The Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory

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Today we continue our review and dialogue with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In the two previous essays we defined and set forth CRT’s twelve central beliefs. In this essay, we will turn to the story of its origins. In Chapter Three, Lindsay uncovers “The Proximate Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory” (pp. 87-158). The sheer number of authors, books, papers, and different movements covered in this long chapter is overwhelming. I will do my best to summarize it concisely, accurately and fairly. But I cannot help but oversimplify. There is another complicating factor I must mention. Attempting to discover and describe the origins of any historical phenomenon is fraught with many dangers. Among the most obvious are (1) the past is too complicated to describe completely and (2) historians, despite their best efforts, harbor their own prejudices.

The Two Main Sources

According to Lindsay, “Critical Social Justice Theories, including Critical Race Theory, arise from a deliberate fusion of Critical Theory (neo-Marxism) with postmodern Theory” (p. 89; emphasis original). This fusion was accomplished in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in academia. At a minimum we need to understand the essential features of three things: Critical Theory, postmodernism, and the process of their fusion.

Critical Theory, Or Neo-Marxism

Karl Marx (1818-83) claimed to have discovered the true science of history. History began with the communism of tribal society and pass through two other forms of society until it arrived at capitalism. The capitalist system will inevitably reach a crisis point wherein the exploited workers will revolt and take over the means of production to institute socialism. Socialism will naturally transform itself into communism similar in form to tribal communism but now worldwide. That was the theory.

But by the 1910s and 1920s it had become apparent that something was wrong with Marx’s theory. Capitalism had raised the standard of living in Europe to the point that workers no longer felt themselves miserable and exploited. The workers had adopted what Hungarian Marxist György Lukács (1885-1971) called a “false consciousness,” that is, they thought they were free and happy when in truth they were enslaved and miserable. The neo-Marxists realized that the socialist revolution was not inevitable. They held on to the Marxist belief that capitalism was unstable, but experience had taught them its advance toward socialism was but one possibility. It could also slide into fascism. Hence, the neo-Marxists developed an agenda of “consciousness raising;” that is, a program to convinced people who are relatively satisfied with their condition that they were oppressed in ways of which they were not conscious.  Marxist theorist Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) named this new approach to revolution “Critical Theory” in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.”

For the process of consciousness raising to succeed, the “cultural hegemony” of capitalist society must be challenged. Marxists must pay attention to the places in culture where identity, consciousness, and values are formed. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) named five cultural institutions that Marxists need to infiltrate to cultivate a “counter-hegemony,” that is, an alternative narrative favorable to Marxist revolution: religion, family, education, media, and law. Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), in the 1950s and 1960s, despaired of awakening the satisfied American middle class to revolutionary consciousness. He looked instead to urban blacks, the unemployed, and university students to form the vanguard of a revolutionary coalition. In his books, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Counterrevolution and Revolt, An Essay on Liberation, and One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse outlines an ideological strategy for completing the Gramscian project of creating a Marxian consciousness as a challenge to the dominant culture. Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire (1921-97), in his highly influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, packages Critical Theory in a form designed to liberate students from their “false consciousness” and create in them a revolutionary consciousness.

Critical Social Justice theories, including CRT, incorporated neo-Marxism’s critique of capitalism and liberalism, its theory of false consciousness, its strategies of institutional infiltration and consciousness raising, and its ideal of communism—all while re-centering its social critique on race.

Postmodern Theory

Whereas Marxism and neo-Marxism critique the values and knowledge claims of liberal capitalist society in view of their own truth-claims about a truly just society (Communism), postmodernism debunks all truth claims and grand narratives—including Marxist—as expressions of power. They are in effect post-Marxist as well as postmodern. The most famous postmodern thinker Michel Foucault (1926-84) underlined the ideological nature of all knowledge claims by using the term “knowledge-power” whenever speaking about assertions of truth (p. 127).

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) considered language a prison from which we cannot escape into truth. Words refer only to other words and can never take us to real things. For postmodern thought, linguistic expressions, culture, social order, and law are “constructions” created consciously or unconsciously to acquire or retain power. To the unknowing, these constructions have the appearance of truth, fact, and reality. Hence the task of postmodern criticism is to unmask, to “deconstruct,” these deceptive structures. All of them! Those trained to think in postmodern terms see a power play, a conspiracy, in every assertion of truth, value, or fact. In Lindsay’s words, “It isn’t clear that postmodernists had much interest in doing anything further than taking things apart and playing in the wreckage, however” (p. 132).

At this point we are left asking how CRT can benefit by incorporating postmodernism. For in postmodernism, CRT’s central concepts—“race,” “systemic racism,” “Blackness,” “Whiteness,” “justice,” “equity” “diversity,” “inclusion,” etc.—are just as much power constructions as are rights, free markets, merit, and other liberal values, facts, and truth claims. They too must be deconstructed to reveal cynical masks for power, which would empty CRT’s rhetoric of its moral force.

Fusing Neo-Marxism and Postmodernism

Lindsay takes Kemberlé Crenshaw’s 1991 paper “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” to be a pivotal text in the creation of CRT. As Crenshaw sees it, postmodernism’s assertion that all group identities, values, and cultures are socially constructed—a view called antiessentialism or constructivism—can be useful to critical social justice movements such as CRT. Incorporating postmodernism into CRT enables it to expose and deconstruct hidden systemic racism. But Crenshaw also sees the need for marginalized groups to maintain a strong sense of group identity. She says, “At this point in history, a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate and destroy it” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 139).

The dominant group (white people) intends the categories “black,” “woman,” “queer,” etc. to be negative and disempowering. Crenshaw welcomes the postmodern insight that these labels are pure power constructs with no basis in the essence of the people to whom they are attached. Nevertheless, these categories possess a sort of reality that must be acknowledged. Crenshaw observes, “But to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in the world” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 137). Identity categories “are imposed, thus made meaningful and real, by systemic power and those who hold and wield it” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, pp. 139-40; emphasis original). In this way, Crenshaw can embrace postmodern constructivism as useful in critiquing the dominant group’s justifications for maintaining its privileges without giving up the reality of marginalized group identities useful in the quest for liberation. There is a huge difference, says Crenshaw, between saying “I am a person who happens to be black” and saying “I am Black.” To say “I am Black” accepts the imposed identity but transforms it into “an anchor of subjectivity…a positive discourse of self-identification’ (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 138). Think of the way certain gay people have embraced the insult “queer” and turned it into “Queer,” a proud assertion of identity. For Critical Race Theory, Black identity is a “matter of lived experience no one has standing to challenge” (“Mapping the Margins,” quoted in Lindsay, p. 137).

According to Lindsay, Crenshaw’s contribution to CRT was to figure out a way to incorporate the advantages of postmodern constructivism while making the category of race-identity immune from deconstruction. The assertion “I am Black” is irrefutable. Thanks to Crenshaw and others, CRT is Critical and Constructivist, that is, neo-Marxist and postmodern. It can exempt itself from the critique it makes of others. Liberal accusations of racism in CRT or postmodern attempts to deconstruct it will be interpreted as manifestations of systemic racism and white supremacy.

What Do Critical Race Theorists Believe?

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Today we continue our review and dialogue with James Lindsay, Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory. In Chapter Two, Lindsay lays out CRT’s core beliefs under twelve headings. The precise wording is not as important as the picture they paint of the CRT worldview and agenda.

The Twelve-Part CRT Creed

Racism is the ordinary and permanent state of society. The whole system of society has been constructed to benefit white people and disadvantage people of color. In examining any situation “The question [under CRT] is not ‘did racism take place”? but ‘how did racism manifest in that situation” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, p. 7; quoted on p. 32). Racism is so woven into the system that it cannot be rooted out apart from a complete transformation of society.

White people do not act to benefit people of color unless it is in their interest. This thesis was popularized by Dereck Bell in 1970 and is known as the “Interest-Convergence Thesis.” Under this thesis, school desegregation (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954) and other civil rights “advances” were enacted primarily to serve the purposes of whites. The system cannot act otherwise than to benefit those in charge of the system. The effect of this thesis is to cast a pall of suspicion over every interaction between whites and non-whites no matter how innocent it appears to those not sensitized.

Material conditions determine one’s character, values, and choices. The problems that beset minoritized communities today—crime, poverty, illiteracy, etc.— are the legacy of past racism. They are not the result of character flaws.

Race is socially constructed—not biologically given—and imposed by white people to maintain white dominance. Though CRT denies “race essentialism,” it nevertheless affirms that imposed race categories create a “structurally real” racial identity in a way that determines the lived reality and identity of minoritized groups.

Social structures—law, customs, policies, values—determine the positions of different groups within the power dynamics of a society. Lindsay explains, “While there is nothing [biologically] essential to being black or white, there is something structurally essential to being black or white in a white-dominant system” (p. 47; emphasis added). That is to say, “Whiteness” and “Blackness,” though features of an artificially constructed social order, determine the feelings, place, and identity of every black or white individual within this order as unavoidably as if they were written into the biology of each. As Lindsay points out, this belief grounds the logic of identity politics.

People of color—the oppressed, the minoritized—possess privileged access to knowledge white people do not have. One’s oppressed position within the power structure of society “brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism” not possessed by whites (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 9; quoted in Lindsay, p. 49). This positionality within the system gives minorities a “unique voice of color” that “is deemed to be authoritative and beyond contradiction” (p. 49). It is impossible for a white person to disagree with CRT, because CRT claims to be the authoritative source for the authentic “voice of color.”

CRT privileges storytelling, narrative-weaving, and counterstorytelling above rational argument and fact-based reasoning. CRT uses fictional stories, allegories, and parables to create narrative realities that “challenge prevailing narratives, stereotypes, and expectations…about race” (p. 52). Though such a storytelling approach can be persuasive to a receptive audience, it can be abused. Lindsay observes, “As a result of leaning upon storytelling…Critical Race Theory often presents claims of racism in situations where the evidence doesn’t support it and then considers requests for evidence to be evidence of further racism” (p. 56).

Standard narratives of American history are written from the perspective of the dominant group and must be subverted and revised to favor minority perspectives. Quoting Critical Race Theory: An Introduction: “Revisionist history examines America’s historical record, replacing comforting majoritarian interpretations of events with ones that square more accurately with minorities’ experiences. It also offers evidence, sometimes suppressed, in that very record, to support those interpretations” (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 20; Lindsay, p. 57). This belief is clearly a subcategory of the one above. CRT constructs revised historical narratives that subvert the legitimating narratives of the dominant (white) order whether they are plausible by the standard methods developed by professional historians or not.

Such liberal principles as color blindness, individual rights, equality under law, economic freedom, freedom of speech, reinforce and perpetuate the status quo of white supremacy. In their critique of liberalism, Sensoy and DiAngelo assert that “The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism…[keeps] the marginalized in their place by obscuring the larger structural systems of inequality. In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow” (Is Every one Really Free? p 5; quoted in Lindsay, p. 60). Liberalism provides excuses for white people to benefit from the racist system with a clear conscience and constructs convenient explanations for why inequality among racial groups persists. As long as the liberal order remains, white people will never freely give up their privileges to create racial equity. Hence CRT favors socialism above liberalism.

In CRT, whiteness is a kind of property—equivalent to “private property” in Marxism—which must be abolished if true equality is to be achieved. Whiteness—a rather diffuse concept—is the sum total of the exclusive privileges white people give to themselves along with their justifications and the mechanisms for their preservation. Whiteness is held as a kind of property justified in law by a right of exclusive use. Whiteness must be abolished. According to Lindsay,

“Critical Race Theory regards ‘whiteness as a property’ because it enables them to transition the Communist Revolution out of the economic sphere and into the racial-cultural sphere—with race made the central construct for understanding inequality. To become ‘less white’ and to ‘disrupt whiteness’ is to attempt to fulfill Marx’s Communist vision of the abolition of bourgeois private property in a new domain to which the American culture is more sensitive” (p. 67).

Intersectionality: people within oppressed groups must not be identified primarily as unique individuals but as members of intersecting groups. A person may be black and female or black, male, and gay, etc. and be oppressed from more than one angle. The point of intersectionality is to open the eyes of all oppressed groups—so different in many respects—to their common identity as oppressed and generate a common front against systemic oppression.

Antiracism is the practical strategy for implementing CRT. The first thing to get clear is that “antiracism” does not mean color blindness or race neutrality. It means replacing policies that promote inequality with policies that institute equity among groups. Ibram X Kendi proposes enacting a constitutional amendment establishing a Department of Antiracism. He describes its work as being:

…preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure that they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas (Interview with Politico Magazine, 2019).

The Department of Antiracism would be independent of Executive, Judicial, and Legislative oversight and would be staffed by “formally trained experts on racism” (Interview with Politico Magazine, 2019).

Kendi says elsewhere,

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination (How to Be an Antiracist, p. 19; quoted in Lindsay, p. 75).

Two-Sentence Summary

CRT’s belief system can be summarized in three words:

White America stinks!

Summarizing its agenda takes thirteen words:

Burn it to the ground and build a Socialist order ruled by Antiracists.

What Is “Critical Race Theory”?

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Today I will begin a series of essays in review and dialogue with James Lindsay’s book Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis (Orlando, FL: New Discourses, 2022). This book addresses matters of great importance to the church, Christian higher education, and American society. As readers of this blog know, I try to stay away from partisan political issues. My central aim has always been to help Christian believers, individually and corporately, to think clearly about their faith and remain true to the original, biblical faith in confusing times. In so far as I touch on politically controversial issues, I do so only in service to this central aim.

My Political Philosophy

You would not believe me if I claimed to have no political philosophy. So, let me tell you where I am coming from. I believe that the American constitutional order, along with the original Bill of Rights (and most of the later Amendments) set up in 1787/90, has been a great blessing to the church and the world. I believe the liberal order thus instituted—limited government, separation of powers, the rule of law, representative democracy, individual rights, personal, religious and economic freedom, equality before the law, etc.—is the best system of government ever devised. I am instinctively suspicious of any movement toward state control of private spaces in the name of public good. I reject all dreams of humanly constructed utopias—anarchist, communist or theocratic.

Overview

As is obvious from his book’s title, Lindsay argues that Critical Race Theory (CRT) should be understood as “race Marxism;” that is, CRT is a Marxist program that makes race instead of economic class “the central construct for understanding inequality” (p. 5) in society. We cannot grasp CRT’s convoluted vocabulary, methods and aims, asserts Lindsay, unless we first understand it as a Marxist program. Lindsay supports this charge with quotes from the original writings of the movement and a thorough examination of its historical antecedents. The book contains six chapters and 297 pages:

  • 1. Defining Critical Race Theory
  • 2. What Critical Race Theory Believes
  • 3. The Proximate Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory
  • 4. The Deep Ideological Origins of Critical Race Theory
  • 5. Critical Race Praxis—How Critical Race Theory Operates
  • 6. What Can We Do About Critical Race Theory

Defining Critical Race Theory

CRT is a belief system and an activist program, originally centered in the nation’s elite law schools (in the 1970s and 1980s) but now present in almost every college and university in America. It asserts the belief that American society is, and always has been, constructed on a foundation of white supremacy. America is racist to the core. CRT insists that the system of government that I praised above—the American constitutional order, limited government, separation of powers, the rule of law, representative democracy, individual rights, personal, religious and economic freedom, equality before the law—puts people of color at a disadvantage and was designed from the beginning with this end in mind. It cannot be fixed from within but must be replaced with a new socialist order empowered to commandeer and reallocate economic and social goods to create equity among racial groups.

Lindsay quotes CRT insiders Richard Delgado and Jean Stefrancic (p. 26):

What is Critical Race Theory? The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power…Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, NYU Press, 2001).

Lindsay provides his outsider definition of CRT:

Critical Race Theory is a revolutionary and broadly neo-Marxist mode of activism based upon the belief that the fundamental organizing principle of society is “systemic racism,” which it asserts was created and is maintained by white people in order to preserve a social structure that provides a multitude of unjust advantages over people of color, especially blacks (p. 16, bold and italics original).

Academic Interest Only?

I hope you will stick with me as I take you through Lindsay’s argument. He argues that CRT is not just another kooky academic theory. It is of a piece with the Marxist utopian visions that can be implemented only by totalitarian regimes, which have murdered hundreds of millions only to fail time and again. CRT must not be mistaken for liberalism or progressivism. It is intolerant and regressive. It is not compatible with Christianity or belief in God. It is a replacement for God and Christ. It is not truly antiracist but racist. Indeed, Lindsay finds the “Iron Law of Woke Projection” to be true every time: Of whatever crime or sin CRT accuses its opponents, you can be sure that it is guilty of the same.

