A Critical Look at Critical Theory with Carl Trueman

Life and Books and Everything — Clearly Reformed

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A Critical Look at Critical Theory with Carl Trueman

October 16, 2024

Life and Books and EverythingClearly Reformed

In his new book To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse, Carl Trueman argues that “Critical theory [sees] any notion of human nature as merely an ideological or social construct, a function of discourses of power.” Even though critical theory makes for dense reading, and is probably very little read by people in the pew, the ideas and assumptions of critical theory have shaped our world in undeniable ways. Listen in as Kevin and Carl talk about what critical theory is, where it came from, and how the church can provide a better, truer, and more beautiful alternative.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro & Sponsors

4:48 What Kind of Historian Are You?

9:03 Why Talk About These Things?

24:23 The Critical Question

46:04 Sponsor Break

47:46 How Do These Ideas Shape Christians?

1:02:43 Closing Questions

1:13:18 Until Next Time….

Books & Everything:

ESV Men's Study Bible

Here We Stand

Puritan Treasures for Today

Westminster Theological Seminary Biblical Language Certificate

To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse

From Frankfurt to Fox: The Strange Career of Critical Theory

Transcript

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Greetings and salutations. Welcome back to Life and Books and Everything. I'm Kevin Young, Senior Pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina.

Right next door to Charlotte and I am joined today by my special guest and good friend. People throw those words around, but Carl actually is a friend. I'm glad to say.

So Carl, glad to have you back and the two of us were just hanging out. It's not quite the right word, but we're just together in Savannah with a whole bunch of other people over the weekend at a reformed worship conference. So we could have done this then, but I didn't bring a camera or it's actually become easier.

I'm sure you have something to say about this technologically. It's actually become easier to do these things at a distance in front of a computer. It's certainly more convenient a lot of the time.

So no disagreement there. All right, we are talking about Carl's new book called to change all worlds critical theory from marks to mark use. And here's the book published by B and H just came out.

I have lots of tags there really enjoyed reading it in lots of questions and we'll see how many we can get to. I want to back into this, Carl, with a little bit of biography that I feel like I should know, but I can't recall. So I know you did your PhD at Aberdeen, correct? Yeah, I did.

Yeah. What was your dissertation on and who was your supervisor? My supervisor was W.P. Stevens, the Zwingley scholar. And my dissertation, the title was the Soteriology of the Early English Reformers, 1525 to 1556.

And I looked at patterns and understanding of salvation in the early English Reformation, looking at five early English Reformers. Looking particularly at how they had interacted with modified and adapted a continental understanding of Protestant things of justification and the election, how those things had fed into the English Reformation world. So when I did my doctoral work at Lester and thank you for the recommendation for John Coffey, you were the one who one of the people in that direction and it was great working with John.

One of the things that was really valuable that I learned, I had, you know, I went in, okay, I'm going to study John Witherspoon. I had read the complete works, which isn't as much as, you know, somebody like Luther or Calvin, but four big volumes. But I just had in my mind, yeah, I'm going to write about here are the things he said, here are his ideas.

And that was some of what I did, but John was really good at steering me. Okay, that's, that's an intellectual history. And that's interesting and important.

And there's some, but there was, there was quite a bit of that already. And he pushed me to say, why don't you focus on his Scottish career. There's not as much about that as about what he says in his philosophical work in America.

And so I really enjoyed trying to do some more of the cultural history and biography and social history, and even just to be introduced to those categories. I've heard you say you're an intellectual historian. And yet I've heard you lecturing enough to know you believe that technology, for example, is very shaping as a historical contingency.

So what kind of historian are you Carl and how do you put all of those different approaches to history together in a book like this? Yeah, it's a good question. I think the old term for my kind of history would have been history of ideas. And that's generally rejected these days, because what that tends to do is, is abstract the ideas from the historical context.

And also tends to make history a history of, of the great thinkers. So all you ever look at are the great thinkers of history, how Plato shaped Aristotle, how can shape so and so, whereas the kind of history that I do and the kind of history that you do care in is much more rooted in understanding that there is ideas cannot be abstracted from their context, not simply anyway. And it's interesting you mentioned John Coffey.

I think John Coffey's book on Samuel Rutherford is a great example of the kind of intellectual history to which I aspire. And John was quite influenced, as I've been myself, by the writings of Quentin Skinner, the professor of history at Cambridge. And Skinner's an interesting character because he's both well trained in history and in philosophy.

And he wrote a very influential essay, I think in the late 60s, meaning and understanding in the history of ideas, where he really reorients the reader to thinking about ideas as actions, that he's building on speech act theory and saying when you write something or when you say something, one way of thinking about that is that you're doing something and actions always arise from a broader context. They arise from the framework of possibilities that you have. They connect to the technology that's available.

They connect to not simply, we might say, the great tradition of the great and the good of the past, but even to relatively minor thinkers of the present, we all exist in this sort of ferment. So, to circle back to the question, what sort of history do I do? I do intellectual history, but I'm always asking that question, well, why does this person say this in this way at this particular point in time to this particular group of people? What resources do they have? What are they hoping to achieve? So it's that kind of question that I'm asking, which inevitably means one has to address the material conditions of life as well as the great books that you sit in the library and read. That's a great answer.

And, you know, I'm with you on, it's not an either or to both and the books do matter. There are great books. There are great thinkers.

And yet, as you said, maybe an older historiography just would trace this great book and then this next book and then this next book and here we are to the present. And then, you know, some of the social historians, it doesn't matter. Just tell me what the price of fish was in the market and that was determining everything about these ideas.

I lead with that question because I could see someone reading this book saying, oh, well, that's very interesting and erudite and Marx and Mark Hughes and putting myself in the shoes of an evangelical Christian. I say I'm an evangelical Christian, but I've heard this and so have you before, especially around these ideas of critical theory, someone will say, especially if you're warning the church with some of these ideas will say, oh, come on. There's not a single person in my church that has ever heard of Mark Hughes, let alone read him and the jab there sort of is, why are we talking about these things? Nobody's reading these.

Shouldn't we be talking about much more important or warning against Christian nationalism or some other thing? So what is the motivation for talking about these things when someone might say, these are a bunch of ideas from, you know, dead Germans or dead Frenchmen and just let their ideas stay dead because nobody reads them anymore? Yeah. Well, a couple of responses to that. One, of course, is that the book was, I didn't plan to write the book.

I was approached by B&H, the publisher, you know, I think 2021, 2022. And they said, hey, there's so much ferment about critical theory in the church, particularly critical race theory. We would like a book that would help people understand what's at stake.

So I first saw a little bit of pushback, I suppose, on that question is, certainly in 2021, 2022, critical theory was one of the biggest things around. You know, the Southern Baptist Convention was feeling the need to debate an opine on critical race theory, which up until a few years previously had been an obscure legal discipline confined essentially to university departments. So there is that dimension to it, but I think the broader question is, you know, one of the relevance of these writers is often quite a lot of things that begin as intellectual ideas resonate with the culture in which they're expressed, and can become almost the unconscious intuitions of the way people think.

It goes back to Charles Taylor's concept of the social imaginary that I've used many, many times. Taylor makes the point that the way we relate to the world, the way we imagine ourselves, the way we think of ourselves in relation to other people is very rarely the result of an argument we've read and being convinced by. It's much more diffuse and much more complicated than that.

It's more intuitive. But the problem with intuitions is you're not even conscious. They're there most of the time.

They just seem to be natural. And so exploring the nature of certain intuitions and finding out that actually, if we look at a thinker who is very self conscious about what we assume to be intuitive, we can see much more clearly the implications of the ideas. Then we can ourselves.

It's not a critical theory thing, but take marriage, for example. We might, you know, we might watch binge watch Will and Grace and intuitively come to think that, hey, gay marriage is great and it makes people happy. And that's just the way our imaginations have been shaped without realizing that actually the fundamental redefinition of marriage in say no fault divorce, gay marriage, et cetera.

Keep implications beyond that. Hey, it just seems good. So what I wanted to do in this book was look at the origins, the foundations of the various schools of critical theory.

In order to make the reader aware of what's at stake, what's really being claimed here at a more than just intuitively injustice sounds bad. I should be opposed to it kind of idea. And what you said there about intuition is absolutely true and the Will and Grace have never actually seen an episode of Will and Grace.

I hope not to. But yes, that is one of the classic examples. And it seems to me, people on the left were much more attuned to this, meaning they understood.

They want representation. And so there needs to be a certain multicultural matrix diversity matrix representation that we need to see people like us. And I think we can acknowledge in a simplistic way, there's something to that.

And I think we could, you know, say, Oh, sure, sure, I bet for a long time. You know, you wouldn't think twice for a lot of years. Here's your college brochure.

Oh, and it's a bunch of white people that all sort of look the same. And you might not realize, well, what does that say to someone? And then, you know, people, I think, have pushed that. You know, common sense insight a bit far and it becomes mere tokenism.

But there's an understanding there that all of that shapes what seems to be normal. I remember when years ago, and I wouldn't be sending my kids to the, you know, probably to most public schools today, though there's a variety of them. But when my kids were in the public school.

And I was on the sex education committee because the state of Michigan had this law that was still there that you had to have a clergy on the sex education committee for the school district, which is bizarre. And somebody sort of secretly nudged me knowing I was a conservative because usually no conservative volunteers for that. But one of the things that kept coming up was, you know, we, we need to show representation.

We need everyone, you know, a family who has two moms or two dads or a Buddhist in the community. We need all of our materials and math story problems to represent them, which sounded like a, you know, a foolproof argument. But what they can never answer is, okay, how many of those examples ever have church going Christians? How many of you know, you don't, you don't do something with a family of, you know, nine children, so that I can feel represented.

It's a very certain slice that needs to be represented. Tell me if I'm right or wrong. Is that kind of thinking part and parcel of some of the critical theory? It is though.

It would need some qualification. I think certainly, and we would all acknowledge to extend the truth of what you said, you know, about representation. I remember coming to the States in 2001, and for many years, it struck me as interesting that I saw more gay couples on the TV than I saw mixed race couples.

And I'm sort of, that's odd. I know quite a few mixed race couples. At that point, I didn't know any gay couples at all.

And so this is interesting. So I think that the issue of representation is one that we should all be interested in and concerned about. I think the key with critical theory is to realize that the representation, it's not an attempt to reflect reality as we find it.

It's an attempt to transform reality. So the reason why you and your wife and your nine children don't get represented is the critical theorist would have no interest in representing that. Because that would seem to indicate that traditional marriage, having lots of kids, wife being a mother to nine, that that's a desirable thing for society to have.

So with the critical theoretical approach to things, it's not a question of reflecting reality. That's what the critical theorists would sort of call, that's more akin to what traditional theory, which is a way of explaining what is. Critical theory is designed to transform what is into what it should be.

And so what you want to do, you know, if you're a critical theorist, what you want to do in terms of representation, is give a vision of utopia. Or if you can't do that, because of course, as we don't live in utopia, it's impossible to conceptualize, do something that shakes the foundations of societies, it's currently constituted. So, for example, you don't press for gay marriage so much because you think it's just fair that gay people should be married, you press for gay marriage, that would be the sort of Andrew Sullivan kind of taken.

Oh, we have gay marriage so that we can bring gay couples into a conservative institution. No, from a critical theoretical perspective. You dismantle marriage and you press for gay marriage because you want to destroy marriage in order to clear the ground for something better.

So it's not just about representation, it's about a deliberately loaded form of representation designed to achieve minimally the destruction of the system as it currently exists. So let's jump in, you've already given us a good segue there because I have lots of things that won't get to all of them about critical theory. One of the things you make clear is though the big conversation point was critical race theory, and I have to tell you, even to this day when I see CRT, I'm not sure if they're talking about Karl R. Truman or critical race.

There was a great headline in the student newspaper and the president of Grove had been interviewed by a critical race there. And the headline said, President McNulty says, there is no place for CRT in the classroom at Groves City College. My favorite headline of all time.

