbites and ideas protruding like so many separate islands forming archipelago in the ocean of our culture. To see only the islands, however, is to miss the sub-ocean rifts, ranges and reefs that connect them together and help us to understand them as a whole and in relation to each other. If we seek to understand the surface features of our culture while paying no attention to the deep assumptions, convictions, concepts and stories within which they arise, we shall achieve only a superficial and disjointed grasp of our times. Such a proof-texting approach to cultural engagement can never adequately understand the ideas and values of our culture, and without such an understanding it can never engage that culture in debate on a fundamental level.
The very idea that there are deep concepts and narratives which structure the discourse of our society and shape its values is perhaps a little clearer today in intellectual circles than it is in society at large, where such stories and concepts often remain assumed and unspoken. Such overarching concepts and narratives can be seen roaming through the groves of academe under the name of “theory” or sometimes “social theory” or “critical theory”, and they come in varying guises: Marxist theory, feminist theory, eco-theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory or subaltern theory, as well as deconstruction, psychoanalysis or a Nietzschean analysis of power relations. A thumbnail definition of such a theory is that it “takes a critical view of society and adopts an ideological focus, typically associated with an emphasis on the analytical importance of sociohistorical context, an emancipatory agenda, and reflexivity”.[13]
One important aspect of these theories is that they are not merely telling us what to think about or act upon in the world, but how to act and think in relation to everything. They are not merely something to think about, but something through which to think about everything, in the sense of providing us with interpretive grids to make sense of the whole of life, to know what is important and why, and to know and feel what is praiseworthy and blameworthy. Once such a grid is in place any new fact or event will be interpreted in its terms, with the result that constructive and mutually respectful dialogue with other theories is difficult unless and until the assumptions of the theory itself become part of the discussion.
This book begins to sketch some contours of what we might (somewhat inelegantly) call a “biblical theory”, and to show how it can talk incisively, authentically and productively with other theories currently prominent in our culture. This task is all the more pressing today because each of these theories seeks not only to explain the whole of life and experience, but other theories as well. In his essay “What is an author?”, Michel Foucault mentions a group of thinkers whom he calls “founders of discursivity” (where “discursivity” means a new language to speak about the world and the place of humans in it):
They are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts. In this sense they are very different, for example, from a novelist, who is, in fact, nothing more than the author of his own text. Freud is not just the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Marx is not just the author of the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital: they both have established an endless possibility of discourse.[14]
What Foucault is edging towards with his notion of “founders of discursivity” is that certain writing (he focusses on Freud and Marx as he considers them to be the first and most important examples) makes possible not only other similar texts but a whole way of understanding and engaging with the world that might look a lot like the founding texts or might look very different, but is either way indebted to them. Philosopher Paul Ricœur expresses a similar thought when he argues that “all great philosophies” are “de omni re scibili, about everything knowable”.[15] In other words, there is no feature of the world of human relations that a “theory” cannot fit into its story: fashion, food and family, nature, novels and national debt.
Marxism can understand everything there is to understand in terms of its own concepts and stories. As can psychoanalysis. As can the Bible. Furthermore, each of these ways of thinking offers its own understanding of other theories as well. For example, psychoanalysis might construe the whole biblical narrative as an elaborate projection of a law-giving father figure into the heavens (see Freud’s Moses and Monotheism), or perhaps for the Marxist all the Christian’s arguments are evidence of a false consciousness which merely serves the interests of the powerful. In other words, each of these discourses already has an explanation for anything that the others could possibly say, and already has a place for them within its own account of reality.
Given that these stories can explain all other stories, they cannot simply argue their differences on some putative neutral ground (the very idea that there is “neutral common ground” is a feature of some of these stories and not others). Following Alasdair MacIntyre, theologian John Milbank therefore argues that these all-encompassing stories cannot be argued against but must be out-narrated,[16] and that if the biblical story (and the theology which flows from it) is not clearly shown to explain all other stories in the world, then it will quickly find itself explained away in turn, with nothing to say in reply:
The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. For theology, this must be a fatal disease, because once theology surrenders its claim to be a meta-discourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God, but is bound to turn into the oracular voice of some finite idol, such as historical scholarship, humanist psychology, or transcendental philosophy. If theology no longer seeks to position, qualify or criticize other discourses, then it is inevitable that these discourses will position theology: for the necessity of an ultimate organizing logic […] cannot be wished away.[17]
If Christians do not articulate how the Bible explains all other stories in terms of its story and how the Bible provides a positive vision for society, then other stories will step in to explain the Bible’s story in their own terms and provide that vision in its place.
