Christopher Watkin > Quotes

“During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again, other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” He asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law—each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“As James K. A. Smith points out, “It’s precisely when your ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal that you’re most prone to absolutize the temporal.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“To live in God’s city here and now is to enjoy God’s limitless peace, love, and creativity; it is also to live a subversive, revolutionary life in this world as we repeatedly scratch the surface of the earthly city to reveal God’s goodness, truth, and beauty under its makeshift palimpsest.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Not for the last time in these pages, we find that the subversive logic of love quietly enters—then devastatingly explodes—the matchstick scaffolding of simple binaries upon which the modern world hangs its most cherished values. Ask a lover if she experiences her passion to please her sweetheart as a constraint; ask her whether she feels like a dupe of someone else’s power games: she will either laugh out loud or look at you with profound pity.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“They have put the kind of hope in their political leaders and policies that once was reserved for God and the work of the gospel. When their political leaders are out of power, they experience a death.”31 This loading of electoral fortunes with ultimate significance is what it means to bring religion into politics, and secular people can be guilty of it just as much as Christians.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Neither we nor the universe are necessary. We may be important, precious, glorious even, but preciously and gloriously unnecessary.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. . . . The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“This reflects in the sphere of epistemology the wider point made by Cornelius Van Til that “covenant theology is the only form of theology which gives a completely personalistic interpretation to reality.”18”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“This rebellion of the orthodox, or what John Milbank might call a counterrebellion, is neither straightforwardly conservative nor simply progressive: it seeks neither only to maintain nor only to overthrow. It is emblematic of the radical nature of orthodoxy in the last days: there is nothing quite so radically subversive today as sound doctrine and godly living.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“They are two sides of the same coin, nicely summed up in the Anglican prayerbook affirmation that to serve God is perfect freedom.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“If I am a Christian, those who disagree with me are not by default intellectually inferior, they are not rationally benighted, they do not lack imagination, they are not narrow, weak, or juvenile, they are not medieval, and they are certainly not a virus. They have every chance of being my betters in all these respects. I simply cannot look down on them. It is crucial to emphasize that this is no clever rhetorical flourish. If I claim to be a Christian and do not acknowledge that my “enemies” are very possibly my moral and intellectual superiors, I have simply failed to understand the gospel of Christ. I am still operating according to the performance narrative, not yet according to the grace narrative.20”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“As Chesterton says, “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad” because they are “isolated from each other and wandering alone.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“This means that a biblical attitude to this world can neither be one of simple affirmation nor of straightforward condemnation. Wherever Christians look in the cultural world, they will find Hart’s palimpsests: no social movement, no artefact, no text, no church, no performance, and no academic discipline is free from the violence, selfishness, delusion, and rebellion of sin, however “Christian” they might appear, and similarly nothing in culture is so full of these things that it can fully erase the goodness of the original creation.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“idolatry is disordered love”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“The cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk insists on what he calls “enlightened false consciousness” in which an individual or a group intentionally and ironically cultivates a state of consciousness they know to be false because it is advantageous to do so.35 Frankfurt school theorist Max Horkheimer argues for a similar idea: the bourgeoise embraces ideology out of cunning and a will to dominate, not because they are duped by it.36”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Disordered loves, like addictions, also lead to all manner of personal and social pathologies: in Augustine’s terms “The punishment for every disordered mind is its own disorder.”69”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Jacques Ellul has a word for this instrumentalizing attitude: technique. His analysis helps us to appreciate just how deep and wide the n-shaped dynamic runs in our society. He defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity.”14 It is “never anything but a collection of means and the search for the most efficient means” in any given situation,15 with its origin in Cain’s city-building and Lamech’s polygamy.16 Up until the eighteenth century, Ellul argues, technique was largely absent from all areas of society apart from the mechanical, but in the industrial revolution, technical progress suddenly exploded and began to reconfigure every area of life, from industrial production through politics to the family. The result is that today technique is not a thing out there in the world; it is how we do everything we do in the world: “The Third World, Europe, militarization, etc., are all political matters. Inflation, exchange rates, standards of living, and growth are all economic matters. Yet technique has a part in all of them. It is like a key, like a substance underlying all problems and situations. It is ultimately the decisive factor.