The Wicked Bible

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In 1631, a London printer reprinted the King James Bible. Unfortunately, the typesetters made the glaring mistake that gave the Bible its name. Instead of reading “Thou shall not commit adultery” the seventh commandment reads “Thou shalt commit adultery” (Ex 20:14). In today’s essay, we will examine, not an unfortunate typo, but a determined strategy of interpretation that intentionally leaves out many “shalt nots.”

In the previous seven parts of this study, I described the scientific, philosophical and theological developments that made plausible the thesis that LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living are consistent with the moral and religious teachings of the Bible. I am not addressing non-believers; they don’t care what the Bible says. Nor am I speaking to progressive Christians; they reduce biblical authority to a mousey “me too” to the spirit of the times. I am writing to Christians who say that they accept the Bible’s authority for faith and morality but argue that the church can affirm LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living without compromising this stance.

In my recent book The Choice: Should the Church Affirm LGBTQ+ Identities and Ways of Living (Los Angeles: Keledei Publications, 2024), I analyzed and critiqued a book by Karen Keen: Scripture, Ethics, and the Possibility of Same-Sex Relationships (Eerdmans, 2018). In this book, Keen defends a thesis of the kind I am most concerned for my audience to understand and reject, that is, biblical moral teaching is consistent with LGBTQ+ affirmation.

Keen, along with other authors who defend the same thesis, begins with the tacit admission that, according to a plain reading of the biblical texts and the near universal consensus of the Jewish community and the church for more than 3000 years, the Bible appears unequivocally to condemn same-sex sexual activity. See Genesis 19:1-11; Lev 18:21-24; 20:13; 1 Cor 6:9-10; 1 Tim 1:8-11; and Rom 1:22-28.

In speaking to an audience that believes in the authority of the Bible and reads the Bible within the traditional church, Keen begins with the disadvantage of having the burden of proof. How can she hope to convince this audience of the affirming view? Clearly, she must (1) convince them that the “plain” meaning of the texts is not so plain as they first thought, and (2) if possible, she needs to shift the burden of proof from the affirming to the traditional side. Her book sets about to achieve both of these objectives.

As I come back to her book two years after I wrote my reply, I can now place her argument into the larger framework I’ve developed in this series. In sum, to achieve objective (1), she makes use of the kind of modern historical criticism I discussed in the previous essay under the rubric “Historical Study that Rejects Authority.” As you will see below, her interpretive strategy focuses our attention, not on the texts themselves, but on something behind the texts, that is, on the unspoken motives or aims of biblical moral rules. She moves from the objectivity of the text to possibilities about which we can only speculate. To achieve objective (2), she makes use of the view of reality that Galileo, Descartes, and Locke first proposed and Rousseau, the Romantics, Nietzsche, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir developed to their logical ends, that is, that human beings possess no created or natural, self-revealing essence, identity, or self. Individuals choose and construct who they become. Though Keen does not appeal directly to this postmodern idea, she invokes the private, internal experience of gay and lesbian people as a moral authority that must be respected—an idea that would have made no sense before modernity. Though Keen deals with gay and lesbian issues only, her arguments apply equally to the transgender experience as well.

In the first chapter (“The Plan”) of my book, I outlined the complete argument of her book along with its conclusion. On a macro level, the success of her argument depends on our acceptance of three interpretive principles and acknowledgement of three experiential facts. They are as follows:

 Interpretive Principle #1

The Bible’s positive moral teachings provide a vision of justice, goodness, and peace; they are intended to promote human flourishing.

Interpretive Principle #2

The Bible’s moral prohibitions are intended to forbid things that cause harm to human beings and the rest of creation.

Interpretive Principle #3

To apply the Bible’s moral teachings appropriately, we must deliberate about whether or not applying a biblical rule to a situation prevents harm and promotes human flourishing. Applications that harm people must be rejected.

Experienced-based Fact #1

Gay people do not choose to be gay, and the overwhelming majority cannot change their orientation.

Experienced-based Fact #2

Faithful, loving gay relationships do not cause harm to those involved or to the human community. To the contrary, they can display all the fruits of the Spirit listed in Scripture.

Experienced-based Fact #3

A large majority of gay people do not have the gift of celibacy and find that state deeply painful.

