Jubilee Summer 2022

Summer 2022

Reformed Scholasticism and Reformational Thinking Dr. Joseph Boot

recovering biblical foundations for our time

Book Review: Myths and Mistakes ‘Myths in New Testament Textual Criticism’ Textual Tim Dieppe

Critical Theory and the Gospel Dr. Bradley G. Green

summer 2022 issue 4 7 14 27

Editorial Reformed Scholasticism and Reformational Thinking — Joe Boot Critical Theory and the Gospel: Theological Analysis and Reflection — Brad Green Book Review: “Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism” – Tim Dieppe

Layout design by Kathy Jimenez.

Jubilee is the tri-annual communiqué of the Ezra Institute to our global family of friends and supporters. The Ezra Institute is a registered charitable Christian organization. Learn more and find additional resources at www.ezrainstitute.com.

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Write to us at Ezra Institute: PO Box 9, STN Main, Grimsby, ON L3M 4G1 jubilee@ezrainstitute.ca

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editorial Dear friends, Welcome to another issue of Jubilee! As you may have heard, we have begun a return to the earlier form and purpose of this journal, which is to provide a resource to help Christians think Christianly about every area of life. The mission and vision of the Ezra Institute remains the advancement of the lordship of Jesus Christ over all of life and culture, and that includes our thought life. With that in mind, we have not hesitated to tackle complex and controversial topics in an in-depth way, and to present it in a hard-copy format that readers can revisit, mark up, and otherwise interact with. Jubilee is distributed to subscribers and ministry partners, and we’re grateful for your support as we progress through this year.

NEWS UPDATES

We are very excited to announce that the Ezra Learning Portal is coming online at the end of this summer! If you’ve been engaging with the Ezra Institute for any length of time, you may remember that at the end of 2021 we began work on this new online learning portal; some of you helped us by testing the beta version of that platform and providing feedback to help us improve it. This coursebased learning platform is intended to solve several problems that we’ve identified.

First, we’ve noticed that interest in our in-person training programs has been growing, while at the same time the ability to travel globally has been dramatically restricted. Those same restrictions have also made it harder for us to accept invitation to participate in other ministries’ events and programs. We’ve also heard from many Christians

who, for several reasons, are seeking alternatives to mainstream, formally accredited Bible colleges and seminaries. We’ve sought to respond with a solution that provides faithful teaching and lasting value. The Ezra Learning Portal is: Paid: charging a small subscription fee enables us to commit more time and resources to continually add to and improve the portal.

Professionally produced: Christians should do all our work with excellence, and that extends to video production and web development.

Custom-designed: We did it the hard way with a proprietary, built-from-scratch platform. This took longer, but it allows us more control over the final product, and it makes it harder for the cancel-culture mob to deplatform us.

Mobile-friendly: It functions like an app, but it doesn’t need to go through app store approvals.

The Ezra Learning Portal is designed for students who find themselves unable to attend traditional classroom settings, Christians schools and churches providing congregational education, and a general audience who are seeking in-depth instruction from a known and trusted source. We hope that this new project is a blessing to God’s people. You can learn more about it by visiting www.ezralearningportal.com.

MINISTRY EXPANSION

In the previous issue we announced that the Ezra Institute is expanding our work to the UK and USA. Dr. Joe Boot is returning to the UK this summer to lead the establishment of that office. He will be in Canada regularly to participate in all our training programs and conferences, and will continue to work closely with the Canadian and American staff in every aspect of the ministry on a weekly basis. The Podcast for Cultural Reformation, Jubilee journal, and publishing work will continue in its present form, as well as pursuing relevant expansion opportunities within our unique sphere. Thank you for your ongoing prayers and support during this time of transition.

TRAINING PROGRAMS

As of this writing we have just concluded another summer of programs. This year we welcomed 24 delegates to the Runner Academy in Golden, British Columbia, and 36 students to the Worldview Youth Academy in Port Colborne, Ontario. We praise God for sending us another wonderful group of delegates – sincere, thoughtful, and energetic young people from a range of backgrounds. Recordings of these sessions will be posted on the Ezra Learning Portal.

The opportunity to meet, study, and have fellowship with likeminded Christians from around the world is truly a blessing that we never want to take for granted, and as we expand our ministry presence, we look forward to offering more training programs in more locations in 2023.

Still to come this year is our first general-audience training program, the Christianity and Culture Colloquium. This three-day course is for Christians from all backgrounds and stages of life who are interested in understanding how to apply God’s Word to our present cultural moment. Lord willing, we intend to offer this program October 18-21 in southern Ontario. If you would like to attend, please contact us at info@ezrainstitute.com, or check our website, www.ezrainstitute.com.

PODCAST FOR CULTURAL REFORMATION

We continue to be encouraged by the number of people who reach out to us to let us know how they have been blessed by the Podcast for Cultural Reformation. This show started to reach a broad audience with the message of the gospel and its application to every square inch of life and culture. God has graciously amplified our audience so that we are reaching 20,000-50,000 listeners each month, which places this show in the top 1% of podcasts globally.

You can catch us on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and most other podcast platforms. And of course, you can always listen directly on the website, www.ezrainstitute.com. Beginning this fall for Season 6, we’re also looking forward to launching a brand new video component to the show.

RESOURCES

We are continually working to provide faithful, engaging, and timely resources through our publishing wing, Ezra Press. So far this year we have released Joe Boot’s newest book, Ruler of Kings, distributed in partnership with Wilberforce Publications. In this book, Joe seeks to provide the foundation for a distinctly Christian response to our current socio-political crisis.

We are also preparing a new edition of A Time to Search, to be released at the end of the summer.

This 20th anniversary edition of Joe Boot’s classic apologetics work was published in North America EDITORIAL

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as Searching for Truth. Joe explains how the biblical worldview makes sense of the whole of reality, wrestling with questions common to the human experience about suffering, truth, morality, guilt, and the claims of the person of Jesus.

Finally (so far), Joe contributed a chapter to a volume produced by Ezra Institute Fellow Andrew Sandlin, entitled Failed Church: Restoring a Vision of Ecclesial Victory. This collection aims to assess the present state of the church, and deals with topics as diverse as prayer, economics, authoritarianism, environmentalism, and eschatology.

These and many other books are available at www. ezrapress.ca.

that persisted for several centuries, culminating in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, and which endures in various forms in present-day Christianity. It required a comprehensive Christian world and life view to effect a break from dualism, and this was found in the reformational tradition.

Dr. Brad Green introduces the key thinkers and ideas of Critical Theory, explaining how CT is a religious system of thought, complete with doctrines of creation, sin, redemption, and eschatology. Significantly, he notes how Critical Theory is ultimately not critical enough with regard to both the problems and solutions confronting mankind.

Ezra Institute Fellow Tim Dieppe has contributed a review of a recent work of scholarship in the field of textual criticism.

IN THIS ISSUE

It’s our privilege to bring you two new articles this issue, as well as a book review. Ezra Institute Founder Joe Boot has written on the relationship of reformational philosophy to Scholasticism, explaining how the Christian gospel and the person and work of Jesus did not neatly fit with the assumptions and ideological commitments of the Greco-Roman context where they were introduced. This is part of the reason why Paul describes the preaching of a crucified and risen Christ as “foolishness to the Greeks.”

Joe expands on the uncomfortable relationship between Christian thought and Scholastic dualism

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EDITORIAL

Thank you for your continued support. We are encouraged to know that you are praying for the work of the ministry as we seek to vindicate the gospel of Jesus Christ over all of life. We trust you will be blessed and challenged by the material in these pages, and we would be delighted to hear your feedback.

For Christ and His Kingdom, Ryan Eras DIRECTOR OF CONTENT & PUBLISHING

Reformed Scholasticism and Reformational Thinking The Root of Creation The New Testament reveals explicitly the role of Christ Jesus as the one in whom all things are created and hold together and for whom all things exist (cf. Col. 1:15-20). The apostle Paul deepens our understanding of creation and redemption profoundly by showing that the triune God is the root and end of all things: for from Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Rom. 11:36).

The twentieth-century Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd drew out some important implications of this scriptural truth when he taught that it is not only the Christian worldview, but all human thought which is embedded in a religious ethos (ground-motive) oriented toward an idea of origin and law-order. In his New Critique of Theoretical Thought Dooyeweerd expressed this reality in philosophical terms:

All meaning is from, through and to an origin, which cannot itself be related to a higher origin … all genuine philosophical thought has therefore started as thought that was directed toward the origin of our cosmos.1

This is part of what makes the Christian worldview utterly unique as a system of thought.

In the Greco-Roman cradle of Western civilisation, there was no room in philosophical thought for a free creation by an infinite-personal God as revealed in the Bible. This is because the Greek understanding of nature (as it comes to full flower in Aristotle) was ruled by a ‘form-matter’ scheme that regarded reality as consisting of an uncreated, amorphous chaotic matter, which by a forming activity of an impersonal divine principle achieves a coherence of ‘form and matter.’

