Hello, welcome to the Theology Pugcast. It's great to have you here for this episode and we have a special guest today. We're going to allow him to introduce himself in a moment, but just to remind you of who I am, in case you're a longtime listener and for new listeners, you probably should just know anyway because you're obviously new. I'm C.R. Wiley and I'm a pastor and I serve at Church of the Pacific Northwest and I am a senior editor at Touchstone Magazine. Okay, Glenn, how about you? I'm Glenn Sunshine. I'm a professor emeritus of Renaissance and Reformation History at Central Connecticut State University. Senior fellow to Colston Center for Christian World View and I write a bunch of things so you can find me most easily on Substack. Okay. Now, unfortunately, Tom is having connectivity issues today and it's just kind of a weird day. He's not an old friend of mine on today, Bradley Green. So Brad and I go back to, I think it's like 2013 or something like that. When we both, I think that's right. We were roommates at the Academy of Philosophy and Letters and that's how we got to know each other a little bit. Anyway, I've been able to follow you a little bit online since then and you've been publishing a number of things and you've got something new out there we're going to talk about today. So why don't you just introduce yourself to the podcast audience? Well, CR and Glenn, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. So I am Brad Green, Mary Chodayan. We have three children, 27, 25, 23 and I've taught for 28 years at Union University here in Jackson, Tennessee. Gently in theology but some church history, some philosophies, some Latin and I enjoy being something of a generalist. I have come through the Baptist world that an MDiv, it's Southern seminary, a THMS Southwestern seminary and a PhD at Baylor a number of years ago. Listen, it might be interesting and we help start a Guston School which is a Christian Leblanc School or a classical and Christian school here in Jackson. That's a part of our story. And after 28 wonderful years at Union we are heading up to Louisville and I will start teaching some philosophy and theology at Southern seminary this fall in Louisville, Kentucky. But that's a start and a number of things and we're going to discuss I believe one of those, the latest book today and it's an honor and thrill to be with you, fellas. Well it's great to have you Brad and here's the book. It just came out entitled What Is Critical Theory, a concise Christian analysis. And this was sent to me from an editor at Crossway and appreciate that. Anyway we've talked about critical theory on the show a few times and what you're doing with this book though is perhaps a little different than folks are familiar with or maybe a quaint with other treatments. Often when critical theory is addressed it's addressed in a kind of well alarmist and you know batten down the hatches kind of way. And you're taking a more measured scholarly approach in this book and I think that's great. It's good to have a treatment like that that allows the people behind a particular school of thought to speak for themselves a little bit but not in a way that you just sort of like go along with everything. It is a critical analysis. So you are evaluating it. But why don't you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to write the book and then introduce us to the book. Sure. Well thanks again fellas. Yeah. So I think for many of us we kind of experienced 2020 and all that happened that year with COVID and George Floyd and BLM and Antifa you kind of throw into that the Trump election is a pretty wild time in American history. It seems to me and I suspect it will be written about for some time. Coming out of it really before that actually before that I was trying to make sense of critical race theory. I'm 60 so I've kind of seen these waves come along in our country. A lot of course I don't know. But so I was thinking a bit about critical race theory and then began to read a bit of Herbert Mark Kooza and realized I really had never read the critical theorist to integrate length themselves. So the critical race theory, critical theorist going back to 1920s Germany. So I really chose for those that we can talk about this hour to try to read and think through. I'll also say this is you all you had a number of very thoughtful people. Let's think of James Lindsay for example. James Lindsay writing some very good critiques of the critical theorist, very good critiques of people like Herbert Mark Kooza in particular who I think is one of the most interesting. Probably the most perverse not to be a lawyer, but probably one of the most perverse, but also one of the most clear I think in some ways to read and understand and the biggest rock star of that group. But Lindsay is offering here's someone who was enthralled by the new atheist and probably a typical left wing kind of person at least years ago, secularist, atheist of his own admission, writing some of the most penetrating critiques of the critical theorist. But Lindsay, I'd love to sit and have coffee with him and talk to him about this, is Lindsay saying the answer to the critical theorist is to essentially go back to enlightenment liberalism, you know, kind of classical liberalism. And if I have to choose, I'll take classical liberalism and me, this and Hayek and all those guys more than the Marxist by, you know, industry, the imagination. But I did think that something in Lindsay's critique was lacking because he really wasn't and isn't offering a theological critique. He wasn't, wasn't and isn't offering a robust biblical Christian theological engagement with this. And as a Protestantism of Angelica, what I'm trying to argue in the book is in one sense the critical theorist aren't critical enough and I'll try to explain why I say that. And that the only real answer is a full or Christian biblical theological grasp of the issues and that the problems that the critical theorists might be kind of grasping at partially, the problems were best understood by a Christian understanding of reality