Conclusion

Because covenanted same-sex relationships embody justice, goodness, and human flourishing, do not cause harm to the people in the relationship or the human community, and unwanted celibacy causes great unhappiness to gay people, faithful deliberation must conclude that the Bible allows covenanted same-sex relationships.

The Wicked Bible

The chapters Keen devotes to defending the three interpretive principles aim at achieving objective (1), that is, creating doubts about the traditional interpretation of the anti-gay texts. The chapters that narrate the three experiential facts aim at shifting the burden of proof from the traditional interpretation to the affirming interpretation. Apart from the developments I explored in parts one through seven in this series—Galileo, Locke, and biblical criticism—Keen’s arguments make no sense at all. I can’t imagine anyone even thinking of them.

Such interpreters as Keen read the Bible’s “shalt not” as “it depends.” The Holy Bible becomes The Wicked Bible without changing a word.

A Clarification on the Historical Method of Bible Study

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Some readers of my recent essays on modern historical criticism may have come away thinking that I am against studying the Bible within its ancient historical context. I want to make it clear that I do not reject a historical approach to the Bible. In this brief note I want to clarify my views on this subject.

A Distinction

I make a huge distinction between (1) studying the Bible with the church of the past and present, as the accepted authority for the doctrine and life of the church, with the intention of remaining faithful to the original teaching of Jesus and his apostles and (2) studying the Bible as a historical document on par with other books, outside the church (usually in the university), and with no intention of conforming one’s mind to Jesus’s and his apostles’ teaching.

Historical Study Under Authority

It is appropriate for biblical scholars studying the Bible in way (1) to use every bit of historical and linguistic knowledge they can gain to help the church understand the canonical texts of the Bible. Such scholars seek to serve the church by helping it remain faithful to Jesus and the apostles instead of reading current culture, thought and idiosyncratic fancies into the words of the Bible. The goal is to let the texts speak again as they spoke to their original audiences. It is to respect the authority of the scriptures in the form in which the church received them. This way of studying the Bible is a theological discipline and is of relevance to the church.

Historical Study that Rejects Authority

Biblical scholars who pursue way (2) reject the authority of Scripture for Jesus’s and the apostles’ teaching and may also reject Jesus’s and the apostles’ authority itself. The picture of events portrayed in the canonical texts, they argue, must not be accepted at face value but must be interrogated. The scholar’s aim is not so much to let the texts speak as to search for a history behind or underneath or obscured by the text. Often, the purely academic scholar seeks for human origins for the ideas stated in the texts or the history of the literary composition of the texts. This form of Bible study is a humanistic discipline like others pursued in the secular university.

A Distinction Blurred

I do not deny the possibility of reading the biblical documents as of purely human origin and of humanistic interest only. All one has to do is apply the methods of humanistic study to the Bible apart from faith and submission to its authority or any interest in hearing the word of God in the Bible. One can try all sorts of hypotheses just to see how one can make them fit the data. With the right presuppositions and a vivid imagination one can “find” a purely human Jesus, a gnostic redeemer, an apocalyptic fanatic, or a violent revolutionary. One can find multiple versions of “lost Christianity” and pursue an endless variety of conspiracy theories. The humanistic approach can be quite interesting. In my graduate studies I took many courses that read the Bible in this way. Let them spin out their theories! But they have nothing to say to the church. The church wants to hear the word of God.

However, what concerns me is the influence of the humanistic approach on some biblical scholars in Christian colleges, universities and seminaries. These professors are trained in the humanistic approach to the Bible dominant in secular universities and many of them do not get clear on the difference between the reason the church studies the Bible and the reason humanistic scholars study the Bible. Hence, they fuse the legitimate historical study of the Bible as in way (1) described above with way (2). Apparently, they think that they are obligated to pursue the humanistic study (2) and teach its results to their students because they think it is the only way to apply the historical method to the Bible in a responsible way. And they think they are serving the church and strengthening the faith of their students by doing so. They are mistaken.

For the two ways are incompatible. They begin with different presuppositions and aim at different goals. They overlap in some of the data they study and the skills they employ, and these commonalities are often mistaken for overall compatibility. But that is like saying that robbing banks is compatible with the work of a police officer because the two activities make use of some of the same skills and tools!