In this spirit, Thinking Through Creation presents biblical doctrine not a series of facts but a framework for understanding any facts whatsoever, approaching the Bible not as a story within reality but the story of reality, and as the reality itself within which any other stories must necessarily exist. This fundamental and crucial claim is encapsulated by C. S. Lewis in his address to the Oxford Socratic Club on November 6, 1944: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”[18] The whole of life and thought is shaped by the Bible, not because the Bible has something explicit to say about every facet of contemporary society (there is no verse that explicitly addresses the merits of parliamentary representative democracy or how often to check our social media accounts) but because every facet of contemporary society fits within the story unfolded in the Bible, as Christian philosopher Cornelius Van Til explains:
there is one system of reality of which all that exists forms a part. And any individual fact of this system is what it is in this system. It is therefore a contradiction in terms to speak of presenting certain facts to men unless one presents them as parts of this system. The very factness of any individual fact of history is precisely what it is because God is what he is.[19]
For the Christian, everything is what it is because God is who he is, and everything—including culture and intellectual life—has its place within the narrative and concepts of the Bible.
The Trinity and Creation: From Embarrassment to Riches
When it comes to the vision of developing and deploying a biblical theory today, there is a sad irony in many Christian attempts to intervene constructively in intellectual and social debates. The irony is that the biblical teachings and passages that Christians most often avoid and over which they feel embarrassment are often precisely those teachings and passages that can most decisively and innovatively shape fresh thinking. Surely few doctrines today cause as much confusion and as many blushes among Christians as the Trinity, and no passage provokes more controversy and uneasiness among Christians and more anger and ridicule in the wider culture than the account of the creation of the world at the beginning of Genesis. Too often, our contemporary culture sees in Genesis 1 and 2 only problems about days, Darwin and dinosaurs, and the Trinity is dismissed as irrational or as an alien imposition on the Bible dating from three centuries or more after the final biblical documents were written and owing more to church politics than biblical witness. Obedient to this cultural trend, many Christians seek to consign the Trinity and the opening chapters of Genesis to the “too hard” box of doctrine and to the “too contentious” box of public debate, and many in the contemporary church have lost confidence in these foundational truths. This is a disaster for thinking Christians because the fundamental biblical truths of the Trinity and creation provide an indispensable and powerful suite of insights and tools for engaging with and critiquing contemporary thought and culture, as well as providing a foundational context without which other biblical truths do not make sense.
The Trinity and creation are the foundation of all biblical Christian thinking. A world that exists as the creation of a sovereign God is simply not the same place as a world that happens to exist in the absence of any deity or purpose, and a world created by a Trinitarian God is not the same place as a world created by many gods or by a god who lacks Trinitarian richness. And any attempt to reckon with the world from a biblical point of view must grapple with these two fundamental differences. Far from being an embarrassment to sophisticated debate and fresh thinking, the Trinity and creation provide thinking Christians with a spring-board to engage constructively in some of the most important philosophical, political and social questions of our time.
Overview and Structure
This book seeks to lay foundations of a Christian “theory” by carefully considering how we might think our culture through the Trinity (chapter 1) and the creation account in Genesis (chapters 2 and 3). The first chapter argues that the biblical account of the Trinity provides Christians with a way of understanding reality that is both more sophisticated and more beautiful than extra-biblical alternatives. It introduces the distinctive and foundational biblical truth of absolute personality theism and shows how a biblical understanding of transcendence and immanence differs from its philosophical namesake. The reader is introduced to the tool of cultural analysis called “diagonalization”, which refuses the false dichotomies that characterize much contemporary social thinking. The Trinity is contrasted with the perennial philosophical problem of the one and the many, and the irreducibly loving relationality of the Trinity is contrasted with a society whose most fundamental dynamic is power.