I know, it's appropriate. So right from the beginning, here on page five, you talk about human nature, and I think this is, I'm not really well read on critical theory. So I feel like I've imbibed some things and try to understand some of it, but this was a good insight for me because you talk frequently in here about how they have no place for human nature.

Early critical theorists would thus the accounts of, quote, human nature as attempts to grant some kind of absolute authority to the contingent moral vision of a particular time or society. So explain why was it so important to critical theorists to do away with a traditional Christian or even just Western idea of human nature. Yeah, well, the simple answer to that is that human nature is what the critical is where human nature is what the dominant class think it is.

And they impose that upon everybody in order to make normative and normal the structure of society as it currently exists. So that's the sort of the straightforward statement. The philosophical background to that is the early critical theorists that I deal with in the book, the really the early Frankfurt school guys, very influenced by Hegel and Marx.

But Marx read through a Hegelian lens, Hegel is the 19th century, 18th to 19th century philosopher and very much the philosopher of change. For Hegel, we might almost say that human nature is something to be realized in the future. Society is changing what he calls spirit is emerging through the historical process.

And at the end of history, then we will finally see what the ideal society, what the ideal of human nature is. So these critical Marxists, critical Hegelian Marxists are really arguing that, okay, we have, how do we define human nature? Well, typically we define it in terms of the kind of behaviors that we are to engage in and the kind of ends that we have. Well, they would say those ends, let's say that exist in 19th century industrial Britain, work hard, be sober, be a faithful husband, don't cause trouble for your neighbor.

All of these ends, they would say they're not actually intrinsic to human nature. They serve the needs of industrial capitalist society. We want well-behaved people who do as they're told in the workplace and keep their households organized so that society doesn't descend into chaos.

What we do in order to make that a pungent and powerful is we say, that's human nature. Behaving like that is actually what it means to be a human so that if somebody doesn't behave like that, we develop ways of punishing them, for example. Some guy is sleeping with lots of different women and getting all of these other women, not his wife pregnant, we're going to sanction him in some way.

In an earlier age, maybe you'd have gone to prison, maybe today we'll shun him, maybe we'll refuse to employ him. There are ways of enforcing that. So human nature is the sort of way of, in some ways, nature might put it this way.

Human nature substitutes for God in some ways, becomes this kind of authority. One of the central books of early critical theory is written by a pair of quite brilliant thinkers, I think. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno and it's the dialectic of enlightenment.

And this book is really a long discussion about nature. But what's interesting is they never define nature. And that's not that they just forgot and woke up, the book was published, oh my goodness, we forgot to define nature.

And we talked about it for 250 pages. They don't define it because the underlying point is, you can't define it. Nature is what a given society at a given point in time wants it to be in order to justify the status quo of that society.

And I suppose that the central point of my argument against all forms of critical theory, particularly relative to how Christians should interact with it, is that at its core, it rejects the idea of human nature. But the core human nature doesn't have that given transhistorical moral shape that I think the Bible says it does have. I just want to underscore that point because somebody listening to this who finds critical theory very confusing and I find elements of it very confusing it's hard to keep track of all these things.

And yet that's a point that we can understand and we need to use as we talk to people or even as we just think to ourselves we're constantly asking that question how did we get here. And there's a lot of answers to that but this is a key point, which you said about nature because if you have human nature in a Christian way immediately that tells you, well there's some aughts to life there's some things that are imposed upon us because it's our nature. And as I've heard you just even over the weekend lecture about the body for most of human history, the body would have, we just would have understood, we would have assumed there are of course limitations that are put upon me in my body.

And if you thought you were a man trapped in a woman's body or vice versa, as you said any doctor would have said well that's a problem with the mind you're not thinking about something correctly. So human nature is tied to all of this because once you can blow up a Christian concept of human nature, then there's no to use the postmodern lingo there's no meta narrative about us as as human beings there's no constraint. You say here on 23 it's related to this self consciousness and you're talking about Hegel.

Self consciousness is shaped by the social environment in which we find ourselves what it means to be a person is defined by the network of relationship and roles within which we are set. The critical question thus becomes the extent to which those relationships institutions communal practices and expectations forces into roles and identities that hinder us from flourishing. So say more about that because there are elements in that description we would agree with we are shaped by our roles and institutions.

And yet what are the critical theorists saying there from Hegel? Yeah well first of all just as an observation on Hegel you know it's interesting that Hegel's philosophy really becomes powerful in the in the first half of the 19th century, which is a time of great going back to one of my earlier answers you know it's a time of great change. Now Marx and Engels put their finger on this in the Communist Manifesto all that is solid melts into air in a world where industrialization is is shattering all the old norms patterns of behavior transforming communities. A philosophy of change becomes very very plausible in a way we were talking over the weekend if you lived in the 13th century where nothing changes in the space of a hundred years really.

It's very hard to believe that the world is a world of flux and very easy to believe that everything is set in place. What happens I think when you've got the you know and really begins to emerge with with Marx in the 1840s is once you cotton on to this idea that the way the world is is not the way the world has to be. And that the way the world is shapes us in the way we are and then when you look around the world and think man there's a lot of suffering in this world and a lot of things going wrong.

The obvious next move is so given that everything can change it should be changed. We need to tinker with the structures of society or we need to overthrow them and transform them entirely as a way of allowing human beings to finally realize who they are. Now Hegel does this through what's often referred to as a sort of Hegelian dialectic.

I need to ask you that's the thing that somebody in a Western Civ class learns thesis antithesis synthesis. How does that play into these ideas? Well when you think about first of all the whole point of dialectic is that we might say you know things change over time. And I might give a simple example I think we're both married think of our marriages you know we I've been married 34 years you've been married 22 long enough to have nine children at least we know that.

So you know what marriage means on day one to you is not what it means after 22 years and nine children. Marriage on day one is not what it means to me after 34 years the meaning of marriage changes as our interactions with our wives and their interaction with a transform. So one thing dialectics points to is the idea that to understand what you know to understand what a marriage means you've actually got to go to the particular situation and see you can't simply take the word in the abstract.

