Watkin reminds us that the biblical story, or metanarrative, is also a far ranging ideological assessment of culture. It too offers a type of critical theory: it also tests and evaluates all things, but in the light of God and his Word. And the aim is not revolution but redemption.

The new book by a Monash University philosophy professor and Christian thinker is receiving a lot of interest, attention and discussion. Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture by Christopher Watkin (Zondervan, 2022) is a large and important volume – so much so that simply writing a short review of it will not do it justice.
So I will instead just pen some pieces looking at aspects of the volume, highlighting some key chapters. Those who are somewhat familiar with his earlier titles will know that Watkin is a capable Christian philosopher who has written helpful assessments of postmodern heavyweights such as Foucault and Derrida.
He has long been interested in offering Christian analysis of contemporary thought, and that has culminated in this 600-page attempt at lining up the biblical storyline with it. A VERY brief and sketchy overview of his current volume would go something like this:
The secular left is heavily into critical theory, which is about criticising and deconstructing all aspect of life: culture, politics, history and so on, to determine the inherent power relations going on. The aim is not just to identify so-called oppressive power structures and try to make things better. The aim is to tear down society altogether and rebuild it according to the latest version of utopian revolutionary thinking.
Watkin reminds us that the biblical story, or metanarrative, is also a far ranging ideological assessment of culture. It too offers a type of critical theory: it also tests and evaluates all things, but in the light of God and his Word. And the aim is not revolution but redemption. It seeks to restore fallen individuals, and where possible, renew a fallen culture – although that only fully occurs with the new heaven and the new earth.
Thus he applies the biblical storyline to the cultural and social and intellectual issues of the day. The chapter I want to examine here (Ch. 23), looks at “The Last Days and Giving to Caesar What Is Caesar’s”. He looks at how we are to react to culture and society around us: do we embrace it fully or reject it altogether?
To help answer this question he appeals to the famous gospel story of paying taxes to Caesar (Luke 20:21-26). His critics of course were trying to trap Jesus: if he said yes to paying these taxes he could be accused of being “an assimilationist who has sold out the gospel,” and if he said no, they could accuse him of treason and rebellion against the state. The response of Jesus was this:
[Y]ou give the object to the one whose image it bears. And here is the genius of the principle: giving Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s is not like sorting a load of washing into skirts and blouses, with each item neatly folded away either in the “Caesar drawer” or the “God drawer.” There is no neat separation of the two… because the coin is an image of an image. The coin is in the image of Caesar, so it should be given to Caesar, and both the one who gives and Caesar himself are in the image of God, so they and everything that is theirs should be devoted to God.
In other words, giving to Caesar is part of giving to God. Paying taxes is a gift (so to speak) to Caesar, but it is also at the same time – and in a more fundamental way – a gift to God. Paying taxes is part of my Christian duty (Rom 13:6-7). In doing so, I offer service to God. I am to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but I am to do so recognizing that everything – including Caesar and my very self – is first of all and ultimately God’s. The second gesture, giving to God what is God’s, gathers up the first giving in its own transcendent offering.
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Whether art museums or classical music organizations, those institutions have sacrificed their comparative advantages—connoisseurship, scholarly knowledge, and devotion to the highest expressions of culture—in favor of a partisan political program that distorts both present and past.

Like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has redefined itself as an antiracist “agent of change.” In July 2020, its director Max Hollein and CEO Daniel Weiss announced that the museum will henceforth aim to overcome the racism still perpetrated by our “government, policies, systems, and institutions.”
What such a political mandate means for an art museum may seem puzzling, but two exhibits currently running at the Met provide an answer. They suggest that the museum will now value racial consciousness-raising over scholarship and historical accuracy. Double standards will govern how the museum analyzes Western and Third World art: only the former will be subject to the demystification treatment, while the latter will be accorded infinite curatorial respect. The Met will lay bare European art’s alleged complicity in the West’s legacy of oppression, while Third World violence and inequality will be chastely kept off stage.
The first show, “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met,” arranges the Met’s own seventeenth-century Dutch canvases in thematic categories, such as still life and landscape. (The content of those categories is sometimes hard to discern underneath such mannered academic rhetoric as “Contested Bodies.”) Highlights of the show include Franz Hals’s portrait of Paulus Verschuur, a bravura performance of spontaneous brushwork and psychological acuity that captures the Rotterdam merchant’s modern irony, and Johannes Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, which anticipates Paul Cézanne in its treatment of decorative pattern and geometry.