Chapter 2 seeks to tease out the intellectual and social implications of the biblical account of the creation of the universe in Genesis 1 and 2. It introduces the important biblical idea of the creator/creature distinction and shows how it revolutionizes human relations by turning a “u-shaped dynamic” of reciprocal favor into an “n-shaped dynamic” of divine initiative. The Bible is shown to diagonalize both the fact/value dichotomy that underpins much contemporary thinking about ethics and also current debates about the relation between language and reality. Finally, the chapter elaborates a distinctively Christian understanding of beauty in the context of a created superabundance that challenges the prevailing cultural values of efficiency and productivity.
In chapter 3 we turn our attention to the biblical story of the creation of humanity. The Genesis 2 account of humanity created in the image of God is set alongside contemporary cultural alternatives to show that the Bible furnishes us with a picture of humanity that resonates more with our values and intuitions than competing accounts, with particular emphasis on its crucial importance for the question of equality. The creation mandate, so often dismissed today as an exploiter’s charter, is revealed to be a springboard to incisive and sophisticated interventions into the areas of ecology and environmentalism and also an imperative to involvement in cultural production in all spheres of society. Finally, the chapter draws out the cultural significance of Sabbath as a subversive and life-affirming act of resistance to prevailing cultural hegemony.
In addition to the main discussions of the Trinity and creation, the reader will find three types of reflection scattered throughout the book, set apart from the main flow of the text against a grey background. These sections deal with particular issues that arise from the major doctrines and passages discussed. Sections entitled “Think it through” deal at greater length with themes and issues raised by the biblical passages studied in the main flow of the book. “Reading notes” discuss how the Bible shapes reading practices both of itself and of other texts. “Compare and contrast” sections trace through the similarities and differences between the Bible’s treatment of a particular issue and that of a non-Christian philosopher or school of thought, showing more clearly some of the important alternatives to the biblical position. Finally, each chapter ends with a section entitled “Summary and Further Reflection”, containing a list of the key biblical and cultural patterns discussed in the chapter, a list of terms and names from the chapter that are defined in the glossary, questions for further study, reflection and action, and a list of further reading.
The mission of this book is to reclaim the Trinity and creation from their cultural despisers and to show how these foundational doctrines speak into, question and re-orient some of the most important debates in contemporary society. If it succeeds in its aim then it will plead guilty to the charge of “incitement to biblical thinking”, for it will have provided a jumping-off point for Christians and others engaged in all areas of thought and culture to use the biblical patterns and concepts explained in its pages to develop fresh and distinctive interventions in many new contexts, challenges and debates.
[1] Acts 17:19-20
[2] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.1.1.
[3] Roberto Esposito, ‘Flesh and body in the Deconstruction of Christianity’, Minnesota Review 75 (2010) 95.
[4] John Stott, The Contemporary Christian (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1992) 27.
[5] Alvin Plantinga, “Augustinian Christian Philosophy”, The Monist 75:3 (1992): 291-320.
[6] Plantinga, “Augustinian Christian Philosophy” 291.
[7] Plantinga, “Augustinian Christian Philosophy” 292.
[8] Plantinga, “Augustinian Christian Philosophy” 293.
[9] Plantinga, “Augustinian Christian Philosophy” 308.
[10] Plantinga, “Augustinian Christian Philosophy” 308.
[11] The post appeared on the Reformation21.org website and has since been taken down. Professor Trueman has confirmed to me in private correspondence that he is happy to stand by the quotation.
[12] C. S. Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books”, in Walter Hooper (ed.), God in The Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970) 202.
[13] “Critical Theory”, in Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday, A Dictionary of Media and Communication (Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press, 2011) 81.
[14] Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979) 154.
[15] Paul Ricœur, “Irrationality and the Plurality of Philosophical Systems”, in Dialectica 39:4 (1985) 309.
[16] John Milbank Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley, 2006) 331.
[17] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory 1.
[18] C.S. Lewis, “They Asked For A Paper”, in Is Theology Poetry? (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1962), 165.
[19] Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics, ed. William Edgar (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2003) 193.