This duality had the effect of dividing reality into two realms – the sensory and supra-sensory – the former being the realm we can experience with our senses and the latter being the realm which we cannot. This latter realm was nonetheless thought to be know-

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able by the intellectual contemplation of rational souls – an idea which influenced the thought of Augustine, for whom the soul was conceived as an immortal substance.

Dr. Joe Boot, M . A ., Ph.D.

JOE BOOT is the founder and President of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto.

Joe earned his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida. His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer. His most noted contribution to Christian thought, The Mission of God, is a systematic work of cultural theology exploring the biblical worldview as it relates to the Christian’s mission in the world.

Joe serves as Senior Fellow for the cultural and apologetics think-tank truthXchange in Southern California, and as Senior Fellow of cultural philosophy for the California-based Centre for Cultural Leadership. Joe is married to Jenny and they have three children, Naomi, Hannah, and Isaac.

In our understanding of what it means to be human, the eventual result of these ideas was that man came to be seen as assembled from two components, distinct in principle i.e., a mortal, material body, and an immortal, rational soul. Plato considered the soul-substance of the human being primary, whilst regarding the body as merely its “tool,” the way a man drives a car. For Aristotle, form was the divine, higher principle that is embedded in non-divine, chaotic matter as its essential unity. Together they make up a substantial unity in which the rational soul is considered the “essential form.”2 This view is a radical departure from biblical revelation, in which there are no independent substances (uncreated soul substances, essences, or eternal chaotic material), over-against the all-conditioning Word of God. In Scripture creation is distinct from Christ but not separated from Him. The apostle Paul thus shocks the Greek philosophers in Athens with his application of this reality: “for in him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28). As Andree Troost puts it, “[Christ] is with God the Father, the creator and bearer of the entire cosmos which was created in him.”3

Scholasticism Scholasticism can be broadly defined as an effort to blend Christian theology and ancient Greek dualism. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas brought Roman Catholic Scholastic thought to its apogee by officially interpreting Aristotle’s views for the church. He attempts to build a formal bridge between the Greek dualistic worldview and Scripture. As Dooyeweerd notes, “Scholasticism seeks a synthesis between Greek thought and the Christian religion. It was thought that such a synthesis could be successfully achieved if philosophy, with its Greek basis, were to be made subservient to Christian theology.”4 Aquinas thus tried to accommodate the form-matter dualism of the Greeks to the Christian faith. In this marriage, ‘matter’ was the principle of imperfection, and the ‘rational form’ was the ‘thinking soul’ which participated in the divine.5 As a result, Aquinas divides the creation order into a natural and supernatural realm. That legacy has remained with us in various permutations ever since.

Eventually, in this accommodation, a theological trend developed that we might call a psycho-creationist anthropology. Such a paradigm asserts that with each new life, God permits the implanting of

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restored through Christ and the church – the church an indestructible soul into a body from without – being the one supernatural institution of grace. the body being prepared by an organic life principle. So instead of maintaining the biblical unity of the human person, what emerges is the uncomReformed Scholasticism fortable assemblage of two independent substancThough the Reformation broke with much of this es – body and soul. The flesh (non-divine earthly mischaracterisation of life and sought a renewal of matter of the body) is conceived as a shell for the the biblical understanding of a life-comprehending noblest ‘part’ of man – the immortal soul which esCreation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation by capes the corruptible material flesh at death. The the power of the Holy Spirit, it did not completerational soul (anima rationalis) is regarded as a spirly destroy Scholasticism’s artificial bridge from Aritual complex of particular functions (i.e., thinking, istotle to Christianity. Consequently, a ‘Protestant feeling, willing etc.), the seat of true light, natural scholasticism’ soon became entrenched and has reason, and spirituality, whilst the body is implicitpersisted into modern evangelily or explicitly denigrated in terms calism. As Dooyeweerd explained, of lower desires and carnal appeThis scholastic “Protestant scholastics thought tites. Sin’s root is then supposedly they could strip Greek philosophy located in these ‘lower’ fleshly de- perspective is of its pagan features by depriving sires. This teaching obviously enantithetical to the it of all independence and turning tails the problematic notion that scriptural reality it into a handmaiden. Thus, it was God creates and inserts sinful put to so-called formal use in syssouls into each new body – hence of the creation of tematic theology and theological the need to shift the seat of sin to human beings as a ethics.”6 I’m reminded of recent the body’s ‘lower’ capacities. This assertions that Critical Race Theory helps account for the rise of the unity, along with a be a “useful analytical tool” for medieval ascetic ideal and a vision life-comprehending can Christians. of monastic life as manifesting the fullest expression of devoted ser- apostasy in sin and vice to God. rebellion at the Fall. The great reformer, Martin Luther, openly claimed to be of William of Ockham’s school – a perspective in The religious superstructure built which he was immersed whilst at Erfurt monastery. up around this philosophical dualism steadily diHe was profoundly influenced by Ockham’s comvides all of life into two domains, the natural and plete separation of ‘natural life’ from the ‘superthe supernatural (spiritual) – a worldview expressed natural’ Christian life of grace – thereby driving a in the polarities of nature and grace. Nature is conradical wedge between creation and redemption. ceived as form and matter, and grace (supernatural So-called ‘nature’ was viewed exclusively in the light faith) as an additional gift to bring the immortal of sin, with ‘reason’ regarded as the only guide in soul to perfection. This scholastic perspective is the natural domain, clearly entailing the ubiquitous antithetical to the scriptural reality of the creation and secularizing notion of a radical separation of of human beings as a unity, along with a life-com‘reason’ and ‘revelation.’ Consequently, “[I]n matprehending apostasy in sin and rebellion at the Fall ters of secular government, justice and social order, so that humanity is in need of an equally life-coma person possessed only the light of reason.”7 prehending redemption at the root of our being.

Instead, though our ‘rational soul’ is wounded by This fundamental error also expressed itself in Lusin and deprived of the gift of faith, it is not radicalther’s attempt to set law (nature) and gospel (grace) ly perverted and depraved by the Fall. Scholastic in opposition to each other. The law was an order thought teaches the Fall really robbed us only of a for sinful nature which Luther began to regard as supernatural gift of grace (i.e., true faith) which is REFORMED SCHOLASTICISM

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antithetical to supernatural grace. Gospel love must overcome the ‘rigidity’ of law. Consequently, the link between creation-law and God’s grace was effectively severed. On this view, redemption came to imply the death of ‘nature’ rather than its restoration and renewal. Though he vigorously attacked pagan philosophy, because of his lack of insight into the full implications of a biblical worldview, Luther was unable to direct people to a comprehensive inner reformation of thought. As Dooyeweerd explains, “he did not see that human thinking arises from the religious root of life and that is therefore always controlled by a religious ground-motive.”8 Calvin also, though clearly grasping the Barth rejects sovereignty of God over all creation any point of and its life-comcontact between prehending character, was not able the Christian fully extricate faith and natural to himself from this life so that he persistent Greek dualism because completely he lacked a truly repudiates the scripturally groundidea of Christian ed ontology. Calvin follows Augustine culture (who unsuccessfully fought to shake off Neo-Platonism), and this is apparent in Calvin’s view of the human person where he conceives of the soul as the noblest ‘part’ of man – an immortal (though created) ‘being.’ The flesh is a kind of prison so that soul and body stand over against each other in uncomfortable tension, never fully taking in the biblical unity of the human person.

Calvin’s reformational emphasis on Christ’s rule over all of life is thus pushed aside by a protestantized Scholasticism. Whilst wanting to honour biblical revelation, there is no true inner reformation of all thought and so Christ’s kingship and scriptural authority are soon sequestered in the narrow realm of religious faith. Theology is consequently honoured as ‘queen’ of the sciences, whilst philosophy and other disci-

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plines must simply be ‘adapted’ to the church’s theological principles. The thought that philosophy, history, natural sciences etc. must be inwardly reformed from a scriptural worldview just doesn’t occur. These disciplines supposedly belong to the lower realm of nature, natural reason, and natural law, whereas theology is concerned with the higher supernatural realm of faith, grace, and the church.

It is then no surprise to find the eventual development of dialectical theology in Protestantism which “sharply opposes the religious antithesis in the area of worldly life, rejecting the idea of Christian politics, of a Christian political party…and of Christian scholarship.”9 Karl Barth continues the identification of nature with sin, separating nature from the Word of God which he and his followers regarded as ‘wholly other.’ Barth rejects any point of contact between the Christian faith and natural life so that he completely repudiates the idea of Christian culture – including Christian art, political life, scholarship, and even social action. Here, the creation law and ordinances recede so far from view that Christian thought effectively begins with the idea of a Fall and then redemption – for Barth there could be no knowledge of creation law and norms.

With this continuation of Greek philosophical dualism in various branches of Protestantism, we can see the many ways in which a division of life into separate domains has stubbornly manifested itself. Consider some of these familiar polarities still emphasized to varying degrees by many reformed evangelical Christians and Protestants of all stripes: Body/Soul: We are a ‘soul’; we have a ‘body.’ Human beings are made up of two separate substances, one higher the other lower, easily distinguishable and separable. The soul (a complex of higher functions including reasoning and feeling) is the ‘real’ person; the body is merely a shell. The soul’s destiny is Heaven or Hell, the body and the earth are relatively less important.

Material/Spiritual: The Christian life is a ‘spiritual’ life consisting of ‘spiritual’ disciplines. It is an inner battle against the desires of the lower

part of us – stemming from the body. The material world is an incumbrance, lesser, or evil, and we will eventually escape it into Heaven. In the meantime, we must suppress the desires of our material nature.

natural law. By contrast, Christ is the source of special grace and special revelation. The one is a ladder to the other, but we need the addition of faith and grace in special revelation to bring us to completion, salvation, and perfection.

Natural/Supernatural: Most life activities are just natural and about this world, but Christianity is about a supernatural world beyond this one, and therefore this natural life and creation are not as important as the supernatural world. The natural is mundane and boring and carries on largely in terms of its own impersonal laws, but sometimes God breaks in to do supernatural things like miracles, which are much more significant than everyday events.

Reason/Revelation: Human reason is sufficient for understanding most of life in the natural world and guides politics, education, culture etc. in terms of neutral, rational principles. Human reasoning, though prone to errors, is good as far as it goes and can offer high-probability proofs for God’s existence acceptable to logical and right-thinking people. However, supernatural revelation to the soul is admittedly necessary for eternal salvation and to disclose certain spiritual doctrines.

Public/Private: Our spiritual life of faith is an essentially private matter of personal conviction and should not be imposed on anyone else. Our private faith is not for the public space as it does not involve publicly accessible knowledge and in any case, God’s kingdom is not of this world.

Science/Faith: The sciences operate only in terms of objective natural reason and concern religiously neutral knowledge of the natural world. The sciences answer factual questions about how things happen in the world. Faith is unrelated to reason and is only concerned with the higher value judgments of why things happen. The only truly Christian academic discipline is theology because it is concerned with studying religion and faith. There can be no distinctly Christian view of philosophy or science.

Secular/Sacred: Most of life functions well in terms of neutral secular principles and concepts that everyone can agree on. Politics, education, law, science etc. are secular areas of life for which man’s common natural reason is sufficient to govern. The church, however, is a sacred institution of grace which, unlike these other areas, is ruled by biblical revelation. This revelation must not be imposed or applied to culture and society, for to Christianize culture is mixing the upper and lower storeys, secular and sacred.

Law/Gospel: Law is concerned with the earth, the material world, and sinful natural desires, whereas gospel freedom is spiritual and concerns grace for the soul. The church is the institution of grace, not law – which is a matter for the state as a natural institution. Grace throws law aside because grace has no more need for the law than Heaven needs Earth, or the saved soul has real need for the body.

Common/Special Revelation: The natural creation is the realm of common grace, common principles,

Culture/Kingdom: The kingdom of God is a purely spiritual and invisible reality that does not manifest itself outside the heart and supernatural institution of grace – the church. The kingdom of God fundamentally concerns a future heavenly reality, not the present earth and human culture. The earth is destined for total destruction so nothing in human culture has any eternal value. Getting souls into Heaven and preserving them in the institutional church through this veil of tears is our calling.

Dooyeweerd has shown that these artificial separations of domains in life ruled by different principles follow logically from the dualistic conception of the human person derived from the form-matter and substance concepts in Greek philosophy and then synthesized with the Christian view of creation and redemption.

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The Reformational Response As with all errors, Scholasticism’s persuasiveness lies in its close imitation of the truth, together with its use of familiar biblical language. Scripturally, we may conceptually distinguish an inner and outer man (2 Cor. 4:11,16), fully dependent in every way and at every moment upon the sustaining Word of Christ (Acts 17:28; Rom. 11:36). But there is no independent ‘essence’ of human life, no higher and lower substances or ‘parts.’ The “I” or human ego cannot be identified simply with reasoning, feeling, willing, or any other aspect of our existence, because these functions all presuppose a deeper unity that transcends them.

At the deepest The “I,” our full human selfhood, the depths level of our of the heart, is God’s mystery transcending humanity, at the temporal functions the heart of of our existence and our existence, is grasped only in relation to God who has all of life is a placed in us a sense continuous of the eternal (Eccl. response to the 3:11). Critically, Christians shall one day folWord of God low Christ out of the grave (Col. 1:18; 1 Cor. 15:20). It is the full person that is raised to life (inner and outer man), just as it is the totality of creation which will be released from its subjection to futility when we receive the fullness of our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies (Rom. 8:19-23).

Reformational thought therefore resists every inclination to divide up created reality in terms of philosophical distinctions that are entirely foreign to the Bible. Our faith rests on the scriptural truth “that the mediating Word is the religious lifeline which links God and man together in a life-long, all-embracing covenant relationship of revelation and response.”10 All of creation in every part is governed by the mediating Word of Christ and in no domain of life do we escape the all-embracing relationship we have with Christ and His Kingdom. All of life is a religious response to that Word.

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Dooyeweerd’s reformational philosophy translates this all-embracing, mediating, and holding power of the Word of Christ in terms of what he calls ‘ontic normativity.’ This is simply the recognition of a law-Word for creation that provides a normative structure for all spheres of life and every entity within creation – it governs the law-conformity of all created reality. As such, Christ cannot be ‘uncoupled’ from a so-called ‘natural’ realm of factual neutrality, an area of creation that can be withdrawn from the sovereign Lordship and authority of Jesus and His written Word-revelation. Christ Jesus, who holds all things together by the Word of His power, from whom, through whom and to whom all things exist, cannot be banished to a supposed upper storey of reality, a spiritual world of ‘grace,’ shunted out of history to a future age, nor imprisoned in the walls of the church institute so that the kingdom of God (Basileia) is limited to the institutional ekklesia.

The central direction of Scripture is the unity and continuity of God’s creation and redemption within the rubric of the kingdom of God – an all-encompassing Creation, Fall and Redemption of the whole of life. This inescapable revelation must be the starting point for both our philosophical and theological activity; it is not a theological product of human interpretation but is rather the motive-force of the biblical message. The radical character of this religious motive, argues Dooyeweerd: …can only be revealed by the Holy Spirit, because he opens our hearts so that our faith will no longer be a mere acceptance of formal articles of our Christian confession, but a living faith, serviceable to the central working of God’s Word in the heart – the religious centre of our life… In their radical meaning – as the ground motive of the Word-revelation and the key to true knowledge – creation, fall and redemption are no simple articles of faith; they are rather the Word of God itself in its central spiritual power, directed to the heart, the religious centre of our existence. Confronted by the Word of God in his heart, man can offer nothing, but only listen and receive…The Word of God… must penetrate to the root of our being and become the central motive-force of our whole Christian life.11

This means that Christ’s restorative kingdom life cannot be restricted to a ‘part’ of the human person nor any isolated terrain of human existence or experience such as the church institute or our personal devotional lives. Rather, it breaks out in marriage and family, education and entertainment, science and arts, politics and law, business and economics.

In each of these areas we are led either in terms of the kingdom of light or kingdom of darkness, obedience or disobedience. As Danie Strauss has noted, “It is impossible to speak of a neutral sphere within so-called common grace, where the total antithesis, for or against Christ, does not radically apply.”12 In all life aspects, in every activity, institution, and academic discipline, we will be for or against the Lord.

At the deepest level of our humanity, at the heart of our existence, all of life is a continuous response to the Word of God (Rom. 12:1) All the laws and norms Christ Jesus has ordained for creation which stand above us and yet are bound to us, call us to conformity to the Word! The matchless beauty of this gospel is that Christ’s Word is life and His total kingdom one of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

1

Herman Dooyeweerd, New Critique of Theoretical Thought: Collected Works, Series A – Volume One, trans. David H. Freeman & William S. Young (Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press, 1984), 9.

2

D.F.M Strauss, “Scholasticism and Reformed Scholasticism at Odds with Genuine Reformational-Christian Thinking,” in Ned. Geref.

Teologiese Tydskrif Vol. 5, March 1969, no. 2 (97-114).

3

Andree Troost, What is Reformational Philosophy: An Introduction to the Cosmonomic Philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd, trans.

Anthony Runia (Jordan Station, ON: Paideia Press, 2012), 166.

4

Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular and Christian Options, Collected Works, Series B – Volume 15, trans. John Kraay, ed. D.F.M Strauss (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2012), 115

5

Dooyeweerd, Roots, 119

6

Herman Dooyeweerd, Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy: Collected Works, Series A – Volume Six, trans. Magnus Verbrugge, ed. D.F.M. Strauss (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2013), 46

7

Dooyeweerd, Roots, 141

8

Dooyeweerd, Roots, 141

9

Dooyeweerd, Roots, 143

10 Gordon J. Spykman, Reformational Theology: A New Paradigm for Doing Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 94.

