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Tim Keller Peddles ‘Biblical Critical Theory’

Evangelical leftists are well known for flip-flopping from one position to another. During the summer of 2020, many evangelical leaders dove headlong into the social justice movement, embracing critical theory in open defiance of Biblical teaching on justice. This embrace was followed by backpedaling in some cases, as many pastors received pushback from their congregants.

Flip-floppers went from pedaling social justice-aligned books like Jamar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise to denying that Critical Race Theory was actually being used in churches and seminaries to indoctrinate Christians into Marxist ideologies that contradict the gospel. Now it appears that many of the leftist flip-floppers in evangelicalism may once again be poised to accept critical theory as a “useful analytical tool” and even attempt to syncretize the theory with the gospel.

Tim Keller, Gospel Coalition founder and promoter of some of the most subversive “Christian” ideologies in the last twenty years, is known for taking foul secular ideologies and baptizing them in the waters of Christianese. Keller regularly partners with Biologos and its founder Francis Collins in promoting theistic evolution, the baptism of the false secular humanistic teaching of evolution in the waters of Christian language.

Through the Gospel Coalition, Keller has been a leading promoter of leftist political ideology under the false premise that political parties are morally neutral. Keller has even gone so far as to register as a Democrat, aligning himself with a political party that has advanced the cause of normalizing sodomy, establishing child-abusing transgender policies, legalizing preborn baby murder, and advocating numerous other anti-biblical policy.

With a track record of disguising false ideology with a thin veneer of Christianese, one should not be surprised that Keller, who originally claimed to be against the false ideologies of “Secular Justice and Critical Theory”, recently joined forces with philosopher Christopher Watkins in the promotion of a new Christianized version of Critical Theory. 

Keller wrote the foreword in Watkins’ upcoming book “Biblical Critical Theory,” which is set to be released in November. According to Watkin, he wanted to write a book that took the Bible seriously while also taking Critical Theory seriously.

I am scrambling around as an undergraduate, trying to find books that take both the universe of these critical theorists seriously, that really understand them, and that take the Bible seriously, and seek to remain faithful to it, and I just couldn’t find anything, and I was sure that there was a book out there to be written.

The real question that Watkin and Keller should be asking is, “Why should Christians be engaged in the practice of syncretizing a Biblical worldview with the many godless ideologies of the world.” Believers have a duty to answer the world’s questions through the sufficient words of scripture, but Christians should never expect that scripture will satisfy the carnal desires of a fallen world that is bent against God. 

A closer examination of Watkins’ beliefs reveals that, while he claims to hold to a “Biblical critical theory,” the lens he views the world through looks much like the lens of other leftist Critical theorists who have made their mark on evangelicalism in the last five years. Watkins is currently in the middle of a four-year Australian-government funded research project to investigate the role that the church and Christian institutions can play in the “new social contract” (aka new world order).

When Watkins explained his theories on social contract in the past, they resembled Keller’s views on how social gospel-infused into society by Christian institutions can benefit society. As with all presentations of social gospel, the presentation of the gospel is made subservient to a desire to find common ground with the false ideologies of the world. Watkins has fallen prey to the Critical Race Theory narrative pervasive in the United States, as he has paid homage to false race-based narratives and left-wing organizations in his writings on social contract.

I would like to finish by quoting an account from a meeting of faith-based leaders gathered in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, who was killed by a 28-year-old white police officer. The account is written by Michael Ray Matthews from the PICO Network (People Involved in Community Organizing).

As I continued to lead songs and chants in the pouring rain, one of the seminarians grabbed the bullhorn and asked if we could change our chant from ‘show me what democracy looks like’ to ‘show me what theology looks like.’ She was calling her sisters and brothers in the faith to go all in—to be totally immersed in mind, body and spirit, to bring the richness of our faith into the public space. 

The book has received endorsements from a number of critical theory proponents on the left, including egalitarian feminist theologian Michael Bird.