You have to look at the interactions in history that are going on at a particular point to define a certain term. Now secondly Hegel and Marx following him think history has a direction that history is on the move and there is a logic to it. So in Hegel you can imagine a thought experiment you can say when people first get together let's say they organize themselves as a society and they have one strong man who rules them and he's the dictator and everything he says goes.

Well that ultimately proves to be a problem it may work for a while but after a while people realize that that's inhibiting they are individuals they have personal desires and intentions and having the one man in charge inhibits them. So they rise up in rebellion they overthrow the dictator and they establish an egalitarian commune where there is no king in Israel and everybody does what is right in their own eyes. Well after a while the downside of that becomes patently obvious and you know it leads to anarchy it leads to chaos and so you have a third form of social organization emerging we might say representative democracy where the needs of the one with the design and the needs and desires of the many are kind of balanced and regulated and Hegel would sort of point to that we might do a healing thing say that's how history works.

There's a sort of proposal we organize ourselves in accordance with that it doesn't quite work there's a reaction. And finally there is a resolution that brings the best of both worlds together and eliminates the worst. Now in Marx you get it moving into the economic sphere.

You have these shifts in economies and the final stage before utopia is the capitalist stage and what happens in capitalism is it slowly but surely the wealth of a nation gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. This creates catastrophic suffering for those who are actually producing the wealth and finally the whole thing will collapse and form a communist utopia. And that's where the critical theorists come in because what they're wanting how do we get from late capitalism to the communist utopia.

I've always wondered this is a bit of a side question but Marx. You know, Marx was not in his lifetime a very likable person. I wouldn't say, you know, Ingalls had to constantly give him money Ingalls did a lot of the intellectual work that Marx is credited with.

And Marx was not probably a great guy to have at parties. And then some of the later people here in the 20th century I mean just have positively just weird perverse sexual fetishes of their own. Do these character flaws sins we would say as Christians did they inhibit the reception of their ideas or are they just not unknown because they don't have or they're not known because they don't have Twitter or the ideas just percolate and become influential later when no one cares.

It just seems like on some level wouldn't some people say well that guy's really a weird and a big jerk. Yeah, it is interesting. I think there are probably a couple of things at play here.

One is of course some people embrace the perversion that that iconoclasm. It's interesting that Wilhelm Reich who's one of the, well that's what I was thinking. The more in some ways, you know he writes his major works in the 1930s he dies in the 50s.

His work is not embraced until the 60s when the kind of iconoclastic sexual a morality that he's proposing resonates with a rising generation particularly the the generation of 1968 student rebellion. So there is a sense in which to quote Nietzsche's madman Wilhelm Reich came too early. His time was not yet.

He wrote in the 30s but his time came post-mortem in the 60s. Same a bit with Marx. When Marx is buried in 1883 in Highgate Cemetery, Engels makes the speech and effectively says you know nobody's heard of this guy but everybody will have heard of him in 50 years time.

Well that takes you up to the 1930s. That's pretty much he's the most famous man in the world in the 1930s. So there is an element of time lag.

There's an element of embracing the iconoclastic perversions. I think there's also an element of benefit of clergy to quote George Orwell's famous essay on Salvador Dali. Why do we not hold Salvador Dali to account for his perversions? It's because he's a great artist and we cut artists slack.

And I think there's an element of that in certainly in the sort of philosophical world relative to great intellectuals that these critical theorists were certainly the first generation or two of critical theorists were immensely impressive intellectuals. One of the sort of half jokes I make at the start of the book is I want to write on critical race theory because frankly I don't rate critical race theorists as being particularly intellectually impressive. Whereas you know you take a character like Marcuse or Adorno or Hawkeye and you may radically disagree with their philosophy but man are these guys read the Western canon of philosophy.

They knew that which they rejected. They knew that which they appropriated. These were not insubstantial.

This was not just bumper stickers. No. An okay.

You know, Marcuse was a bit of a creep as well. I think Adorno and Hawkeye lived relatively upright respectable lives. You know, the sort of the weirdness doesn't apply to them.

But they were substantial intellectuals in a way that sort of Picasso is a substantial artist. You know, I don't look at Picasso's paintings in order to think, hey, I want to go off and live like Picasso. But it's impossible to appreciate modern art without going through Picasso.

And I think it's impossible to understand what's going on politically in our world today without going through. The most brilliance of the critical theorists in the early 20th century. Here at one point you're giving something of a summary.

You say, now if those ways of thinking can themselves be challenged and overthrown, then the societies committed to them can also be changed in revolutionary ways. Therefore, the critique of ideology, the exposure, for example, of its inner contradictions or failures to account for all reality is in and of itself transformative and revolutionary. You can unpack that.

But my particular angle to this question is with that word revolutionary, which is certainly right here with these critical theorists and certainly with marks. You know, sometimes I hear even Christians or people on the right today who will throw around the word revolution. Now, I know we had an American revolution, but I don't, I'm trying to think here.

I don't recall people in that intellectual movement advocating the cause, as they called it in 1776, calling it a revolution. I think they thought they were restoring their rights as Englishmen that they had. Magna Carta, yes.

Magna Carta and the Parliament and, you know, certainly new philosophical ideas from Locke and from the Enlightenment. But what about that word revolution? Is that a word that Christians ought to use cautiously or perhaps not at all? Yeah, well, I mean, like all words, it has a semantic range and it's used in different ways. We could talk about the industrial revolution, which was a way in which production, production of goods, was dramatically transformed.

We could talk about. Digital revolution. Digital revolution, the Copernican revolution in science.

I think when we're thinking about talking about revolution as critical theorists, think about it. We're thinking about what the great Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce. He's got a great essay actually on different meanings of revolution.

And del Noce argues that what Marxists are proposing is what he calls total revolution. Now, total revolution is, you know, essentially summoned up against everything that is. It is the revolution of permanent turmoil.

You know, I'm happy talking about the American revolution. Yeah. But as you say, it's not a desire to overthrow everything.

It's a desire maybe to recover something from the past or to re-pristinate something or to bring out the full implications of something that was done in the past. It is a revolution that at some level has continuity, which that has gone before. We might say there's a metaphysical continuity there in the understanding of what it means to be human.

Whereas the critical theorists are arguing for a total revolution goes back to the question of human nature. It's not that they want to take hold of human nature and tweak it and improve it and make it better than it is. Who would disagree with that? It's that they want to overthrow entirely what human nature has been thought of as being in order to replace it.

It's why, you know, for example, one of the characters I deal with, one of the sort of precursors to critical theory really a Hungarian thinker, George Lukas. Lukas talking about truth. Well, who's opposed to truth? We want truth.

Well, except Lukas would say, but the truth isn't what you think it is. You know, two plus two equals four is that's not the truth as Lukas is thinking about. What's the truth as far as Lukas is thinking about? Yeah, we want truth.

Truth is that which transforms us and gets us towards utopia. So, for example, think about the 1619 project in America. One of the things I think that conservatives didn't, some conservatives didn't understand about that project was pointing out that it's historically problematic, if not wrong, are many, many key points is beside the point.

The point of the project, the truth of the project from a critical theoretical perspective does not lie in its historical referentiality or plausibility. The truth of it lies in it destabilizing a racist system and helping bring us into a post-racist utopia. That's where the truth of it lies.

So, you know, going back to revolution, revolution is not designed to recover the truth or to uncover the truth that's there. Revolution is designed to transform everything in order to reach that truth which is always deferred to the future at this particular point in time. Yeah, I've a really important question that I want you to riff on.

In page 80, you talk about this, the socially constructed nature of reality, the manipulative nature of truth claims. And then you say, just what you said here, the purpose of theory is not so much to describe the status quo as to destabilize it. So my question is, do you think there are some people, because this is typically a movement associated with the left? Are there people on the right who are quite anti-progressive politics, quite anti-woke in all sorts of ways, may even fancy themselves custodians of the Western tradition, and yet, you know, I'm leading you to what I think.

But it seems to me that they have imbibed some of this, you know, there's a grander truth, there's a poetic truth to it, which is the language that Shelby Steele would use about some of the anti-racism. There's a poetic truth to it, and so even if it's not really accurate, or even if sometimes we are knowingly saying things that aren't really true. There's a bigger truth, and if you don't know what time it is, you don't understand that what we need to do now is destabilize this rank world that is so feminized and all the other things.

So I'm leading you, you can feel free to disagree, but to what degree is this kind of critical impulse evident now on the right? Yeah, I think the last two or three years, we've definitely seen an embrace of critical theoretical principles on the right. I cannot remember the author, but there is an excellent article in Hedgehog Review. I'll send you the link, Kevin.

So if you want to, when you post the podcast, you can put a link to this article written by somebody, I think somebody on the left expressing sort of why on earth a sort of our critical theory, guys, suddenly popping up on the right. I mean, on a casual level, I would say almost every political commercial you see, right or left, casually engages in this kind of thing, you know, that it's not a question of being fairly and accurately representing your opponent's view. It's a point of you grab the soundbite and you know that it doesn't mean what you are claiming it means, but you stuck it down there.

I think Twitter is a great example. Everybody knows that the game on X is not the establishment of truth. The game on X is to smear somebody else or to big yourself up.

It's not a medium that incentivizes truth. It's a medium that incentivizes untruth. I think we had a great example on the right recently with all of the stuff that was coming out of Ohio and Haitians eating pets, et cetera, et cetera.

I didn't follow it in its entirety, but I did read a tweet by a fairly big politician who will remain nameless, essentially saying that, well, okay, it wasn't entirely true. Maybe a lot of it didn't happen, but it got the discussion going in the right direction. It got the discussion going.

And I remember saying to somebody when I saw it, I said, that's exactly what a critical theorist would say about the 1619 project. And with the measure you measure it out, it will be measured back to you. And if you're a conservative and you want to engage in critical theory stuff, then you're engaged in a raw power struggle where truth doesn't count and you have chosen the game that you were playing at this point.

And again, circling back to the Christian dimension of this, I don't think that's an option for a Christian. I don't think Paul would say, it's okay if you lie in your preaching as long as people come to love Jesus. No, Paul rejects underhand ways.

He rejects trickery. So I think Christians need to be in particular very, very careful with how they dabble in this stuff and very, very careful with the media they use that may well incentivize them intuitively to tilt this way in a way that I think will be lethal in the long run, maybe for their souls and certainly for society. What would you say to someone who says, well, that all sounds nice and you can write books and talk about these things.

But look, we are in an existential moment in this country or in Western civilization. And we're past the point where you just make nice rational arguments and the other side considers them. They're not good faith actors at all.

The other side has been doing this for years. And you can go ahead and have your high-minded values and logic and rationality and go ahead and you're going to completely lose the war. Or you can realize that you have to fight with the same tools that they do.

Yeah, well, you know, we need to transform Hollywood to transform America. And you can't get to the top in Hollywood without sleeping with every director and producer in town. So, man, as a Christian, you just got to sleep with every producer and director in town to get yourself that big film contract.

When it's put that way, we know it's complete bologna. We know it's complete bologna. And nothing makes me more furious than so-called Christians.

Denouncing new testament principles of how Christians should behave in the aim of some short-term political goal. What does it profit a man if he wins the whole world and loses his soul? Yeah, to me, this is an absolute no-brainer. And the fact that there are those who don't seem to see that within the church indicates to me just how deeply embedded in the world the church has now become.

You know, it's like the move from Genesis 19 to Judges 19, Sodom Gomorrah is not out there anymore. It's right in here at this point in time. Yes, okay, so being a Christian means we're going to suffer.

Man, they're going to crucify us if we behave like Christians. Well, guess what? They crucified somebody else just about 2,000 years ago who refused to play the critical theoretical game in order to win political power in his life. This day and generation.

And that was in a country occupied by a foreign oppressive force. So I would say to people who argue that way, you need a repent. Simple as that.

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But from right where you are, without having to leave home, it's a great opportunity to work through this certificate program for learning biblical Greek and Hebrew from Westminster Theological Seminary. When I was preaching through Revelation in the last year and it come to the two beasts and one represents the perversion of the state and the other one the perversion of religion. And at the end of the appearance of both of those beasts, there's, there's a call for some kind of action.

And it's striking what those two calls are one says with the false state. This calls for the patient endurance of the saints and the false religion is this calls for wisdom. Now I understand there's an extreme of some Christians that.

Oh, if Constantine had never happened and wouldn't it be wonderful if we were persecuted and to call it the anabaptist option is probably not fair to anabaptist but that that's sort of how people. Think of it. So, yes, yes, be engaged in the political process.

Yes, politics is is a messy business. And yet what you said is absolutely true and it seems that we've in the name of sometimes giving quote unquote Christian commentary. It's not very deeply Christian at all, because the Bible tells us sometimes the thing that you must do in your political defiance is to patiently endure, or this one comes out only by prayer and fasting.

And all of those weapons and they are weapons of the New Testament Christian have been truncated into just one thing, which is, you know, when this political contest now and at all costs and it's incredibly shortsighted and I don't even think it's the best way to try to win what many of these people are trying to win. And it seems to me that it is downstream whether they realize it or not from so many of these critical ideas about truth about destabilizing society. How do you think some of these ideas, especially with the later, you know, full on critical theorists have come to shape Christians, you know, left or right, just have come to shape the use Taylor's term, the social imaginary of Christians.

Well, first of all, just so you haven't asked the question, Kevin, but you did mention prayer and fasting then I would lay out one challenge to those who spend their days tweeting about this stuff. Do you spend as long time praying for the civil magistrate praying for the transformation of society as you do ranting and tweeting about it. If you don't, I suggest you change the priorities in your political approach because this is a spiritual battle and the weapons ultimately therefore are spiritual weapons.

And we know from the Psalms that the Lord can sweep away his enemies in an instant without our help. Now, the extent to which critical theoretical things have percolated into the church, it's hard to judge. I think a lot of the the who are in 21, 22 about critical race theory, it played out on Twitter and it generally played out among a lot of people who I don't think had ever read any of the great texts of critical theory.

So, critical theory became a sort of shimileth then, you know, euphoria or you're against it. So, I'm not inclined to take the frequency of references to critical race theory on Twitter, for example, as a sign that the church has self consciously sold out to this approach. I think we need to be careful that we don't allow, I'm actually going to be writing a piece on this just in the next day or two.

And I'm thinking about the Calvinist notion of total depravity and the principles of critical theory. And there are points of contact there in that a Calvinist, you know, you and I are always going to say even our best actions are always tainted somewhat by sin. My wife and I love having students ramp hospitality, but I'd be lying if I said the only reason we have students ramp hospitality is pure altruism.

We get a kick out of it. We enjoy it. We get some fun out of it.

And, you know, there are always some students you enjoy having around more than others. You know, it's not a totally disinterested, purely righteous thing. And when you look at, say, somebody like Jacques Derrida, a deconstructionist on hospitality, you know, he'll make these interesting comments about, well, you know, the thing about hospitality is, you're actually reminding somebody that you own the house, the fact that you're able to give them your largesse.

You're in a position of power. Because you're in a position, and as a Calvinist, I want to say, you know, I think he's on to something there. There is an element of that.

But what I'm going to differ is this. I'm not going to reduce it to that. And I think one of the things that I've found most worrying in Christian circles, the last few years, has been the absolute reduction of people to pawns in a power game.

The drying up of gratitude for those people with whom we happen to disagree with at certain points in the church. I'm not saying that's the result, the impact of critical theory. But again, to circle back to the very first answer I gave on the nature of history, it's a pathology of the culture in which we live and the kind of culture in which critical theory thrives.

Just because you disagree with the guys, say, on church and state doesn't mean that you can then trash him as this, that or the other, when that man may have given 40, 50 years of his life, sacrificially, to serve Christ's body. You do it perfectly. No, I'm not talking about John Piper, I'm just about hypothetical person.

No, but none of us ever have done. But we should be grateful for that. And I worry that the, what I would call the relentless and unconditional cynicism of a world where critical theory thrives in a way which critical theory embodies is making its way into the church.

And again, that's not a right-left comment. That's across the political spectrum. I see in gratitude, I see the cynicism where everything is reduced to, well, so-and-so does that because it bigs him up.

So-and-so does that because it gets him power. So-and-so does that because he wants to manipulate. No, I think the Bible presents a much more complex view of fallen human nature than is typically found in our culture today or in critical theory.

I think especially as Christians, we need to be cautious about the why arguments, especially dealing with things in the immediacy. It's not that we can't ever make them. Sometimes you do have evidence to suggest this person is doing this because they're grasping after power or because they want money or they're in cahoots with some cabal.

And yet it's too easy to make those argument and it allows people to not make the what argument in the actual intellectual argument. And they just quickly assume you and I am sure have been on the receiving into those well. We know why they're saying this.

It's because of this. They've got a window into my soul of why I'm doing the things that I'm doing rather than taking at face value. And really treating one another as Christ tells us to treat each other as we would want to be treated.

How would we want someone? That doesn't mean we can't be critical. You've written a book about critical theory in which you're critical of these people, but doing our best to try to understand what did they mean? Where can we try to find some insights? Which leads me to one of the things, I know which is maybe ten minutes left, that you talk a lot about in the second half of the book. And that's this saying that was really going around a lot, 20, 21, 22, critical theory.

We're going to eat the meat, spit out the bones. What might be true about that and what's mainly not helpful about it? Of course, you can't do that because critical theory is not traditional theory. It's not like, okay, take a tradition of this.

Immanuel Kant, who's sort of describing and explaining the world, the human mind. One could look at Kant and say, there are elements of Kant that I think are very helpful. And we can eat the meat and leave the bones behind.

When you come to critical theory, it's much more difficult to make that claim because critical theory is, by intention, not descriptive and analytical. It's revolutionary. It goes to the Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach, which is actually engraved at the bottom of his rather magnificent tomb in Highgate Cemetery.

The philosophers have up until now only described the world. The point is to change it. That's a key moment.

Marx in some ways sees that as bringing to an end Western philosophy and starting in new trajectory. So I think we need to realize that as soon as you start grabbing the bits of critical theory you like and leaving the revolutionary program behind, you're actually turning critical theory into traditional theory, and you're not using critical theory as a tool at all. You're doing traditional theory.

So who would argue that the media shaped the way we think? It's intuitive now. We know that. But that doesn't, you can believe that, doesn't make you a critical theorist.

It makes you critical of the media, but it doesn't make you a critical theorist because critical theory is tied towards a sort of eschatology of some kind. Having said that, the way I think that I suggest in the book that Christians might like to think about critical theories, think of it a little bit like you think about Christian heresies. Think about arianism, fourth century.

Arianism. I always say to students when I'm teaching churches, whenever we come across a heresy, it's always good to ask what question, what legitimate question is being asked here? Well, what legitimate question is being asked by arianism? How do we understand the relationship with the father and the son? We might say that the Arian crisis is helpful because it focuses the church's mind on that issue, and it gives birth to a series of categories and concepts that allow the church to pass that issue in a way that's faithful to scripture. But I would never say arianism is a useful tool.

You're going to eat the meat of arianism spit out the bones. Eat the meat. You're not going to do that.

But you're going to say the specific question it asks, it raises a question that I might have missed otherwise. So, when I read critical theory myself, I'm thinking, for example, I used the example earlier of Adorno and Hawkeye, a dialectical enlightenment. When some of you are, they're talking about nature, but they never define nature.

That makes me think, hmm, that's interesting. That's disturbing to me because it makes me think, I'm assuming too easy a definition of nature. Maybe there are under something here that nature is something that we think about in time and space and doesn't exist as a sort of accessible ideal somewhere out there.

So, my thinking on critical theory is, raises interesting questions. Think about gender theory. Think about Judith Butler.

What useful question lies behind gender theory, which of course ultimately undergirds intellectually the transgender movement, Butler on one level is asking an interesting question, why do male and female roles change over time? If you define woman in terms of, well, she's the person who stays at home nine to five and cooks dinner for dad when he gets back from the office. You've actually defined woman in a way that could only really have existed, say between the 1950s and the 1970s. So, you haven't really defined woman at all.

So, even gender theory throws up interesting challenges that make us think, okay, that question, what is a woman? I've got to think about it a lot harder having read gender theory, not because I'm going to eat the meat of gender theory and throw away the bones, but because the weaknesses in my own position have been exposed by these critical sallies against my position that make me think ultimately, hopefully, more clearly and more sharply about it. And that's why you and I both know and admire Abigail Favale, her work. She is a woman who's read very deeply in gender theory, and that's what makes her Christian understanding of what it means to be a woman so much more powerful, because she's been probed at every point by the critical theoretical framework of gender theory.

And she knows what of her intuitions about being a woman simply don't hold water. They're part of being an American in the 21st century. And what actually stand the test of time and point to something essential? The connection, the analogy there with with heresy is really helpful because there's a book, forget the author of it now, it's a short little book I read years ago, our debt to heresy, which is just making that point, heresy has helped sharpen the church's understanding.

But we wouldn't talk about, and here's how in your Sunday school class, you can pull a little from Arias. Yeah. And you can pull some from the story us and is from so sinious.

Here's some some great heretics who can really help us. But when we say that, we're not saying you can't read them, or that there's nothing to learn from the debates that transpired. All that you all that you shouldn't represent them accurately.

Correct. When I teach on Aaronism, I want to present the Arians in a way that if they were in class, they would say, yeah, you didn't break the ninth commandments. You got us correct.

We disagree with you, but you gave an accurate account of what we believe. Just a couple of questions as we as we close. Do you think, you know, you're, you're not a prophet, as Walt Kaiser always said it Gordon Conley said, I'm, I'm neither a prophet nor a son of a prophet, but I do work for a nonprofit was his little quip.

Do you think they're staying power in these ideas obviously Hegel and Marx people are probably going to be talking about for hundreds and hundreds of years. Some of these people like Judith Butler, one of the interesting things you point out her, her writing is famous slash infamous for being incredibly opaque and wins, you know, worst writing awards. And you suggest that some of that may be intentional.

That's part of the destabilizing. I don't have to play according to your rules and look at what I'm doing here. You don't even know what I'm talking about is sort of revolutionary in its own respect, though, I have a hard time thinking, you know, people still read CS Lewis, not only because he's a penetrating thinker, the man could write a sentence.

And these critical theorists by and large, don't write well. Is that going to mitigate their long term influence or are they so well entrenched that now that this is going to be another 50 years at least where people are still living on these fumes. Yeah.

Well, I certainly do. I do think the stylist part of the message and the great example is the work by a doorknob minimum or alia, which is a series really of fragments. And I think the point he's making there is, you know, capitalist society is so fragmented and broken.

I want to reflect that in the way I write. I can't write a simple lucid piece of prose. I want, you know, it's got to be like a Picasso painting.

It's got to be disturbing and fragmented and broken. So the stylist part of it. I think it appeals to a certain pretentious academic class that will continue, I think, to trade in these ideas.

Again, to return to Abigail Favale, the chapter in her book, Genesis of Gender, when she describes gender theory, shows that the ideas can actually be boiled down. It's a very lucid prose if you choose to write them that way. So I think jargon always appeals to a certain academic class, you know, to use the critical theory tool against them.

It's a way of having power, as you pointed out. We understand this and you poor plebs don't. Staying powers are, I think in terms of the basic nature of the ideas, the manipulative nature of power, the manipulative nature of culture.

I think those things will stay. They may not be drawn from reading a doorknob. But I think as long as people read Nietzsche, and Nietzsche is beautiful to read, I think those ideas will be a big part of our culture.