11 Herman Dooyeweerd, Wat is die mens? Cited in Strauss, “Scholasticism and Reformed Scholasticism.”

12 Strauss, “Scholasticism and Reformed Scholasticism.”

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Critical Theory and The Gospel THEOL O G IC A L A N A LY S I S A N D R E F L E C T I ON

While Critical Theory as a school or tradition of thought is not new, it has come to some prominence in recent years.

While there are numerous persons and writing with varied perspectives within this school or tradition, it is nonetheless possible to summarize the principles and convictions of Critical Theory in a general way.

A truly Christian response to Critical Theory will show that it is not—ironically—critical enough.

Christianity truly gets to the heart of the matter and is the most truly “critical,” in that the Christian message offers a true understanding of reality and what is wrong with the world, and likewise offers the true solution to the myriad challenges, problems, and sufferings experienced and seen in the world.

In this article I will first summarize the key tenets of Critical Theory through an engagement with some of the seminal thinkers of Critical Theory. I argue that if Christians are to respond fully and properly to Critical Theory, such a response will need to be rooted in a truly Christian biblical-theological framework. Such a Christian response will recognize that Critical Theory is in effect an alternative theology or religion.

All roads lead back to the Institute for Social Research, founded in 1923 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Hence, this Institute, and its fellow-travelers, are often referred to as the “Frankfurt School.” The early Frankfurt School was composed of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Friedrich Pollock. Other associated persons would be the famous psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm, Otto Kirchheimer, Henryk

SUMMER 2022 Ezra Institute

Critical Theory: A Brief Introduction and Survey

Grossman, as well as Walter Benjamin. Second generation persons who are associated with the Frankfurt School would especially include Jürgen Habermas (born in 1929). The school was unapologetically Marxist, though it also felt free to try and advance, critique, and/or adjust the received Marxism of their day. With the rise of Nazism to increasing power, the Institute for Social Research moved to Geneva in 1934, and to New York City (Columbia University) in 1935.1 Critical Theory was birthed in the aftermath of World War I. It was hoped by many persons sympathetic to Marxism that this crisis would precipitate the revolutionary activity for which many Marxists hoped.

But such a revolution did not occur after World War I, and this led to something of a crisis for the Critical Theorists in general. Thus, Critical Theory both accepts much of the general Marxist (and Hegelian) paradigm, but is quite happy to re-work, re-think, adjust, extend, and even reject at points, various aspects of the Marxist paradigm. One of the “last” great thinkers of Critical Theory—Jürgen Habermas—has been more explicit about, at least in some senses, moving past Marx.

In this paper it is suggested that the key themes of Critical Theory can be viewed through the lens of traditional Christian insights and themes. That is, it will be argued that what Critical Theory offers is—in its own way—an alternative theology or religious vision of the world.

My contention is that when we read the Critical Theorists we can see in their various convictions, arguments and theories a kind of echo of Christian themes—even if in Critical Theory they are distorted, twisted, and rejected. But because Critical Theorists are nonetheless creatures living in God’s world and on God’s terms, their themes and arguments can be rightly understood through the prism of key Christian themes and truths. For organizational purposes I will group the various insights of Critical Theory into three broad categories: 1. Creation, Man, and the Nature of Reality 2. Sin, Atonement, Sanctification, and Holiness 3. History, the Future, Redemption, and the Nature of Eschatology

Critical Theory as Theology

Bradley G. Green Bradley G. Green is Professor of Theological Studies at Union University in Jackson, TN. He is the author of several books, including The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life, Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine, and Covenant and Commandment: Works, Obedience, and Faithfulness in the Christian Life, New Studies in Biblical Theology. He also edited and contributed to Shapers of Christian Orthodoxy: Engaging with Early and Medieval Theologians. He has also contributed essays and reviews to International Journal of Systematic Theology, Chronicles, First Things, Touchstone, and The Churchman.

Brad and his wife Dianne have three children—Caleb, Daniel, and Victoria. Brad and Dianne also helped co-found Augustine School, a Christian liberal arts school in Jackson, Tennessee.

1. CREATION, MAN, AND THE NATURE OF REALITY

Herbert Marcuse, Ontology, and Technology Let us begin with Herbert Marcuse, particularly his “From Ontology to Technology: Fundamental Tendencies of Industrial Society.”2 Marcuse, in a fascinating way, traces the birth of modern science and its entailCRITICAL THEORY AND THE GOSPEL

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ments. We must be content with a broad summary of Marcuse’s narrative here: the modern world saw a shift from seeing a telos built into the very structures of reality, and as even guiding history, to a situation where there is no telos whatsoever as constitutive of reality; the world comes to be seen in primarily mathematical categories; technology becomes virtually ubiquitous.

For Marcuse, the rise of science and its ally technology is then linked to the rise of capitalism. We should not be surprised that as Marcuse and other Critical Theorists talk about “liberation” and the like, this entails the “liberation” from Capitalism, and from societies which create and perpetuate Capitalism.

were at the heart of the very project of industrial society or modern science itself.

We begin to get a real glimpse of Marcuse’s ontology or metaphysic, and his anthropology, as we read on. Marcuse proceeds to write that civilization itself is foreign to, and hostile to, the nature of man. And bound up with civilization is work. Marcuse seems to assume that without civilization and work, man could meet his deepest needs and be happy and satisfied.

Here we see most likely the Marxist-inspired utopianism, in which in some mysterious way, food will be supplied, shelter will be found, and safety from crime will just somehow be present.

Marcuse’s anthropology is explicit in the following: “The primary instincts of man natFor Marcuse, there are certain key “goods” with which persons Marcuse proceeds urally tend to immediate satiation and to rest, to tranquility through ought to be concerned. These to write that this appeasement; they oppose true goods, which should be at themselves to the necessity of work the heart of things are: “the ab- civilization itself and labor and to the indispensable olition of anxiety, the pacification is foreign to, and conditions of satisfaction in a world of life, and enjoyment.” These are ruled by starvation and the insufall “essential needs.”3 And at the hostile to, the birth of modern science, there ficiency of goods.”6 Indeed, “sonature of man. ciety” is intrinsically hostile to the was a recognition of the imporAnd bound up good of the individual. As Marcuse tance and true goodness of these writes: “Society therefore must turn “goods.” There are also addition- with civilization is the instincts away from their immeal realities (whether good or not) work. diate goal and subjugate them to which Marcuse considers “intrinthe ‘reality principle,’ [i.e., the nesic to the very notion of modern cessity of work?] which is the very principle of rescience.” These are “world harmony,” “physical pression.”7 laws,” and even of “the mathematical God,” which/ whom Marcuse calls “the highest idea of universal But as Marcuse develops this line of thought—the quality throughout all inequality!”4 But, according to Marcuse, what has in fact happened? The repressive nature of society itself—things take a good things just mentioned, which were goals or dark and odd turn. As they go about life in society, even motivating factors for modern science, have the instincts of persons change, and they in a sense all been abandoned or marginalized. The goods embrace and accept repression. As Marcuse writes: of “the abolition of anxiety, the pacification of life, “Their instincts become repressive; they are the bioand enjoyment” in a way helped birth modern logical and mental bases which sustain and perpetuscience, but then modern science betrayed and ate political and social repression.”8 That is: persons instinctively embrace and perpetuate the political turned on these key “goods.” Marcuse explains: and social repression which is a natural corollary of “Industrial society clearly developed a notion of society and work itself. Indeed: “All progress, all technology which undercuts its inherent characgrowth of productivity, is accompanied by a progrester.”5 That is: Industrial society or modern science turned on those principles—those goods—which sive repression and a productive destruction.”9 As

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this gets worked out: Society and work—especially in a capitalist mode—are by their very nature—inextricably linked to, and entail: (1) “progressive repression” and (2) “productive destruction.”

Having considered the nature of man, let us turn to how Critical Theory understands the human dilemma, what Christian theology has traditionally spoken of as centered around sin.

2. SIN, ATONEMENT, SANCTIFICATION, AND HOLINESS

If one has read much of twentieth-century philosophy, social theory, and social critique, one sees a pattern: a hunger and yearning to make sense of the times, and in a sense to ask a basic question: What has gone wrong? How did we get here? Or, what makes the modern world the modern world?

Theodor W. Adorno and the Nature of Society One leading Critical Theorist response is suggested by the title of the important essay by Theodor W. Adorno, “Society.” We are placing Adorno’s reflections on society in this section on “Sin, Atonement, Redemption, Sanctification, and Holiness,” for here we glean insights on how at least Adorno thought of man as a social creature—but man as a social creature is already in a kind of system which is “sinful,” such that man is in need of liberation. As Adorno works through his understanding of society, it is clear that the chief culprit that plagues society today is “the market system.”10 He writes: “Behind the reduction of men to agents and bearers of exchange value [i.e., capitalism] lies the domination of men over men.”11 In short, at least one of man’s fundamental problems, if not the fundamental problems is a societal set of relationships in which something like “the market system” prevails. Something like socialism does not yet—on Adorno’s view—promise to clear the deck of all societal problems, frictions, “oppressions,” etc. But clearly, the societal reality which most concerns Adorno is that society in which “the market system” is generally prevalent. But we learn that Adorno seems to see virtually all societies as plagued by market realities. He can write of “the universal law of the market system.”12

Society, for Adorno, seems never to encourage right thinking, living, or “consciousness.” Rather, “society increasingly controls the very form of consciousness itself.”13 That is, “society”—and again essentially capitalism is in view here—conditions the very way we think of our own societal situation. Thus, one can think that making a middle-class income teaching at the local school, or pastoring a local church, or working in the local factory, etc., is leading a good life. But, one is conditioned to think that way. One is actually oppressed and downtrodden, due to having to live out one’s life in a market economy. Thus, the oppressed and downtrodden may live their entire life in that situation, and never know it. We will return to this theme in our “Reflections” section.

Herbert Marcuse and Eros One of Marcuse’s key books is his 1955 Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud.14 His thesis is quite clear. Every effort must be made to liberate persons from anything that will inhibit erotic pleasure. Marcuse writes: “the new direction of progress would depend completely on the opportunity to activate repressed or arrested organic, biological needs: to make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor.”15 In short, he is arguing that the forces and reality of the “market economy” (i.e., capitalism) mitigate against erotic satisfaction. He writes: “the erotic energy of the Life Instincts cannot be freed under the dehumanizing conditions of profitable affluence.”16 Marcuse takes for granted “Freud’s proposition that civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts…”17 Indeed: “Free gratification of man’s instinctual needs is incompatible with civilized society: renunciation and delay in satisfaction are the prerequisites of progress.”18 And again: “The methodological sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions, is culture.”19 Hence, culture is the culprit, for culture by its very existence hampers or impedes the “free gratification of man’s instinctual needs.”

Marcuse summarizes Freud. There exists both a “Pleasure Principle” and a “Reality Principle.”

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The Pleasure Principle is just that—man is driven to various forms of pleasure, including (or especially) sexual pleasure. The Reality Principle is that in any given society there are barriers which keep persons from seeking to fulfill the Pleasure Principle. These two principles are in fundamental conflict.20 Like other Critical Theorists, “society” or “civilization” mitigates against true human freedom. As Marcuse writes: “The replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle is the great traumatic event in the development of man…”21 In summarizing Freud, Marcuse does not hesitate to speak in architectonic terms of this struggle between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle: “Freud considers the ‘primordial struggle for existence’ as ‘eternal’ and therefore believes that the pleasure principle and the reality principle are ‘eternally’ antagonistic.” Where we have something like the old Manichean dualism between good and evil, transposed into different categories: the “eternal” struggle between (1) the provenance of true freedom, which is sexual—the Pleasure Principle, and (2) that which constrains and leads to repression of one’s desire—the Reality Principle.

The clash between these two principles is again spoken of in terms of revolutionary liberation. Psychoanalysis can help recover the deep repression which both the individual has done to himself, and which the larger culture—also shaped by the Reality Principle—has inculcated. But what happens as someone who is seeking psychoanalysis to come to terms with their sadness, or depression, or anxiety, or anger—or whatever it might be—starts to discover these deep repressed desires which flow from the Pleasure Principle? These desires “must eventually shatter the framework in which they were made and confined” [vis-à-vis the Reality Principle].22 “The liberation of the past does not end in its reconciliation with the present. Against the self-imposed restraint of the discoverer,23 the orientation on the past tends toward an orientation on the future.”24 Indeed, “The discovery of lost time becomes the vehicle of future liberation.”25

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So, Critical Theory offers its own understanding of sin and the human dilemma. It has Gnostic and dualistic (even Manichean) overtones, since the problem of man appears to have always been in existence. There is no pre-fall realm from which man has fallen. Further, community or civilization is by its very nature oppressive and mitigates against true freedom. Let us turn to what Critical Theory tends to say about history, the future, and even the nature of eschatology. In this last section we will get a sense of Critical Theory’s understanding of redemption.

3. HISTORY, THE FUTURE, REDEMPTION, AND THE NATURE OF ESCHATOLOGY

There are several points where Critical Theory addresses the future, a future hope, redemption, or eschatological goal it is seeking in history. Generally, when it is looking ahead to that to which it aspires, it speaks in utopian or even revolutionary terms. Let us return to Herbert Marcuse’s essay, “From Ontology to Technology.”

Herbert Marcuse and Redemptive Revolution Marcuse laments that what he calls “the technological project” should have eventually “annulled” itself.

As Marcuse writes: “the necessity for domination was supposed to disappear.”26 We are clearly in Marxist territory here. There is need for centralized power— which is centered in and flows from the revolution— to exist. But it will fade away once the revolution has accomplished its goal of destroying the capitalist order, and once the subsequent centralized state has accomplished its goals. We get a sense of the not-sosubtle dystopianism when we read Marcuse’s lament that the technological project or “technicity” did not in fact fade away. What should have resulted is as follows: “The triumph over misery and the insufficiency of goods should have made it possible to ‘abolish labor,’ to put productivity to the service of consumption, and to abandon the struggle of existence in order to enjoy existence.”27 But it is worse on Marcuse’s reading. The “domination and destruction” of the technological project continues. Indeed, “domination and destruction themselves become the conditions of progress.”28

Marcuse finally gets to his own solution to this technological dilemma. The answer is revolution. Marcuse writes: “all liberation presupposes a revolution, an upheaval in the order of instincts and needs: a new reality principle.”29 Marcuse then writes: “This total transvaluation of values would affect the being of nature as well as the being of man.”30 It is not wholly inaccurate to see this “total transvaluation of values” as a kind rebirth of both man and nature— albeit a rebirth quite different from the rebirth of biblical faith.

Walter Benjamin and Messianic Hope We complete this section on history, the future, and the nature of eschatology by looking at a seminal essay by Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”31 This is a provocative essay, twenty separate theses or paragraphs (reminiscent of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, in the sense of an almost stream-of-consciousness flow of thought). The bogeyman of the essay seems clearly to be historical materialism—the notion that matter is all there is, and that history “marches” (without meaningful human agency?) to its end. We might think we have some true kind of freedom or agency, but really this “historical materialism” wins all the time, something which Benjamin laments.32 For Benjamin, the kind of happiness we experience is inextricably bound to our own particular human circumstances and human situatedness. This—in one sense—is almost self-evident, but there is a dark and somewhat depressing way that Benjamin construes our situatedness, as we shall see.

Benjamin writes: “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.”33 He continues, in almost a cryptic way: “There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

Historical materialists are aware of this.”34 It is striking how this notion of redemption and Messiah shows up in this essay. Benjamin continues on

the same theme: “only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour—and that day is Judgment Day.”35 It is hard to know exactly what to do with Benjamin’s images of redemption, Messiah, and judgment day.

This may simply be a rhetorical flourish. But I suggest that this imagery—at one level—more likely reflects an image-bearer stumbling upon central Christian truth claims and realities, even if one never ulti- Benjamin seems mately accepts to be saying that these truth claims all history has and realities.

been the victory of folks, powers, institutions which should not have been victorious.

Indeed, I believe we are forced to conclude that Benjamin is engaging in a kind of mockery and denigration and perversion of Christian imagery. The language of redemption, Messiah, and judgment is being reworked or “transvalued” into Marxist categories.

Thus, Benjamin writes: “The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of the Antichrist.”36 As Benjamin proceeds his own (presumedly) philosophy of history emerges quite clearly: “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.”37 Benjamin continues: “According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession.”38 Again, this may be generally true. But then Benjamin writes: “For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.”39 What kind of philosophy of history is emerging here? If the Whig view of history interprets the past and says that what happened is good—the past occurred as it did because things CRITICAL THEORY AND THE GOSPEL

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ought to have happened that way, Benjamin seems to be saying that all history has been the victory of folks, powers, institutions which should not have been victorious. But this general thesis is asserted, not explained.40 In short, Benjamin seems to view the historical past as simply or only the victory of “barbarism.”41 This is of course fundamentally a non-Christian understanding of history. The Christian is quite free to draw attention to the many and variegated examples of sin in the world, the way man’s sinfulness has wreaked havoc in the world since the garden, and the many ways in which man’s sin has caused, contributed to, and In short, Critical exacerbated human suffering. But Theory does not what the Christian have a larger cannot do is picture all history that theological way. Can a Chrisframework of tian really look at creation—fall— the incarnation, life, death, resurredemption— rection, ascension, consummation and exaltation of Jesus as just one against which to more example of interpret and make the victory of barsense of life in the barism in human history? Of course, world. there is no subtle irony here, for assuredly the evil one—and various Jewish and Roman authorities—were engaged in a kind of barbarism when they put the Lord Jesus to death. But Christians know the fuller story.

The “subduing” of the anti-Christ (which appears to be primarily understood as economic forces), is ultimately portrayed in revolutionary terms. And for Benjamin this revolutionary moment is shot through with Messianic hope and overtones. For Benjamin a “historical materialist” [which seems to be Marxism in Benjamin’s preferred sense] “approaches a historical subject only where he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed

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past.”42 The present for Benjamin is “a model of Messianic time.”43 Rather than think or work in “historicist” terms (where one identifies many causal links in a kind of chain from past to present), we should think or work in terms of “Messianic time”— for in this construal there is a real hope of meaningful revolution which can set all things right: “[the non-historicist historical] establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”44 Indeed, in this, Benjamin’s preferred way of thinking, “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”45 We will reflect on how to respond to Benjamin’s provocative essay in the reflections section below.

Theological Reflections 1. CRITICAL THEORY AND THE NATURE OF REALITY

Christian readers of Critical Theory will likely be struck by the passion and desire of many of these writers to grasp what has gone wrong with Western society. For example, in their seminal work, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (originally published in 1947, though distributed in a more informal way in 1944), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno could explain the impetus and goal of this work as follows: “What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”46 It is something of a challenge to remark upon Critical Theory’s understanding of the nature of reality without also speaking of Critical Theory’s understanding of the human dilemma. The reason for this is straightforward. Critical Theory does not posit any sort of pre-fallen era which then becomes fallen or sinful. There is no pre-sin realm or era, as Christian theology has traditionally asserted. Thus, to explain or explore Critical Theory’s understanding of the nature of reality is to explain the various challenges, problems, difficulties that face mankind. As noted, this means that for Critical Theory there can be something like a Manichean tendency to see re-

ality as inherently or essentially problematic. Nonetheless, we will try to first offer a theological analysis of Critical Theory’s understanding of the nature of reality, and then shift in the second section of these theological reflections to focus more on what Christian theology calls sin.

We saw, especially in Theodor Adorno’s “Society,” a kind of aversion towards, and even hostility towards the reality of “society,” and in Marcuse an aversion towards “work” as something inherently repressive and destructive. Do we see a similar concern as expressed by Jean-Paul Sartre, when he could say that “hell is other people”? On a theological level the frustration, nervousness, skepticism, and hostility toward “society” might be what emerges when one (1) notices or recognizes the pain, unfairness, awkwardness which exists in so many social relations; but (2) does not have an understanding of the goodness of creation and this good, created order combined with the reality that sin has tainted, corrupted, and marred this world and all of life within this world. In short, Critical Theory does not have a larger theological framework of creation—fall—redemption—consummation against which to interpret and make sense of life in the world.

It is intriguing that Critical Theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer lamented the “dialectic of Enlightenment”—the idea that the Enlightenment, which began ostensibly as an attempt to liberate persons and provide for the well-being of persons, ended up becoming a tool of oppression and subjugation.

What is intriguing is that the Critical Theorists—at least at some level—are still working with a commitment to the centrality and primacy of the individual.

Persons like Marcuse will focus on the sexual desire and pleasure of the individual, but all or most of the Critical Theorists place the individual at the center of things. In that sense the Critical Theorists are working in the key modes of the Enlightenment: the centrality of the individual.

In the course of redemptive history, we learn that other civilizational entities are good and proper. For example, the family—ultimately a pre-fall reality—is not hostile to truly being human. Ephesians 6:1-4 reads:

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.”

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Children here are told to obey parents “in the Lord” (v. 1). Paul quotes the fifth commandment, reminding his readers that there is a covenantal blessing which attaches to obeying parents (vv. 2-3). Fathers are indeed commanded to raise children in the “discipline” (παιδείᾳ) and “correction” (νουθεσίᾳ) of the Lord. Children, then, in part through godly parents, are being shaped under God into being the persons they ought to be. There is a “paideia” of the Lord, into which parents (here explicitly fathers) are commanded to lead children.

The most obvious example of civilization/community in Scripture, after the family, would of course be the Church itself— “the pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). The Church is at the heart of redemptive history. Rather than the Church being an institution which harms or hampers or mitigates against being most fully human, the Church is that institution in which, and through which, and in relationship to which, persons can truly become who they ought to become. Indeed, it is the “plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God” that “through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:9-10).

In short, while Adorno can say “society increasingly controls the very form of consciousness itself,”47 the Christian can say that certainly “society” (here think of the family) is—by God’s command through Paul—to “condition” persons within a family. Fathers are to “condition” children and do so by inducting them into a certain reality—the paideia of the Lord. To push this further, we should say that all fathers induct or “condition” their children. The real question is simply: In what way and into which culture is a father training his children?

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Critical Theory, by seeing “society” as fundamentally and essentially hostile to human well-being, is working with an anthropology wherein what is most important is the solitary individual and his or her desires and will. The Critical Theorists, although lamenting the Enlightenment, are still staunchly committed to at least one Enlightenment principle: the unchallengeable place and sovereign role of the isolated individual.

Critical Theory is right to look at the world and say, “Something is not right here.” Traditional Christianity asserts that there was indeed once a pre-fall era.

Adam’s sin has disrupted this, and now all persons come into the world in what is now a post-fall era.

Christianity therefore posits a radical and necessary disjunction between these two eras or moments of history: That era which precedes the fall, and that era (our own) which comes after the fall. Like every philosophy or theology which denies this key assertion, Critical Theory must cast around for explanations for our current dilemma but excludes in principle the Christian understanding of these two eras in history. But there is a deeper problem, which we will explore in the next theme.

Rather than seeing civilization as inherently hostile to human well-being, the Christian faith posits a prefall era, in which “civilization” (the union of the first human pair) as a good thing, and this union of man and woman, is pictured—at least in Genesis 1—as a part of God’s created order. It should be no surprise when we see present-day heirs of Critical Theory expressing clear contempt for the traditional family. Indeed, Theodor Adorno, in The Authoritarian Personality, considered support for the traditional family as one of the markers of being a “fascist.”48 2. CRITICAL THEORY, SIN, HUMAN DILEMMA, AND REDEMPTION

As we noted above, it is difficult strictly to differentiate (1) Critical Theory’s understanding of the nature of reality from (2) Critical Theory’s understanding of the human dilemma or sin. Nonetheless, in this section we reflect on Critical Theory’s understanding of the human dilemma, or sin.

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We noted a tendency, especially in Adorno’s essay “Society,” that one can spend one’s entire life apparently happy, making a middle-class income, etc., and never realize that one has been conditioned to think one is happy and generally free, while one is actually oppressed and downtrodden by the market system in which one has lived one’s life. Now, on the one hand—and dealing at the level of abstraction or generality—it is of course the case that one can be radically self-deceived. Indeed, Jeremiah 17:9 can speak of the heart as “deceitful above all things.”

And in the story of Saul and the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15, Saul’s frankly bizarre dialog with Samuel—when Samuel confronts Saul after failing to follow God’s command to wipe out the Amalekites— can only be read as an exercise in self-deception.

Perhaps the key example of self-deception in the Bible is in Romans 1, where Paul can argue that all persons know God. What can be known about God “is plain to them;” God “has shown it to them;” even God’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived;” “they knew God.” But in their suppression of this knowledge “they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” Thus, self-deception is a reality and category the Christian can and should affirm, but it must be construed, understood, and conceptualized within an overarching biblical-theological framework which will ultimately take into consideration a biblical theology of God, man, sin, person and work of Christ, redemption, soteriology, church, and last things.

But Critical Theory’s concept of self-deception seems to misfire at several points. The heart—it seems—of man’s problem is that he is conditioned by “society” or “the market system.” There is certainly an anthropology at work here. Man is the innocent creature, caught in a conditioning world in relationship to which he seems to have virtually no ability to exercise any true agency. Is this a kind of Manichaean world in which reality is by nature evil, and over which man has no real redemptive solution—besides revolution? In an odd way, man seems absolved of any responsibility for his current dilemma. Man may play a role in the regenerative work

of revolution, but man—in a kind of hyper-Pelagian sense—seems to bear no real responsibility for his dire situation. While the Christian is quite happy to affirm a notion of “self-deception,” the conceptual framework within which Critical Theory construes “self-deception” or being conditioned must be ultimately rejected as deficient. Why is this? Because on a Christian understanding man has plunged himself into misery. Yes, the Christian worldview acknowledges that there are forces arrayed against us, forces both in the heavenlies (Ephesians 3 and 6) as well as more mundane, earthy forces. But the heart of the dilemma, on a Christian understanding, is that man—both our representative head Adam, and each one of us—has placed himself in his dire situation.

University, where Solzhenitsyn argued that the real problem of Western culture in the modern world runs right through the middle of every human heart.

Thus, while Critical Theory seeks to be “critical,” it is ironic that in the end it is not really critical enough.

3. CRITICAL THEORY AND ESCHATOLOGICAL REVOLUTIONARY REDEMPTION

As we saw above, it is intriguing how often Critical Theory makes recourse to language of redemption, and even does so with eschatological overtones or imagery or language. We saw this above, especially in the work of Walter Benjamin.

Self-deception

As Stephen Eric Bronner writes concerning Benjamin: “the revolution becomes an apocalyptic ‘leap into the open skies of history.’”49 Bronner could also write: “New forms of redemption may still exist for the neglected utopian shards that have been littered throughout history.”50

Perhaps the key weakness with is a reality and Critical Theory’s understanding of the human dilemma—on Christian category the terms—is that it misses the heart Christian can and of the matter. When one reads the literature of Critical Theory, man should affirm, but it seems to be a cog in a world which must be construed, is way beyond his control. That understood, and The use of Christian imagery, inis, man is—in one sense—simply conceptualized cluding redemptive imagery, by an “innocent” creature caught in non-Christian, and especially reva world of political and cultural within an olutionary groups, is not uncomand economic forces. Thus, it is overarching mon, and not unique to Critical “market forces” or the like that Theorists. As James Billington reis corrupting or controlling man. biblical-theological counts in his history of revolutions, Those things out there are making framework. the various strands of the French one’s life miserable. And again, of Revolution used explicit Christian imagery—at course it is partially true—in a Christian analysis and times perverting them in sordid ways—to describe understanding of culture—to note that there are all their various revolutionary acts. For example, Count sorts of forces arrayed against persons in this life.

Mirabeau, who was at one time a French ambassaBut what seems to be completely absent within Critdor in Berlin, and an early leader in the French Revical Theory is the notion that the real problem lies olution, appears to have popularized the phrase, deep within the human heart. “revolution of the mind.” He also explicitly uses religious imagery to describe the French Revolution.

One is reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s quip when a Billington writes: newspaper in London ran a series of guest editorials, asking the guest editors to respond to the quesThe purpose of the Estates-General51 was not to tion, “What is Wrong with the World?” Chesterton’s answer was short and to the point: “Dear Editors. reform but ‘to regenerate’ the nation. He subseI am.” And this was the point of Alexander Solzquently called the National Assembly ‘the inviolable henitsyn’s 1978 commencement address at Harvard priesthood of national policy,” the Declaration of the CRITICAL THEORY AND THE GOSPEL

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Rights of man ‘a political gospel,” and the Constitution of 1791 a new religion ‘for which the people are prepared to die.’52

Critical Theory also failed to recognize that their own system of thought was ultimately a religious scheme, though parasitic on fundamental Christian realities, principles, doctrines, and concepts.

We are suggesting in this essay that Critical Theory also failed to recognize that their own system of thought was ultimately a religious scheme, though parasitic on fundamental Christian realities, principles, doctrines, and concepts. This is especially clear when we reflect upon Critical Theory’s use of redemptive and messianic themes, and its call for a revolutionary redemption.53

Critical Theory is most certainly not wrong to think in redemptive and eschatological terms. Besides Walter Benjamin, this revolutionary thrust was explicit in Herbert Marcuse as well. Marcuse was right, in a sense, in recognizing that “a new reality principle” (Marcuse’s language) is needed. The Christian faith asserts that the gospel which Christians proclaim calls for a new birth or a new creation. This new birth or new creation is that which man most truly needs.

But this new birth or new creation is more radical than Critical Theory realizes or calls for. The new birth and new creation at the heart of the Christian gospel is a rebirth which requires death and resurrection. It requires that the power used or needed to create the world (2 Cor. 4:4-6) is the exact power necessary to re-create a person. While Critical Theory calls for “a new reality principle” which requires death (simply a part of revolution), the Christian faith heralds the need for death, but a death which is then followed by resurrection for those who put their faith in Christ.

Marcuse, in the tradition of Engels (and Marx), follows a very provocative thesis of Sigmund Freud—at least as Marcuse understand it. That is, Freud could teach that civilization is by nature hostile to human instincts. Again, there is an odd kind of hyper-individualism lurking at the heart of Critical Theory. Liberation—at one level—has to do with liberating the individual from the constraints of civilization, and this includes the liberating of sexual or erotic desire.

As in so many strands of Critical Theory, the Critical Theorists are correct to discern the need for liberation, but on Christian grounds there is much askew.

24

CRITICAL THEORY AND THE GOSPEL

Because Critical Theory understands the human dilemma—at least in part—as the oppressive nature of society itself, Critical Theory likewise construes its understanding of redemption in a certain way. We must be “liberated”—at least in Marcuse’s sense— from reality itself. In Marcuse’s terms we must be “liberated” from the “Reality Principle,” such that we might enjoy the virtually unfettered “Pleasure Principle.”

If biblical Christianity proclaims that God accomplishes His redemptive purposes through the blood of His Son, Critical Theory teaches that all will be made right through revolutionary activity, and in the case of at least Marcuse, this revolutionary activity is tied inextricably to erotic pleasure. Thus, we are left with a kind of deracinated redemption through sexual activity and pleasure.

If the Christian account of man and reality more generally is correct, how could someone not bump into eschatological themes in his or her intellectual deliberations? Has not God indeed placed eternity into the heart man (Eccl. 3:11)? Thus, it makes sense that we should see redemptive and eschatological yearnings and reflections in the thought of those who have not bowed the knee to the risen Lord Jesus.

While recognizing that the use of eschatological, and even messianic, imagery by a non-Christian may in fact be driven by animus, a desire to mock, etc., this does not annul the theological significance of the fact that unbelievers do indeed bump into explicitly Christian theological verities, images, tropes, and concepts in their intellectual deliberations and reflections. We should not be surprised. We all live in God’s world, and think, argue, deliberate, and engage in intellectual deliberation against the back-

drop of just such a world, a world which is created, ruled, and sustained by the God of Holy Writ.

But it is also worth noting that Critical Theory is not bumping into this or that Christian theme and offering some vague affirmation of something Christians also believe. Rather, Critical Theory is reconfiguring, indeed corrupting or perverting, central Christian truths—like the nature of redemption. Nonetheless, the fact that Critical Theory speaks of the need for “redemption,” and even speaks of the need for a Messiah is striking.

So, to summarize our last key theme—the centrality of an eschatology revolutionary redemption.

First, Since Critical Theory appears to posit “sin” as something that has always existed (there is no pre-fall state), it has no echo of how things ought to have been. Second, since man’s problem is primarily economic, there is an inadequate grasp of what needs to be done to set things right. Third, since Critical Theory is by definition atheistic, there is no good, holy, loving, and righteous God who is reconciling persons to Himself and to one another.

Even as Critical Theory cooled to traditional Marxism as it developed as a school, the reality or force or power behind revolutionary redemption could almost not help to be some form of human-generated revolution. Nonetheless, historical materialism remained lurking in the background as Critical Theory developed. Critical Theory ultimately appeals to revolution as the hope or means of redemption, but “redemption” appears to bow the knee to the prior commitment of Critical Theory or revolution.

CONCLUSION

The Critical Theorists were (and almost 100 years later, still are) trying to come to terms with the various pathologies of the modern world. They have their own understanding of: (1) creation, man, and the nature of reality; (2) sin, atonement, sanctification, and holiness; and (3) history, the future, and the nature of eschatology. Like all persons living in God world, the Critical Theorists thought, reflected, and intellectually wrestled as created men to whom God had clearly revealed Himself in and

through the created order (Romans 1). We should not be surprised, then, that Critical Theory can be understood as a kind of religion—an idolatrous endeavor which cannot but help—in a sense—think about ultimate realities in a way which both borrows from traditional biblical themes and categories, while simultaneously corrupting, marginalizing, and even mocking some biblical themes and categories. The definitive Christian critique of Critical Theory is yet to be written, but it is hoped that this paper has at least provided something of what such a critique might look like.

1

Some histories place the move to New York in 1934.

2

Herbert Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology: Fundamental Tendencies of Industrial Society,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edd. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York, NY: Routledge, 1989), 119-27.

3

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 124.

4

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 124.

5

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 124.

6

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 125.

7

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 125. In this section Marcuse makes explicit his dependence on Sigmund Freud.

8

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 125.

9

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 125.

10

Theodor W. Adorno, “Society,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edd. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York, NY: Routledge, 1989), 271.

11

Adorno, “Society,” 271.

12

Adorno, “Society,” 271.

13

Adorno, “Society,” 271.

14 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 [originally published in 1955]). I will be working from the 1966 publication in this paper.

15

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, xv.

16

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, xxiii.

17

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 3.

18

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 3.

19

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 3. Marcuse’s emphasis.

20

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 12-15.

21

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 15.

22

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 19.

23

This restraint is “self-imposed restraint” because persons themselves inevitably embrace the necessity of the Reality Principle.

24

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 19.

25

Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 19. Marcuse’s text actually includes some French, which I have rendered into English above. His text

CRITICAL THEORY AND THE GOSPEL

25

reads: “The recherché du temps perdu becomes the vehicle of future liberation.”

48

This theme runs throughout The Authoritarian Personality. For one example, in the “Conclusions” to their studies the editors ponder what might be done to prevent the development of the “authoritarian personality,” or “fascist.” The editors express concern that it almost must be the case that any successful effort to resist fascism must start rather early in the life of children. This is because “ethnocentric parents” will undoubtedly get in the way: “For ethnocentric parents, acting by themselves, the prescribed measures would probably be impossible. We should expect them to exhibit in their relations with their children much the same moralistically punitive attitudes that they express toward minority groups—and toward their own impulses.” He continues: “But more serious, because much more widespread, is the case of parents who with the best will and the best feelings are thwarted by the need to mould the child so that he will find a place in the world as it is.” That is, even for parents who want to resist parenting in an “ethnocentric” way, the parental passion and concern for one’s children will ineluctably lead most parents to prepare their children for the world as it is, and this world is more encouraging of “fascism,” than not. See Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality, 975-76.

49

Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 25.

26

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 126.

27

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 126.

28

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 126.

29

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 126.

30

Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology,” 126.

31

This essay was published in 1940, before Benjamin committed suicide later in that same year. The German title is Über den Begriff der Geschichte, and is sometimes translated as “On the Concept of History.”

32

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edd. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York, NY: Routledge, 1989), 255.

33

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. Emphasis mine.

34

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255-56.

35

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256. The French is in italics in Benjamin’s text. Other emphasis mine.

36

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257.

37

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257.

50

Bronner, Critical Theory, 115.

38

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257.

51

39

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257. Emphasis mine.

The “Estates-General” consisted of the “First Estate” (clergy), the “Second Estate” (nobility), and the “Third Estate” (the majority of the people).

40

I am not here complaining of a lack of “proof.” Many good essays simply summarize the author’s convictions and general principles.

But it would certainly be helpful if there were even some illustrative examples given.

52

James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 20.

41

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257.

42

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261-62.

43

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262.

44

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262.

45

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261.

46

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002 [originally published in 1944]), xiv.

47

Adorno, “Society,” 271.

26

CRITICAL THEORY AND THE GOSPEL

53 Peter Thompson recounts this insight from Ernst Bloch from Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times. See Thompson, “The Frankfurt School, Part 6: Ernst Bloch and the Principle of Hope,” The Guardian (online), April 29, 2014. Cf. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Polity: 2009 [originally published in 1935]).

TIM DI E PPE , BO O K R E V I E W :

Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism. Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry Eds., InterVarsity Press (2019), 372pp Editor’s note: This review was previously published at Affinity: https://www.affinity.org. uk/foundations-issues/issue-82-book-review-1.

The reliability of the text of the New Testament is constantly challenged and debated, with sceptics pointing to the many thousands of variants and arguing that we cannot possibly know what the original text said. Consequently, any contemporary apologist needs to be equipped to answer questions about the text and the manuscripts. Even ordinary Bible readers are faced with usually over 500 textual notes in modern translations, and sometimes a lot more. These can raise doubts and questions for

the uninformed. Exegetes and preachers need to be able to navigate and assess the arguments for different readings and to explain their decisions to others.

This book is not a how-to book about textual criticism, but it is a very helpful corrective to the huge amount of misinformation that is out there on the whole subject. It is aimed primarily at non-specialist Christians, but it will be helpful for specialists too. Whist aimed at non-specialists it cannot be described as an introduction to the subject. Some knowledge and understanding of the basic issues around textual criticism is assumed.

SUMMER 2022

Ezra Institute

Tim Dieppe TIM DIEPPE is Fellow for Public Policy at the Ezra Institute, and Head of Public Policy at Christian Concern which he joined in 2016. Tim’s special interest is in Islamic affairs. This interest developed after the 2001 attacks which prompted him to study the nature of Islam, including sharia finance. Tim connected with Christian Concern after being asked to run a sharia fund which he refused to do. This led him to become more involved in combatting the increasing influence of sharia law in the UK. Prior to this, Tim had a successful career in fund management for over twenty years. Most recently, Tim was the manager of the WHEB Sustainability Fund which he ran from 2012 to 2015. Before that Tim designed and launched the pioneering multi-thematic investment process for the Henderson Industries of the Future Fund which he managed for seven years. This fund and the SRI Team at Henderson received multiple awards over the period, and Tim was named one of Britain’s top 100 fund managers by Citywire. Tim managed some £400m of global multi-thematic SRI funds, working as part of a highly integrated collaborative team of six SRI specialists. The funds invested exclusively in ten ‘Industries of the Future’ themes combining five environmental themes.

28

BOOK REVIEW

One classic example critiqued in the book is the comparison between manuscript numbers for the New Testament and those for various classical texts. F.F. Bruce made this argument in his The New Testament Documents: Are they Reliable? Several high-profile apologists come in for criticism for updating the New Testament numbers and not updating those for the classical texts. Bruce claimed there were just nine or ten copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Today you should say over 250!

Several apologists claim that Homer’s Iliad is only attested by 643 manuscripts, following Metzger in 1963. Today that would be over 2,500!

Bruce claimed about eight manuscripts for Herodotus, and this should be updated to over 100. Bruce also claimed only eight manuscripts for Thucydides which was not a fair comparison even at the time he wrote.

Against these updated figures, the New Testament is still far better attested with around 5,300 Greek manuscripts. We should recognise, however, that 83% of these come from the tenth century or later. Only just over sixty manuscripts cover the entire New Testament. Many others are fragmentary, and the large majority are text-critically unnecessary. This is not to say that the argument has no value, but that it should not be overemphasised.

Another frequently repeated apologetic argument states: “If we compile the 36,289 quotations by the early church fathers of the second to fourth centuries, we can reconstruct the entire New Testament minus 11 verses.” The only problem is that it is entirely false. Sadly, it was an Islamic apologetic organisation that took the time to investigate the origins of this myth and to expose how false it is.1 In a very best-case scenario, perhaps 54% of the New Testament could be reconstructed from the church fathers, but it is often very difficult to assess what is or is not a direct quotation as opposed to citing the sense of the passage, and sometimes conflating several passages. Christians should avoid repeating false claims which can easily be exposed in the Internet age.

There are several misconceptions around the number of variants in the New Testament. Estimates vary widely. A detailed study of all the variants in Philemon found 3.53 non-spelling variants per word. A similar study for John 18 found 3.86 variants per word, and another for Jude found 3.67 variants per word. Extrapolating these statistics across the entire New Testament, which consists of 138,020 words, would mean that there are around 500,000 variants in our Greek manuscripts. This does not include spelling variants, or variants from patristic citations or early translations. Bart Ehrman is quite correct to say that there are more variants among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Christians should avoid repeating false claims which can easily be exposed in the Internet age.

One misconception about this is that these are counted by adding up how many manuscripts attest to each variant. Some apologists have claimed that if one variant is attested in 4,000 manuscripts then this counts as 4,000 variants. This claim goes back to B.B. Warfield and continues to be repeated today, but it is just not true. That would count as one variant.

For John 18 there are 3,508 variants across 1,659 manuscripts in a text of around 800 words. This works out at an average of one distinct variant per 434 words copied, which is not a bad level of copying accuracy. 1,360 of these variants can be ruled out as nonsensical, but that still leaves a lot of variants to assess. Compare this with NA28 which includes 154 variants in John 18, and UBS4 which includes just ten. Top commentators might discuss a handful of variants in this chapter. But, where the rubber hits the road in actual use, none of the modern English translations notes a single variant in this chapter - not even the richly footnoted NET. The point is that the vast majority of variants are just not worth looking at.

of the content. Included is a bibliography and five indices as well as a foreword by Professor Daniel Wallace.

If you are at all interested in textual criticism, then this book is highly recommended. If you are an apologist who wants to make sure you have your facts right, then this book is required reading in my view. Pastors and theologians who want to update their understanding of textual criticism would benefit too. A very helpful, and sadly much needed corrective to the many myths and mistakes made by well-known authors in this area.

1

“Sir David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes), the Patristic Citations of the Ante-Nicene Church Fathers and the Search for Eleven Missing Verses of the New Testament,” Islamic Awareness, last modified 2007, https://www.islamic-awareness.org/bible/text/citations.

In total UBS4 notes variants affecting over 1,500 words in the New Testament out of a total of 138,020, or around 1 per cent. Most of these do not affect meaning significantly, but some do. Let’s not forget the well-known disputed pericope about the woman caught in adultery and the ending of Mark as the most significant examples. There are others too, but it remains correct to say that no foundational doctrine or ethical practice depends on a disputed text.

This is an edited book with fifteen chapters written by upcoming scholars in the field, each addressing different issues relevant to textual criticism. Many other popular myths are addressed, including myths about the dating of manuscripts, myths about copyists and transmission, myths about orthodox corruption, and myths about canon. I hope that the examples I have given you above give you a flavour BOOK REVIEW

29

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Informing Faith | Reforming Culture

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At the Colloquium we will consider important subjects related to the mission of God’s people to live our lives and shape our world in obedience to Christ, to the glory of God. • • •

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