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Blaise Pascal writes: Men despise religion, they hate it and are afraid it might be true. To cure that we have to begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason. That it is worthy of veneration and should be given respect. Next it should be made loveable, should make the good wish it were true, then show that it is indeed true.2 In”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Christians in the early church distinguished themselves in Roman society by their care for the poor and wretched. They adopted abandoned babies and bucked the trend of fleeing plague-ridden cities in order to stay and care for the sick. This so exasperated the Emperor Julian that he vented in a letter to Arsacius: “Why then do we . . . not observe how the kindness of Christians to strangers, their care for the burial of their dead, and the sobriety of their lifestyle has done the most to advance their cause? . . . It is disgraceful when no Jew is a beggar and the impious Galileans [Christians] support our poor in addition to their own; everyone is able to see that our coreligionists are in want of aid from us.”27”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Esther Meek summarizes this uncontractual dynamic in the following way: “Law, so prominent in Scripture, is not to be understood as creating relationship. Rather, law nourishes relationship.”11”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“This paradigm of the gift places us in the posture of recipients. We receive existence, we receive meaning, and we receive love. To be sure we are creative recipients, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, and receiving the gift of the universe certainly does not make us passive. But the fact remains that we are recipients nonetheless. The one thing we should not do with a gift is pretend we bought or made it ourselves. The giver is usually thanked, so our fundamental orientation to existence in the paradigm of the figure of gratuity is one of praise and thanksgiving.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Resting in the calm eye of a storm raging all around him, Noah is saved in the ark as the flood surges over the land. In the flood narrative it is God who saves Noah from God. In the midst of the torrent of his own raging justice God places a floating ship of mercy.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“One of the crucial pennies to drop in the minds of those who find their way to faith in their adult years is often the realization that, if there really is a God such as the Bible reveals him to be, then he is smarter than I am and his judgement is more reliable than mine: if he and I differ on a matter, and if he is really God and I am really a creature, then it is more than reasonable to assume that he is correct and I am mistaken. To reach any other conclusion would require a bizarre routine of epistemological gymnastics. Either God is God and I am not, in which case his judgement is to be trusted over mine, or else God is not God, in which case there is no reliable way of satisfactorily arbitrating at all between what is reasonable and what is not.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“The book of Revelation is calling Christians to a cultural disengagement: we have woken up to find the prostitute in our beds and the beast raiding our possessions, and we seem to be okay with that.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“The word translated “favor” in Genesis 6:8 is the Hebrew hen, which also means “grace.” With that in mind, there are two ways that this pivotal moment of the biblical narrative could be taken. The first is that Noah, because he was righteous and blameless in his own strength, attracted God’s attention and found divine favor. The second is that Noah was given grace on God’s free initiative, not because of any good behavior or spark of potential on Noah’s part, and that as a result of receiving grace he is righteous and blameless. Both the fuller context of a biblical understanding of God’s undeserved grace and the order of the propositions in verses 8 and 9 militate in favor of the latter interpretation.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Listen to a warning from the 1960s, sent from the pen of Jacques Ellul: “A while ago, people made the monumental error of saying that democracy, liberalism, competitive capitalism were all expressions of Christianity. Today they make the same monumental error for the benefit of socialism.”26 Let us not, in our own day, make a further monumental error by hitching Christianity to whatever political cart happens to be passing. Our grandchildren will not thank us for it.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“So in terms of the concerns of the current chapter, a sovereign God can hold his creatures responsible for their actions not in spite of his sovereignty but only because of it.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Believers in the early church were not persecuted for worshipping God. They were persecuted for worshipping no god or emperor apart from God.9”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture