What Is Critical Theory?

Bradley G. Green joins Camden Bucey to discuss What Is Critical Theory?: A Concise Christian Analysis. They trace the Frankfurt School’s Marxist roots and explain why thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse turned from a narrowly economic account of oppression toward culture, institutions, authority, family, and religion.

Bradley G. Green is professor of philosophy and Christian theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds a PhD from Baylor University, co-founded Augustine School in Jackson, Tennessee, and is a co-founder of Christ Overall.

The conversation evaluates critical theory as a counterfeit religious vision with its own accounts of creation, sin, redemption, and eschatology. Drawing on Cornelius Van Til, Green shows how unbelieving thought oscillates between rationalism and irrationalism; drawing on Henry Van Til, he explains why culture is “religion externalized.” The result is a rigorous, accessible framework for Christians seeking to understand critical theory without caricature and to answer it from the truth of God’s revelation.

Resources

• What Is Critical Theory?: A Concise Christian Analysis
• Bradley G. Green at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
• Christ Overall

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 04:30 Introducing What Is Critical Theory?
• 08:14 Marxism after the failed German revolution
• 10:43 The major Frankfurt School thinkers
• 12:35 Culture, oppression, and the long march through the institutions
• 15:54 Critical theory as a counterfeit religion
• 19:06 What the critical theorists see—and miss
• 21:56 Creation, givenness, and the autonomous individual
• 24:05 Sin relocated from the heart to the system
• 25:18 Marcuse’s vision of sexual liberation
• 29:42 Utopian hope and Adorno’s “Grand Hotel Abyss”
• 33:11 Walter Benjamin and a “messianic rupture”
• 36:45 Repressive tolerance and the authoritarian personality
• 42:35 Van Til on rationalism and irrationalism
• 46:31 Culture as religion externalized
• 49:22 Pastoral and educational applications
• 53:55 Using the book for personal and group study
• 56:20 Conclusion

Participants: Bradley G. Green, Camden Bucey