If you'd asked me 30 years ago, two questions will be critical. People will be talking about critical theory 30 years from now. I would have said no.

And if you'd said to me on which is the most implausible branch of critical theory that will never come to grip the public imagination, I'd have said gender theory. It's clearly completely bonkers. I'm clearly not a prophet on those fronts.

I had a former student who did a PhD in Scotland. She went to Scotland at a PhD, I think on Hawkeye. And he contacted me maybe five or six years ago, and his comment was, I thought I was doing a PhD in the history of ideas.

I now discover I was writing something in the vanguard of a new movement. So I think the ideas, many of the ideas will remain. But I think the writing, I think Judith Butler has probably passed her heyday, for example.

She will be supplanted. I think the idea is the basic cynicism, the basic idea of power and manipulation, because they grab hold of something of the truth and something of human experience will remain as perennials. So we'll bring this to a close by thinking what I hope Christians listening to this are thinking, which is, all right, this is a good book.

I want to get this book, no to change all worlds by Carl Truman, but they're also thinking, so what do I do? I've quoted you often Carl, a line I heard you say years ago that Christians didn't lose the argument on gay marriage, and people say, what do you mean we didn't lose in your responses, because it wasn't an argument. So you say here postscript on aesthetics. We do not hold to the Marxist premises of Adorno and Benjamin, but we all know how powerfully images and music can shape the way we think about the world.

The battle of our gay marriage, for example, was not lost in the public square, because the traditional arguments for marriage were exposed as incoherent. It was lost because the social imaginary came to be populated with images and narratives of happy gay couples and sitcom soap operas and beyond. We kind of know how to think about responding to ideas, and obviously you believe in responding to ideas, because that's what your life is about.

And yet it's not so simple as we're going to get the book that answers the questions and it's gone. So given this reality of aesthetics and the role it's played, what ought Christians to do? Yeah, it's a good question. There's no single answer to that.

I mean, I can think of various areas of Christian endeavor where we might want to at least reflect upon what we're doing. I think one of the key things is, I think from a reform perspective, the true and the good, the good and the true, we get those. Beauty.

We're weak there. And I'm not quite sure how to address that. But I do think we need to think about how can, for example, our worship grip the imagination.

I mean, you and I were both at Terry Johnson's church just any morning. And I would say it was quite a beautiful worship service. I was reminded that worship can be good and true and seriously beautiful at the same time.

And we have these resources and your form tradition. Yeah, so I think we need to worry less about accommodating ourselves to the tastes of modern culture. And more about how do we meet that human craving for beauty in our ranks? I could think about preaching.

I think the most effective and powerful preaching that one hears these days is often the preaching. Again, I don't want to sound too postmodern here, but preaching that connects to stories with which people can identify. You can teach people abstract concepts and ideas.

But they're much more powerful when they're connected to stories. That's why most of the Bible is story. I mean, again, this is nothing new.

Postmodern biblical commentators have been saying this for 30, 40 years now. But I think in the reform world when we emphasize doctrine so much, that's a good thing. But the way we teach doctrine, I think, has to be connected to real life stories.

In the broader culture in which we find ourselves, I think we need to understand. Abstractions leave people cold. Abstractions may be true, but they leave people cold.

Stories carry weight. Think of how the pro-life course has suffered setback up to setback up to setback since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Why? Well, it's because the other side immediately started to churn out stories.

Some of them true. Some of them false. But stories that grip the imagination and the heart, the 11-year-old who's been raped.

And you know, Kevin, as I know, I've never experienced this, thankfully myself has passed. But if a father, when I was a pastor, had come to me, this 11-year-old daughter and had said she's been raped and she's pregnant, what should I do? I know that I should say she can't have an abortion, but every emotional fiber in my being would say, be be saying, this is the one exception. This is the exception.

Because the story is powerful. Because an 11-year-old is not an abstraction. An 11-year-old is a human person.

And so I think on the aesthetics front, we need to think as reform people. We can't just do the same stuff they did in the 20th century. And that's not to say that the 20th century wasn't good then, but we need to realize that there are gaps in what they did that are becoming potentially lethal gaps with this particular juncture in our culture.

So think about how do we grip the Christian imagination in what we say and how we worship. Those would be two principal things that I would want to express. And showing an alternative reality that by God's grace works, not perfectly, because we're on this side of the fall, but works.

And as a pastor, I want to help people realize that most people are not going to write this kind of book. Most people are not called to read Marquesa and read Judith Butler. And people are out there saying, well, what do I do with critical theory? What do I do with all the LGBTQ revolution? Well, there are things you can do raising your kids and loving them, having a stable marriage, opening your home.

These are not nothing. These are things having a healthy, vibrant church, not just a preaching station. And I think preaching is important as anyone.

It's what I do. But it's a church. I'm going to give you the last word by reading what you say.

The answer to the sexual revolution is not an argument. It is a community where properly ordered functional sexual relationships take place within a broader context that acknowledges the responsibilities that sex involves, particularly toward the children who are begotten thereby. This is where the responsibility falls upon the church to model marriages where husbands and wives demonstrate in their relationship the way in which they treat each other, not as objects or things, but as subjects and persons where sex is not so much the taking of pleasure from another, so much as the giving of the self to another in a life of full commitment and sickness and in health for richer, for poor, until death do them part.

Wonderful words, Carl. I want to thank you for the book. Encourage everybody to get this published by B&H academic to change all worlds critical theory.

Mark, keep doing this so glad that you are as Terry Johnson said many times. You are a man of Issacar who understands the time. You know that he refers to the two of us as the sons of Issacar.

We both have that title. Okay, well, you more than me. He had a list of five people.

I forget me. Charles was on the list and he'll have to remind us of the other two, but glad to be of those sons with you. So, Carl, thanks for joining life and books and everything.

Look forward to heading you back whenever your next book comes out. And for all of our listeners, thanks for listening. This is the Ministry of Clearly Reforms.

You can get episodes like this and other resources at clearlyreform.org. So until next time, glorify God, enjoy him forever and read a good book.