The Gospel Coalition supports the church by providing resources that are trusted and timely, winsome and wise, and centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ. from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father

This is truly the book I have long wanted to read, and I believe it deserves to become a standard text for all Christian leaders, teachers, evangelists, and any serious-minded believer.” Corinthians 1 chastens and corrects all of us. For those of us desperate to seem relevant it insists upon an unfashionable cruciform antithesis. For those of us desperate to dig a trench as deep as possible between the church and the world, it confounds us by talking about God’s sophia. And for those of us who always seek a reconciling middle ground or third way, it insists on a categorical antithesis and a glorious fulfilment, both at the top of their energy. No-one should walk away from 1 Corinthians 1 feeling comfortable. Discernment Christopher Watkin, Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Second, the notion of hegemonic power is also legitimate. Christians have long recognized how various institutions can—intentionally or unintentionally—perpetuate ideas like secularism, naturalism, and relativism that create resistance to the gospel. Similarly, Christian parents have to fight against false standards of beauty and sexuality promulgated by the entertainment and advertising industries. These examples show hegemonic power in action, as the culture imbibes norms and values promoted by dominant institutions. Perhaps you saw the video. A woman stares down the lens of the camera, straight into our eyes. Her expression is weary, her tone angry. “How can you win?” she cries, with the air of a question she’s asked a thousand times. “You can’t. The game is fixed,” she answers. “So when they say, ‘Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?’—it’s not ours. We don’t own anything. We don’t own anything.’”Though the assumptions and commitments informing this view of a systemically racist society go by multiple names, here I’ll use “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) as a general term to capture the set of concerns. (To be clear, lamenting the presence of systemic racism does not necessarily make one a CRT proponent.) The question Christians need to ask of CRT (or of liberalism, or any other ideology for that matter) is not simply ‘is it biblical?’, for no modern political dogma will adequately reflect the Bible’s core teaching. Our concern should rather be to discern how Christians should engage with post-Christian ideologies, such as CRT, that traffic in vocabulary with deep biblical resonances like ‘justice’. Fortunately, both in the Bible and in church history we find responses to precisely this question. I will explore two salient examples: Paul’s treatment of Jewish ‘power’ and Greek ‘wisdom’ in 1 Corinthians 1, and Augustine’s engagement with Roman ‘glory’ in The City of God. These two examples will equip us for our own contemporary encounter with CRT and liberal conceptions of ‘justice’. Paul on Greek ‘wisdom’ and Jewish ‘signs’ Queer theory is another activist school of thought deriving from particularly postmodern ideas about human sexuality, seeking to cast off historical (especially Judeo-Christian) definitions and characterizations of sex and gender. “Queer theory is about liberation from the normal, especially where it comes to norms of gender and sexuality. This is because it regards the very existence of the categories of sex, gender and sexuality to be oppressive.” 3 The movement wishes to detach gender identity from the historical trappings of the past that have deemed certain sexual behaviors as right or wrong. Like its ideological siblings noted above, queer theory advocates seek to reshape the ways that gender identity has been assigned. the biblical concept of covenant, or repeated narratives embodying the “first shall be last” motif (language, ideas, stories); the rhythm of promise and fulfilment (time); the biblical idea of God as the ruler over all space, not like one of the localized gods of the ancient world (space); the biblical distinction between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God (structure of reality); the first Christians meeting together on the Lord’s day to sing, break bread, pray, and hear teaching (behavior); the unity of all believers in Christ, and God as the lawgiver (relationships); and, the location and architecture of the tabernacle, or available modes of transport for Paul’s missionary journeys (objects). [17] Over the last few years, new terms like “cisgender,”“intersectionality,”“heteronormativity,”“centering,” and “white fragility” have suddenly entered our cultural lexicon—seemingly out of nowhere. In reality, these words and concepts have been working their way through academia for decades, perpetuated by disciplines such as Post-Colonial Studies, Queer Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Whiteness Studies, and Critical Race Theory, among others. These fields can be placed within the larger discipline of “ critical theory,” an ideology more popularly known as “cultural Marxism.”

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey :: 505 U.S. 833 (1992) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/833/ Cambridge Papers is a non-profit making quarterly publication which aims to contribute to debate on a wide range of issues from a Christian perspective. The editorial group is an informal association of Christians sharing common convictions and concerns. The contribution of each member of the group, and each author, is as an individual only and not representative of any church or organisation. Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer, “The Incompatibility of Critical Theory and Christianity,” The Gospel Coalition, May 15, 2019, accessed August 10, 2021, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/incompatibility-critical-theory-christianity/. ↩ In Michael Serres: Figures of Thought, we learn that the concept of the figure became intuitive to Watkin in his reading philosophy as a graduate student:Biblical Critical Theory doesn’t just give us answers; it helps us to come up with better questions . . . An innovative and immensely fruitful paradigm.”