and the only meaningful answers or the answers that the gospel provides. So the book was originally my title, nothing against Crossway. My original title was Critical Theory in the Gospel, which I think is a little more punchy. Yeah. But they wanted to go with what is critical theory, concise Christian analysis. So so be it. It's published and I'm thankful for in Crossway is great. But I really wanted to bring the gospel to bear on this this philosophy or worldview or set of convictions and walk through how the gospel understands the problems in a more faithful way and offers the real only compelling solution to those problems. So you much more to say that maybe gets us started. Yeah. Well, that's great. But though that with Lindsay, he's taking for granted kind of the value of the enlightenment and its legacy and all of that. And I think a lot of folks when they see responses to critical theory, it's often from people like him. And sometimes people who are sincere, Bible believing Christians, they buy into sort of a package of critiques without realizing it's some of the stuff that comes along with that maybe isn't quite as friendly to the Christian faith as they're assuming. And I remember early on when when critical theory began to sort of sweep through Christian academic circles back in the 80s, there was a kind of giddiness because some people had been frustrated by the enlightenment and its legacy and thought that maybe this was a crack that would allow for a more genuine Christian kind of intellectual life to emerge. But in my own experience and what I witnessed is actually what happened is a lot of those people actually got swept up in critical theory and kind of tried to baptize it. So we have a lot of Christian colleges now where we actually have kind of, well, I guess lightweight Marxists who are now teaching on faculty at those places. Anyway, I'd like to maybe deal a little bit with the enlightenment, the legacy of the enlightenment. And what's good and what's not so good about that before we get into a full Christian sort of biblically informed way of thinking about all this? Sure, sure, sure. So one of one of the most significant books coming out of the critical theorist is Adorno and Horkheimer's dialectic of enlightenment. It's I read the whole thing through, I found it very difficult at first because it's quite turtied. But in, you know, we don't need sloppy summaries of and the critical theorists were not sloppy in general. So when the Christian says enlightenment, there need not be a total rejection. But if we're thinking of man as autonomous, if we're thinking of reason dislocated from faith, if we're thinking of man is neutral in his intellectual reasonings, if we're thinking of that the typical atheist just hadn't seen enough evidence yet versus Paul's critique in Romans 1 that, hey, everyone actually knows God because God revealed himself and everyone suppresses it. Thus they're under the wrath of God. Thus they need the gospel. There's a whole network, I think, of ways of thinking about man, his cognitive abilities, being neutral, reason being the heart of what it means to be human rather than the part of what it means to be human, not seeing reason in relation to faith, not grasping with the noetic effects of sin, at least as I see things. So when I think of the enlightenment, I think of those might be the weaknesses is those tendencies to not think of God, man, the world in more explicitly Christian biblical categories. Now, I'm happy to give a lot of thanks for modern medicine. I've read my window Bayer, I've read my agrarians, I've read my Chesterton and I'm happy to talk about the glory of the Middle Ages, but I'm kind of happy to have penicillin and modern medicine et cetera. So I'm not anti, I'm not anti, all that goes with modernity et cetera. So that might be how I start to talk about enlightenment. As a historian, I sometimes could ask if I could live in any historical period, when would I like to live? And my answer is usually, but now it's pretty good. And the reason I give is two word pairs, dental care and flush toilets. It was pretty great. Fair enough. Fair enough. Now, I think one of the things about, say, critical theories critique of the enlightenment project that distinguishes it from what you were just talking about, which is theological and Christian critique is there's a kind of historicism that the critical theorists embrace, they don't really approach it with any kind of transcendent point of reference. That's actually in their minds, in a looserie and just a kind of an attempt to play a power game on people. So when it comes to their critique of the enlightenment project, what is it kind of boiled down to? That's a good question. So they all do it in different ways, particularly, well, Marcusa does it thoroughly, Adorno and Horkheimer and dialectic of enlightenment. The short version is, the enlightenment began with the great hope of human freedom and unleashing man from various bonds and fetters and poverty and even intellectual oppression, we might say. So that was the goal. What attaches to the enlightenment or what develops along with the enlightenment is industrialism and technology and they would tend to say something of an unfettered capitalism, which is so quick aside, capitalism's always the bogeyman with the critical theorists. We can circle back to that. So what began as a great hope for freedom and getting over alleviating scarcity of food, water, et cetera and shelter because of industrialism, technology, et cetera, what was meant to free us has now entrap this in ways that we didn't foresee. And so technology, industrialism, capitalism, rather than freeing us has entrap this. But the story takes on a fascinating nefarious plot twist and that is that the person living, let's say right now, 2025, or 1950 or 1918, set that whole, let's say going back almost 200 years, 150 years. Once a middle class person, a spouse, three children, middle income, they actually are still oppressed and repressed and being exploited, but they don't know it. And that's kind of where critical theory steps in is that is these people don't really realize they're oppressed. They don't realize that they're being manipulated and that they're being controlled. Now this may get ahead of the story, but the critical, this is one of brilliant aspects of critical theories is they will, they'll talk about the culture industry and how pop culture dominates and mesmerizes and bewitches. And so because of pop culture, the average person doesn't know they're oppressed. So this is where different differentiated self from, say, classical Marxism or traditional Marxism is these cultural components like the culture industry, pop culture, et cetera. Dominates and mesmerizes and bewitches people. So there's these additional layers that keep people from recognizing that they're oppressed. Yeah, yeah. I've got a few years on you. I'm not that many glib. I remember false consciousness raising consciousness to class consciousness. Yeah, I mean, that's all straight new left stuff. Right. Yes. Now, when we think about it, it's exactly right. Yep. So when we think about this stuff, I think one response that could be, I think really significant, but it doesn't seem to get much, I think, respect is that, well, if I don't feel oppressed and my life is still pretty good, isn't that like a pretty good place to be? In other words, you might say, well, you know, there are these different things that you would not allowed to do, for example, like maybe indulge all of your sexual appetites or whatever. Yes. You know, I still enjoy a pretty good standard living relative to the story of the human race over the last four to 6,000 years. And I can do a lot of things that I do enjoy. How do they respond to that? This tends to be the place where this all kind of falls apart because a lot of folks who seem to be really attracted to this way of thinking are actually not the people that are supposedly the oppressed. It's sort of like a younger, sort of upper class people. And there's a whole sort of industry that has gotten into just trying to understand why those people feel so unhappy. But anyway, any thoughts? That's interesting. Yeah. Well, I thought you were going to go a different direction, Chris. Chris, do you tend to go by Chris's CR or just? Oh, yeah, Chris. Yeah, when we, so the CR thing is just for the internet, just. Okay. Okay. It sounds very cool. I like. So I thought you were going to go one direction, you went in another direction. So let me hit both maybe is one of one of the things that Christian need not do is say, as long as you don't feel oppressed or not oppressed, we got to be careful there, right? Because if I'm engaging in apologetic or evangelistic encounter with someone and I say to them that they are suppressing the knowledge of God and they're for under the wrath of God and either gospel to be safe from the wrath to come, the response can often be, I'm very happy. I've got a wife and three children and maybe I've got, maybe I'm very wealthy and I can afford all the vacay, whatever. So we want to, this isn't to really grant all that much to critical theory per se, but just to say we don't need to argue down roads that kind of trap us into an unnecessary bog or corner because the Christian part of the Christian witness to the world is you can be lost, you can be in dire spiritual straits and not recognize it. So that'd be one, that'd be one kind of response to what you were saying. But maybe pose your question again, Chris, I kind of lost the thread there. Well, basically just the idea that we have a lot of people who are ostensibly the object of the concern of the critical theorists who when they hear critical theory, it doesn't resonate with them at all. They're like, I feel pretty good. My life is pretty good. Now your example, I know in terms of what is the situation that we face with the gospel is absolutely right. But what distinguishes, I think, critical theory from that is that there really is a God and there is a day of judgment and you better get ready for it. Yes. Whereas with critical theory. Yes. Yeah, I mean, if you buy into a very sort of deterministic dialectic, there is going to be some point in the future where there's going to be some kind of resolution when it comes to cultural conflict. And maybe you should be ready for that. But Chris, that's exactly where you got to go back to the left. That's where you have to raise consciousness. But you see, this is the thing. Yes, exactly. But that's the thing. I've had lots of people try to raise consciousness with people who are middle class and lower. And working class and they resent it. In other words, they push back and say, you are just actually kind of living in the like as I retower world and you're creating issues that I don't have any reason to identify with. Okay. Now here's the track. What the critical theorists do is they move away from economics. They move away from classical Marxism and they identify other categories of oppression. So you see, to use the terminology of the period, women's lib, black power, gay liberation, all of these kinds of things, you don't identify with the social class in the sense of economics. We've just lived through an example of this. If you look at the surveys about attitudes toward race relations, the black community said that race relations were good and improving at numbers something around 70%. If I remember correctly, up until George Floyd. And then George Floyd happens. It is promoted as this example of white oppression, white supremacy, all of those sorts of things. And there's even pressure in the justice system to act on it as such. George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose. He did not die. There was no sign of his fix. He did not die from an eon as neck. And yet, the police officer, forgot his name off the top-hand, was Shofan. He is in jail for murder, even though his action didn't cause the death. And you get riots, you get everything else. And suddenly, the perception of race relations in the country takes in no stif. And it is because of a deliberate propaganda attempt, or propaganda move, building on