The Dutch Baroque formed the cornerstone of the Met’s first holdings; subsequent bequests created one of the world’s great assemblages of Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, and their peers. The antiracist museum, however, understands that it is not just Western art that needs deconstructing; the collecting and donating of art does, too. Thus, the commentary accompanying “In Praise of Painting” wearily notes that “of course” there are “blind spots in the story these particular acquisitions tell. Colonialism, slavery, and war—major themes in seventeenth-century Dutch history—are scarcely visible here.” It is hard to know who is more at fault, in the Met’s view: the artists or the art lovers who collected their work. Few seventeenth-century Dutch paintings treat of “colonialism, slavery, and war,” and fewer still approach the technical mastery of the Dutch canon. “In Praise of Painting” contains a Brazilian landscape by Frans Post that shows members of an Indian tribe gathered in a clearing. The painting is included in the exhibit as a synecdoche for a Dutch colony in northern Brazil; its interest is purely ethnographic. What other paintings about “colonialism, slavery, and war” do the curators think the Met should have acquired? Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum recently mounted a self-flagellating show called “Slavery,” intending to atone for Holland’s former holdings in Indonesia, New Guinea, and elsewhere. Even the royally endowed Rijksmuseum assembled few canvases with colonialism subject matter; as a second-best solution, it was left to attribute luxury items in portraits and still lifes to slavery and racism.
“In Praise of Painting” adopts that strategy as well. “Still life paintings pictured the bounty provided by newly established Dutch trade routes and the Republic’s economic success, while omitting the human cost of colonial warfare and slavery,” the accompanying wall text points out. The curators do not reveal how a still life painter should portray the “human cost of colonial warfare and slavery.” As even the curators admit, a still life by definition focuses on “things without people.” The Dutch masters, who brought the nascent genre to peak gorgeousness, may have delighted in the dragon-fly translucence of grapes and the somber radiance of silver and cut glass; they may have taught us to see beauty in a kitchen’s bounty. Not good enough. They should have anticipated twenty-first-century concerns about racial justice and revised their subject matter accordingly.
The museum’s benefactors also receive a feminist whack. “Only one picture painted by an early modern Dutch woman has entered the collection over the course of nearly 150 years,” the curators scold. Which Jacob van Ruisdael or Gerard ter Borch would the curators forego for a painting chosen on identity grounds? There simply weren’t as many females as males painting in the seventeenth century. Today, there are; women have unfettered access to art schools and galleries. The Met’s founders bought its female-painted Dutch Baroque canvas—a towering arrangement of peonies, tulips, roses, and marigolds—in 1871. Sexism did not prevent that addition to the museum’s original holdings, but sexism, we are to believe, prevented follow-up purchases.
Having been instructed to see oppression behind portraiture and to hear silenced voices in tableaux of oysters and lemons, the chastened Met visitor may wend his way to “The African Origin of Civilization,” another show drawn from the Met’s own collections. He will find himself back in a world of prelapsarian innocence, where art, if not the collecting of it, is unencumbered by a debunking impulse and where the culture that gave rise to that art is accepted on its own terms, not measured against present values.
“The African Origin of Civilization” pairs artefacts from ancient Egypt with those from modern (from the thirteenth-century A.D. forward) Sub-Saharan Africa to demonstrate their alleged “shared origins,” as the Met puts it, and to “recenter” Africa as “the source of modern humanity and a fount of civilization.” A timeline runs around the walls noting significant moments in African history, such as the receipt of Grammy awards by pop stars from Benin and South Africa.
The show is based on the writings of Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986). Diop held that ancient Egypt was black, that ancient Egypt and modern Sub-Saharan Africa are part of a unified black civilization, and that this black African civilization, not Greece or Rome, is the source of Western civilization. The exhibit opens with a covertly doctored quote from Diop: “The history of Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians connect it with the history of Egypt” (more on that doctoring below). The exhibition “pay[s] homage” to Diop’s “seminal” 1974 book, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, the Met explains.
So who was this “influential Egyptologist, scientist, [and] activist,” as the Met describes him? Diop came from an aristocratic Muslim background in Senegal. In the 1950s, he participated in Paris’s anti-colonial student groups. Diop’s research aims were unapologetically political. He hoped to accelerate Africa’s independence movements by “reconquer[ing] a Promethean consciousness” among the African peoples, he wrote in The African Origin of Civilization. Such a task would be impossible so long as the proposition that ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization “does not appear legitimate.”
In Diop’s telling, in prehistoric times, black Africans moved into the Nile Valley from the South, merged with the blacks already living there, established the ancient Egyptian dynasties, then migrated back across the Sahara into the South. The less demanding conditions those black Egyptians found south of the Sahara discouraged the further development of science and engineering that had begun under the pharaohs. “The Negro became indifferent towards material progress,” Diop writes. Rather than pursuing scientific knowledge, the southern Africans concentrated on perfecting their political arrangements. Those political structures were and have remained superior to those of the West, in Diop’s view. Africans also far exceeded the Europeans in the “social and moral order,” which was on the “same level of perfection” as their political order.
Scientific progress may have come to a standstill back in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the gains made in black Egypt during the Pharaonic period, Diop argues, were so great as to serve as the basis for all subsequent developments in the West. “The Black world is the very initiator of the ‘western’ civilization flaunted before our eyes today,” Diop alleged in The African Origin of Civilization. “Pythagorean mathematics, the theory of the four elements of Thales of Miletus, Epicurean materialism, Platonic idealism, Judaism, Islam, and modern science are rooted in Egyptian cosmogony and science.”
Diop’s intellectual history is as shaky as his demographic claims. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether Egypt was black. Graeco–Roman science and philosophy were a different enterprise from Egyptian learning. The Egyptians developed the calendar, the calculation of time, and some medical cures in the second millennium B.C. Their funerary architecture attests to their engineering skills. But the Egyptian numeration system did not provide the basis for Western mathematics. And though the Greeks admired Egyptian accomplishments, the principle of grounding scientific conclusions on logic and empirical evidence—the hallmark of Western science—began with Aristotle, not with the Egyptian dynasties.
As for Diop’s arguments regarding ancient Egypt’s black racial identity, they rest on Old Testament myth, cherry-picked images of Egyptian sculpture, a reference to “black” Egyptians by Herodotus, and a few alleged similarities between Egyptian and African words. According to DNA analysis from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, mummies from the New Kingdom were most closely related to peoples of the Levant (Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon, among other countries). Modern Egyptians share just 8 percent of their genome with central Africans. As small as that share is, it is much more than that between ancient Egyptians and central and southern Africans; that common 8 percent developed only over the last 1,500 years. The ancient Egyptians, notorious xenophobes, did not believe themselves related to the peoples of the south, with whom their relations were often imperialistic.
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We are responsible to make disciples, but Christ will build his church. And he will do so until the end of the age, when he comes again in glory to unite the two kingdoms into one perfect eternal kingdom. 

Churches as formal, local institutions have been given a very specific, singular mission in this age, best articulated in the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19–20.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.
You’ll notice that there are several phrases in this text that sound like commands, but grammatically there is actually only one command: “Make disciples” is the mandate Christ gave to his church—nothing more and nothing less. All of the rest of the phrases in this passage that sound in English like commands, which we’ll consider in a moment, actually further explain the central command. In fact, we could even say that all of the commands and discussion throughout the rest of the New Testament that directly relate to the church are simply giving further explanation or correcting errors related to the central command of making disciples. All of that explanation and correction still carries with it the force of a command, but it all comes back to this central command: make disciples.
So what is a disciple? Well, a disciple of Christ is simply a follower of Christ. He is one who obeys Christ’s commands, not simply out of duty, but because he knows, if you love Christ, you will do what he commands (Jn 14:15). And the Great Commission bears this out in verse 20 where it says that part of what it means to make disciples is “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” A disciple is someone who observes Christ’s commands, who submits to his rule. To put it another way, a disciple is a citizen of Christ’s redemptive kingdom.
Now we might say, “Isn’t worship our first priority? Why isn’t our primary mission as churches to worship?” Well keep in mind, to be a disciple is to worship God. Submission to the rule of Christ and obedience to his commands is worship. Don’t think of obedience to Christ as distinct from loving Christ. Jesus said, “If you love me”—if you worship me—“you will keep my commandments.” To be a disciple of Christ is to worship Christ. So we could think of it this way: our mission is to make disciple-worshipers. The ultimate aim of all things is the worship and glory of God, but our specific mission as churches is to disciple worshipers for God’s glory.
But sinners can’t worship God—sinners cannot submit to Christ’s rule; so in order to make disciples who observe Christ’s commands, there are a couple more preliminary steps. First, in the parallel passage in Mark, Christ presents the first step toward making disciples: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15). Being a disciple of Jesus Christ requires first that someone hear the good news, repent of their sins, and trust in Christ for salvation. So, the first necessary step in making disciples is proclamation of the gospel.
Second, Christ commands that new believers must be baptized. Physical water baptism is an outward visible sign of inward Spirit baptism. Spirit baptism happens at the moment of conversion and unites us to Christ (1 Cor 12:13)—it makes us citizens of the redemptive kingdom. Water baptism is a public profession of faith and unites us to a visible church—the visible representation of the redemptive kingdom.
And the third necessary component of making disciples is teaching them to observe all that Christ commanded. This is the clear teaching and preaching of Scripture, again all of Scripture, but especially the apostolic teaching recorded in the New Testament.
Spiritual Mission
Notice that with regard to churches, our mission is exclusively redemptive in nature: make disciples. Our mission involves gathering more citizens of the redemptive kingdom through evangelism, baptism, and teaching. The church’s mission is entirely spiritual in nature—it does not involve temporal earthly matters that belong to the common kingdom. The only mandate given to churches that involves physical matters is “contributing to the needs of the saints” (Rom 12:13), but even then, only when the common institution of the family breaks down (1 Tim 5:3–8). Never is the church given the responsibility of meeting the physical needs of society at large. That is the responsibility of institutions in the common kingdoms of this world.
Neither is the church given any commands regarding political involvement. We are to pray “for kings and all who are in high positions,” but churches should not in any official capacity hold political rallies, endorse candidates, or advocate for specific policy positions. Note that even in a very oppressive governmental situation, the New Testament never advocates for churches attempting to overthrow tyrannical governments and establish more righteous governments. That is not the mission of the church. The church’s mission is purely spiritual.
This is important exactly because of Christ’s authority over his church. When the church is operating as a church, it must do what its authority commanded it to do, no more and no less. If our authority as churches is what Christ commanded through his apostles, then we may only do what can follow “Thus says the Lord.”
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