hands up, don't shoot, y'all, Michael Brown, all these other things. Building on that, that creates this impression that race relations are much worse than they actually are, which then makes race relations much worse than they are. That's the game. That's how it's played. Yeah. You're both saying good things, I think, is maybe to try to get to your question a bit as well, Chris, is what, again, so the four persons I studied were Walter Benjamin, who the most tragic case, he, Walter Benjamin was the critical theorist kind of envoy in Paris. He didn't live there in Frankfurt with the rest. Herbert Markusa, the big rock star of the 60s, particularly. Max Horkheimer, maybe less known, but the second director. And then maybe the fine intellect of the gang is Theodore Dorno, I mean, brilliant. What I learned reading, particularly Markusa, is the person that you, your example of the middle class person, or me, working class who's quite happy, is saying, see, there's the problem. This person doesn't realize he's being manipulated and controlled and oppressed. He needs out of it. Now your right is there's almost a delicious irony that might tend to be white upper class intelligency, telling him that he's oppressed, right? But the brilliant, almost ex-files his conspiracy theory kind of angle on this is that the critical theorist looks at the world and sees the happy middle class, working class worker as totally bewitched by the system. So it is fascinating. The part of my critique is that the critical theorist see the problem in the system and virtually in the world as received. They wouldn't use the term created. So it's almost nostic in that sense. The problem is built into the system, built into reality. So the person himself or herself is kind of off the hook. So it's also palladium in that sense, right? The person is not the problem. And that's the reason I suggest in the book is that critical theory is not critical enough is when Solshonitsyn gave his great commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he says the real problem lies right through the hard-earned person. That's the problem, right? So we're back into Christian territory, sin, heart, etc. Solshonitsyn as an Augustinian in that sense. The critical theorists have no room for that way of thinking. You and I are particularly deceived, the three of us, right? I'm assuming Glenn Chris, I'm assuming we're both role confitaries of some sort. We're probably more familiar to the free market than to socialism, just a while guess there. And that we pretty much see a lot of junk that happened in 2020. But that's all this evidence that the three of us are fascists, right? The three of us are caught up in deception. And it says, so Glenn's right, we need our consciousness, our consciousness is raised and we're stuck, we're stuck. And since the problem's not us, it is sins. And since the problem is the system and the culture industry, which is bewitched each of us. The three of us are in a big dilemma. So getting to what the critical theorists are trying to promote. So there's a deconstructive element. And you get into the fact that we're at the reality that there's not much in the way of construction when it comes to critical theorists. Yeah. And that's what I've experienced. So I spent a decade working with lefties in Boston and the inner city. And they were really good at criticizing and condemning. But when it actually came to building anything, they were pretty hopeless. And one of the reasons for that, I think, has to do with the fact that they're not willing to live with the givenness of reality that there are certain kind of intrinsic structures that you're dealing with. And there's a kind of enlightenment sort of hang over that they're all suffering from. And that is the desire to fully define yourself all the way down. Yeah. There's nothing there. And so you're never going to ever be in a place where you can fully define yourself. So you're always going to be under some kind of oppression because it's just technically not even feasible to do that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a great point. One of the most enjoyable bits I stumbled upon in my research was Giorg Lukacch. I think I'm saying his name. You may know Glenn or Chris better than I on pronunciation. He's a Marxist, Hungarian Marxist, died in 71. And he's got a great quote about the critical theorist because the critical theorist, which may seem counterintuitive, with the exception of Marcos, some of them were critiqued for not being revolutionary enough. So they were seen as kind of maybe posers. They were Marxists, but they were twisted. They were kind of reinventing Marxism. And they were happy just to sit and read and write and drink. They liked high culture, classical music, steak, wine, et cetera. Here's a great line from Lukacch. A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residents in the Grand Hotel Abyss, which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as a beautiful hotel equipped with every comfort on the edge of an abyss of nothingness of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments can only heightened the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered. So we offered this notion that the critical theorists at the end of the day had nothing to say. They were good at tearing down, but they really, because, in part, in distinction from Hagel and Marx, the inevitability of change, the inevitability of revolution was no longer accepted. That was because they were caught. Why hadn't the revolution happened in Germany after World War I? So they're kind of reworking Marxism. And they, one of the things they do is say, well, there must be some other things in the way. And that's where the cultural Marxism stuff comes. It's church in particular, family, any sort of patriarchal or complementary and understanding of mom and dad, husband, wife, et cetera. All those cultural forces were part of what was keeping the revolution from coming. But I think in the end, the critical theorists with the exception of Marcusa had nothing really to say constructive, ultimately. And you may know the story, or Dorno, there were, once these guys all, many of them went to the States as Nazi as in arose in the 30s. And some came back, or Dorno and Horkheimer came back. And Dorno goes back to Frankfurt and the school for social research is reestablished or reinbigorated. And you had some students sitting in protesting that these guys weren't radical enough. And Dorno calls the police. And so he's seen as the ultimate traitor, right? For calling the police, you know, typical, fascist move, for calling the police on the next wave of protesters. And Marcusa had something to say, we can get at that if you like. But I think the others in some ways didn't have a constructive proposal for life, meaningful life in the world. Yeah. Yeah. This in some ways goes back to Gramsci, who was one of the influences on the Frankfurt school, whose guy really came up with the idea of cultural Marxism in a lot of ways, as well as false consciousness and all those sorts of things. He was really a big promoter of those kinds of ideas. But he believed that the revolution would occur through a union of intellectuals and workers. And the big problem is you only got the intellectuals which meant you can't really make anything. Right. Right. Right. Right. And not only can't you not, is it impossible to make anything? Doesn't it in some sense undermine the sort of legitimacy of your project when they are ostensibly the body of people that you're trying to help and to liberate. And they're the ones who are at least sort of interested in what you have to talk about? Well, just because we know so much better than them, so we have to educate them. And they don't get it or get educated. I've witnessed this. I witnessed this firsthand. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So Chris, you worked for a decade or so and Boston, you said or Massachusetts. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was involved in the Ministry there and did all kinds of stuff. I was one of the founding members of the Boston Education Collaborative, which had a number of sort of kind of features that were inspired by liberation theology. I don't know if you're familiar with any of the guys at Gordon Conwell and Cume and those guys, but I know those guys. Okay. Yeah. So they were kind of like liberation theology light. Yeah. Elin Villifania. He was a, I like El Dean, but he was pretty, he was just basically called himself a Pentecostal liberation theologian. Anyone? Yeah. I experienced some of that in the old Southern when I was there. It was kind of a lighter version of liberation theology back in the 80s and 90s. Yeah. The kind of the circles that we travel in are worried about. Many of the institutions that they more or less took for granted as being sound, having some way been, I don't know, it's not a show they've been completely taken over by this kind of stuff. So there's more sympathy for it than perhaps people would like to see. Do you have any takes on that? What's going on, particularly with Christian intellectuals? It's, wow, Chris, wow. Okay. That's a great question. Back in 2020, I just, I feel like I was almost in a kind of intellectual spiritual shock. There I was 55, had written a few things and doing fine. And the George Floyd incident that all of a sudden I'm getting these emails from various institutions with which I'm associated saying, we just have to be more racially this or racially that. And I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to, so I went and watched that video multiple times. I watched the unedited version. And I noticed a number of people of that, I think four person police group were multi-ethnic if you want to use that term, whatever, you know. And I'm just thinking, what's happening here? Why this quick rush to portray this a certain way? So this is, this is began intellectual journey. For me, I did write a piece that got rejected by a certain publication. It eventually got published at, at ref, ref 21. I wrote a book review of Doug Wilson's Mirror of Christendom. It was all ready to go into this particular online site and then got pulled because I, I didn't, I didn't want to throw Doug under the bus. He's a friend. I like him and I'm not going to throw him under the bus just because he's not, you know, he who should not be named, you know. And something, I think our evangelical leaders didn't lead well. I think, and now, you know, conferences of quit meeting, et cetera. I think there was a major seismic shift. And these are my people, right? These, I mean, all those institutions that I'm naming are not naming. Those are my people I've written for them and I've traveled with them and I've spoken at the, whatever. I just think there was a, a weakness in evangelicalism was kind of unveiled. And now we need, we just need good writing, good scholarships, sober minded, Bible, satirated, historically informed Christian scholarship. We don't need to be shrill or a screed. So I tried to write this book, you've both common, or you've common in Christ. I mean, I've tried to, I tried to write it with a somewhat dispassionate, but yet passionate in another sense. Because really the Christian, you know, the response to the new left, the response to the progressivism isn't to say, we don't believe in justice. The response is, hey, we've been saying that for 2000 years. That's our story, right? The justice story. And what is right and the objective nature of morality and the beauty, the human person and being made in the image of God and, and blacks and whites should get along, right? I mean, kind of the most basic things is, it's a heart and soul of good, Protestant evangelical theology. And so we should be raising our hand and speaking clearly. And I think in 2020, there was just a lot of confusion and people got scared about touching the third rail and not saying things the way they ought to say them. And so we need good, good writing, good scholarship, good content. And it's kind of a fourth rightness. And I think many people in the pew, hopefully will be encouraged by this kind of podcast, right? This kind of, just fourth right, candid, rooted in good thinking, rooted in a deep knowledge of 2000 years of Christian theology and Western culture. I think there's probably plenty of people out there who don't want to be taken again and good content helps with that. Yeah. I wrote an article for breakpoint quite a while ago now called Why Welkness is a Christian Heresy. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. The whole point of it is that the idea that people are equal, that the poor or the marginalized haven't here in dignity, that they deserve respect and honor and all of those kinds of things, the things that oppression is wrong, the things that critical theories built on all are products of Christianity or Judaism. Yeah. Nice. Nice. As a result, you know, the technical definition of heresy, they're the etymological definition means to choose. Yes. Hybrid. And so what a heresy is is where you choose one aspect of the truth and you run with it so far, it distorts everything else. And yeah, and in that sense, critical theory qualifies as a Christian Heresy. It picks up on a legitimate notion out of Christianity and runs with it so far, it turns into a lie. Yeah, the couple of things that come to mind is you're reflecting their glen. I agree with your take and I agree with the points that you just made. I think that what I picked up on when it came to this collapse of a commitment to, I think, transcendent reality, which is kind of at the heart of what critical theory is about, is that everything is historicized. There is no point of reference outside of the created order and there's no prospect or conviction that people can be capable of making informed judgments based on transcendent truths, realities, truth, goodness, beauty, et cetera. Everything becomes a kind of embeddedness in a particular social class or interest sort of structure. So because I'm a white male in the West and I own property, therefore all of my judgments are to be thrown out because I will only represent my interests. Just like the other party will only represent their interests. The interesting thing about that is it connects into epistemology. So they have this thing coming out of feminist epistemology, Harman, I believe it was, who, it's called standpoint epistemology. It says that basically everything that you think of as truth comes out of your intersectional categories. Now the irony of that is that young, this is connected in with postmodern theory and so on. But the irony of that is that basically they're arguing for presuppositionalism. Presuppositions are predetermined by your intersectional categories. Right. Yeah. And the obvious critique is somehow the, whether you want to say the Marxist or critical theorist, some other own perspective is privileged nonetheless and is not subject to being simply the determination of their own historical situatedness. Right. That's usually the thing I use when I'm interacting with those sorts of people. So when there's an interlecuter that I'm interacting with who's using sort of the Marxist tropes, I'll just say, okay, well then everybody has an agenda, why should I submit myself to yours? You know, if this is just kind of a doggy dog world, well I'm just going to tear away at the meat and get what I can't. And it's just too bad. In other words, your whole appeal to justice is empty. Yeah. And this actually connects in with, with Derry Duh and his concepts of knowledge is being essentially a power game. Right. What any culture thinks is true, not only true, but even what qualifies his knowledge is essentially determined by those in power as a power game to keep them in power. So there's no such thing as truth, there's no such thing as knowledge as only power games. Right. So let's get back to the book. Good. Yeah, you can back to the book, Brad. So we've got about 15 minutes or so. I love to hear you kind of address some things that in the course of your study in writing the book, you think, boy, more people need to know about this. This would really make a difference in terms of understanding and in terms of knowing how to respond. What are some things that you'd really like for us to take away? Sure. Well, thank you. As I was reading and so I guess it was fall of 21, I just kind of started buying critical theory stuff and printing it, whatever and reading. What struck me in the way I structured the book is my argument is that critical theory, so it's essentially mentioned, mentioned, Christian Heresy, that's kind of the thesis of the book in one sense is I suggest that the critical theory is in different way, where the critical theory can be understood as a kind of parasitic worldview upon Christianity and kind of an alternative religion. And so I do it in a very straightforward way. I suggest a critical theory as its own doctrine of creation or its own metaphysics, its own view of reality. It has its own doctrine of sin or what's wrong with the world. And it has its own doctrine of redemption and I kind of combine redemption, history, eschatology into one section, kind of where the world is going and how it's going to get there. And I suggest that, and this is where I don't think, say, Lindsay's critique is going to be the one that should satisfy James Lindsay's brilliance is, it's not one that should satisfy the traditional Christian. So I suggest that critical theory has its own doctrinal commitments, which echo mimic the Christian faith, but that the Christian faith does it better. So please do by the book, but that is the summary of the book in 45 seconds, reminitors. So for example, the critical theorists tend, Marcusi can be an exception every now and then, but tend to see the world as inherently at the heart of what it is as plague with all sorts of stuff, including economic corruption and oppression. So it's not sticking that sense. The problem is kind of there from the beginning. Now sin, that could be the sin chapters well, but as far as the section on sin, there's this human dilemma that again, yes, historicism people are trapped by their situatedness, they're trapped by the system. They are, they're blinded by the culture industry. But again, it's it's pelagian, even not stick. There's the problems outside of us. Okay. The redemption to me, and maybe I'll linger on this chapter for a minute, is redemption. At least in Marcusa, the doctrine of redemption ends up being essentially via sexual experience. And this is why I think Marcusa is the most corrupt, most perverse of the gang. Perhaps the most helpful thing I've found is that what Marcusa does is he burrows from Sigmund Freud to say, there's two principles. There's the reality principle, and that's that we need order and restraint to forget the civilization. Then there's the pleasure principle, and the pleasure principle is largely sexual pleasure. And that's the id, you know, what you really want is sexual experience. Now if Freud said those two are always in conflict, and there's no real solution. And so Freud could come up with phraseology like a coping mechanism. How do you cope by having to behave, have social order, but not having your deepest desires, sexual desires fulfilled? So Freud just kind of left the problem insoluble. Here's Marcusa's, I don't know if you want to say brilliant, sonopin, it's fascinating. Marcusa says, what we need is a new reality principle. We need, you know, Marxists like they don't understand the world, they want to change the world. But Marcusa offered a solution. Marcusa said, if we can simply allow people to fully express themselves sexually and to have maximal sexual pleasure, we can actually virtually turn the world on its axis and create a new world. And we can have a new sexualized reality principle. So we have friends whose children have attempted to transition et cetera, these tragic situations. And you wonder why would a public school, a government school want to keep a child's sexual confusion away from mom and dad? Well, the logic is very easy and very clear. Even if no one of these schools has read a page of Marcusa, that stuff floats down. And in this world view is going to say that that child, if they are going to be truly free and not oppressed, they must be able to express that so-called sexual orientation. Mom and dad, the pastor, the youth minister, etc., are all part of this oppressive fascist. We can talk about fascism, fascist network that is keeping that person from becoming truly free. All that, so you have to allow them to transition or you have to fund that transition, etc. All that goes back ultimately to Marcusa, at least he's the proximate origin. And so Lindsay's right, when James Lindsay says, we live in Marcusa's universe now, he's exactly right. And even if Marcusa's heart, somewhat hard, even if they're not reading him, they follow him. And so maybe the best discovery, most helpful discovery was the sexual stuff, the trans stuff is just Marcusa unleashed at the institutional, cultural, educational, institutional level. I think related to that, Brad is kind of a applied rejection of an original good order. So we think about the Christian faith and we think about creation. What we as Christians hold up to people to confess and to celebrate is that the creation is good. And its original ordering was something that was in everyone's interest, not just some elite groups interest or whatever. And while there is sin in the world, there's still a lot of that original order that is here for us to enjoy. And yes, clearly what we need is not so much to reject the original created order. But recover it. Yeah, I think it's exactly right. What's missing in critical theory that you have in Orthodox biblical Christianity? Is there is a prefall realm? There's a prefall order. And there was a Camelot, right? There was a good created order before sin and that's been perverted. Now it's not completely perverted, right? There's still a goodness in creation in that sense. But the critical theorists have no. Marcusa floats with it interestingly. Marcusa floats with it of some pre, you know, these are term fall, I don't think, but a pre-sand or pre-problematic era. What ruins it from Marcusa is civilization. This is another insight is that from Marcusa and Adorno civilization or society isn't the realm in which we flourish. Isn't the realm in which we become who we're supposed to be with mom and dad and pastor and friends and siblings? That's the realm which perverts corrupts restraints, restricts us. And so it's an explicitly anti-Christian vision of things. So community or society or even work, labor is what hamper us. It keeps us from really experiencing the world and joy and freedom most fully. Now as Christians we can say after the fall, sorry, we can say after the fall work becomes more onerous or something. But there's work before the fall of the Christian world view. Sorry Lynn. Now that is coming straight out of marks. You know, marks says that something is in intrinsically oppressive. Freud's and sexual taboos are the source of civilization. So Wilhelm Reich, prior to Marcusa, just puts it together and says, okay, so the solution to get rid of oppression is to get rid of sexual taboos. I've a short sex on right. He's fascinating. Go ahead. Sorry. And so this creates what I call, I don't know if anybody else uses this terminology. They probably do, but it creates a Freudian Marxism. Yeah. Yeah. That's some Christopher Lash is known for his early, particularly his early works because he was coming out of the left and eventually found his way to kind of social conservatism. But I think one of the things that maybe is worth thinking about in this respect is again, the fact that none of this is really workable. I've known, so I grew up in a kind of bohemian environment. I was just with Matt Crawford, the guy who wrote shop class of soul craft and he grew up in a commune in Berkeley, California. And you won't find a more conservative guy than Matt Crawford. A lot of people come out of that world. They have enough of body of work to reflect on to say this is all a bunch of nonsense. And the language that they tend to use is a lot more scatological. Well, anyway, something to think about. Yeah. Thomas Soul says that the history of liberalism or I don't know what term he uses there, but it's replacing things that worked with things that sound good. And you've got these intellectual constructs that people develop that don't actually work. But when they promote them, they get them embedded through the long march through the institutions, they get them embedded in education, in media, in law, all of these kinds of things. And then when they don't work, they've got built in mechanisms to explain why it didn't work and what we've got to do is do it harder. Yeah, that's a great point. It's a great point. It's a sad, it's a, you know, a donor wrote a book called Negative Dialectic. So I think even he knew there was no culture building going on here, right? There's no building of a community and there, because community society is inherently restrictive, right? And inherently bad for a human person. And that sense, you know, if you want to pick on the Enlightenment once more, the solitary individual is still the heart of it in one sense, even though there are Marxists, because even Marx could say, hey, the goal is freedom for the solitary individual, even though it's done through a collective, et cetera. So the critical theorist around their own way is still modernist. And now in that sense, in one strand of it, we might say. So as we're coming to the conclusion of this episode, this was a fun conversation. Thanks for making the time for us, Brad. There are kind of takeaways that you'd like folks to have. Obviously, we'd love for them to go out and buy your book. If they go on the Amazon, it might not, what they might discover is that it's supposed to be released on the 31st, but apparently you can order it and still get it right away. But you can do it now. Yeah. But is there anything else that maybe you would like for us to kind of walk away with, maybe a message, not just a Christian, but to the church at large? Well, thank you, Chris. It is a pleasure to have been here. I would say when we engage in these various ideologies, the value of the internet age is you can have in seconds a variety of critiques and a variety of engagement. First thing, have confidence that the Christian worldview, the Christian theological vision of reality has a lot to say about all these things. And don't be afraid to think in explicitly biblical theological categories. Don't let our detractors kind of set the game, set the rules for how we have to think or speak. It's a-okay to think in explicitly biblical theological categories about the nature of reality. And I think at the end, we have to for Christians is to be Bible saturated and no church history and know something of Christian doctrine. And you don't have to be a scholar to be a thoughtful Christian, but to-don't be afraid to engage these various philosophies as a Christian in terms of a Christian biblical account of reality. That's probably the main thing I take away is have courage of your conviction as a Christian. And maybe secondly, related to that is don't be afraid to put your head up and say something because the emperor in one sense, the emperor has no clothes with critical theory. It is a depressing, you know, the forward written by Christopher Watkins, a very fine scholar and when I told him I wanted to write this book, he said, I'll be praying for you because it's dark stuff. So I'm kind of happy to have it done. So I wouldn't-I don't want to spend my life reading a door now for the next year, I'll have a long years of Lord gives me, but don't be afraid to stick your head up and say something because a lot of this stuff is pretty impressive, no clothes kind of stuff. That's great. Glenn, do you have anything that you'd like to leave listeners with as we wrap up? Yeah, just so in sort of practical idea to go along with with what Brad said, critical theory makes the claim that it is going to solve problems of equality and all of those kinds of things. And yet it's based on the premise that conflict is inevitable in society. There's always going to be a press, there's always going to be a press. It offers no hope. So the foundation of Christian anthropology is the image of God, which is something that's shared by all people, and therefore it actually ends up being a better foundation for building the kind of society that critical theorists claim they want to build, then their theory would allow for. That's nicely said, Glenn. That's very nicely said. Yep, yep. Okay, as we wrap up, there are going to be folks who want to follow you, Brad, or maybe keep up with what you're working on, is there a place to do that? Yeah, so I do have a website which I don't do much with, but just drag it to www.radlegeegreen.com. Go ahead and repeat that. You'll say, oh, you repeat the address there. Bradleygeegreen.com. And the website is a monument to my effort to be a luddied, because it's very old and very, but if I put stuff up, I'll put it there. And again, I'm headed to Southern, if folks want to consider studying there, but it's been great to be here. It's great. Chris and Glenn, love it, love it. Yeah, it's been great to have you. It's good to see you again, Brad. And by the way, this is not your only book. You've got some other books you've published. So if you go to Amazon, you'll see a list of books that Brad has written over the years. And they're good books and you should buy them. Thank you, thank you. Well, Chris, I can't wait to see your new book. And Glenn, I look forward to seeing you, Lord willing and Doxville. All right, well, great. And thank you for listening to Theology Podcast. You've gotten to the end of this episode. And if you'd like to help us out in our work, you can do that by becoming a patron. I just met a patron. This past Sunday came to my church, or here in Battleground. He lives down in Portland and made the trek up to actually see us in person. And I mentioned that he was a patron. And so I really, really was really pleased to meet him. If you'd like to join him, you can follow the link to our Patreon page. That's in the show notes. 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