The Devil is Always in the Details (of the Method)

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This is the sixth in our series of essays examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of otherwise intelligent people. In this essay I will offer further critique of the historical critical method of biblical study, focusing on the four scientific/critical principles of interpretation listed in part five.

The Principles of Historical Criticism Examined

In the previous essay, I listed four general principles of the historical critical method of Bible study. Biblical scholars derived them from the new empirical/mechanical science and the rationalistic enlightenment inspired by this revolution. The pioneers of the enlightenment—Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Locke—appealed to the stunning advances made possible by the new empirical method as setting a new paradigm for progress in all areas of knowledge. We must, they contended, reject tradition, faith, authority, and common sense, as reliable ways of attaining knowledge and rely instead on our own examination of truth and fact claims. Applying enlightenment principles to the Bible demands that (1) we treat the Bible just as we treat other books, (2) in our biblical studies we rid ourselves of all dogmatic presuppositions, such as those about divine inspiration or the authority of the creeds, (3) we interpret the biblical texts within their ancient cultural, religious, and literary horizons, (4) we must not take fact or truth claims within the biblical texts at face value but must examine them and accept them only to the extent that they are supported by historical evidence.

I titled my previous essay (#5) “How Experts Stole the Bible.” These four principles justify my choosing such a dramatic title. Taken separately or together they wrest the Bible from the arms of the church and place it in the hands of individuals to be used as a quarry from which to gather materials to build their private philosophies or religions. The secular university declares itself the true interpreter of the Bible and the moral conscience of the culture—in direct and self-conscious opposition to the church. Let’s examine each principle separately.

1. Read the Bible Just Like Other Books*

There is, of course, some truth and common sense in this principle. The Bible is written in ordinary human languages with grammatical and syntactical and semantic features that characterize all literature. Its ideas are connected by logical relations and its narratives flow in ways common to literature of its type. The church has rarely disputed this. But the church has never understood the Bible to be in all ways just like other books! It is Holy Scripture! In the early centuries, martyrs surrendered their lives rather than turn over the Scriptures to the pagan authorities. In the Bible, the church hears the word of God speaking through the prophets and incarnate in Jesus Christ. The church gathered and preserved these writings because they contained the apostolic witness to the Word of God, which according to John, “we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). The church never has, does not at present, should not, and never will read the Bible just like other books! And any institution that does so cannot be the church.

2. Responsible Bible Students Must Rid Themselves of All Faith Presuppositions

The second principle of modern biblical criticism also possesses superficial plausibility, which evaporates when examined. The church looks to the Scriptures as its canon (its rule or normative standard). Of course, the church should always be open to deepening and sharpening its faith by its continual reading of Scripture. But the early church received the apostolic writings as authoritative already having an understanding of the faith received from the apostles, memorized and stated concisely in what they called “the rule of faith.”** The church has been reading the Scriptures for over 1900 years. And it keeps on hearing its “rule of faith” confirmed by every reading. The church does not read Scripture as if it had never read it before. It reads it as a community that reaches back in time, not as isolated individuals. Each generation is taught how to read Scripture and what to expect from that reading. Reading the Scriptures without presuppositions is not only impossible; it is also self-deceptive.

3. Interpret the Bible within its Ancient Cultural, Religious, and Literary Horizons.

The third principle, too, contains much truth and much danger. In general, modern people are more aware of the historical distance between the ancient world and contemporary culture than were those, for example, living in the Middle Ages. This awareness can help us hear in those ancient texts what their first readers heard and avoid reading modern ideas and customs back into those ancient texts. It can also warn us not to take the changing customs of dress and diet as binding for all times. However, there is a tendency in modern thought toward what is called “historicism,” which is the belief that we must interpret ancient texts as locked within the ideological limits of their day. Applied to the Bible, critics account for the origin of all its ideas by borrowings from the cultural, religious, and philosophical systems contemporary with it. Historicism excludes miracles, divine revelation, inspiration, and universally applicable moral and religious truth. On historicist principles Jesus must have believed in demon possession, the coming kingdom of God, the resurrection of the dead, etc., because these were the common religious beliefs of his day.

4. Never Take the Biblical Texts at Face Value

More than the others, this principle embodies the enlightenment demand that would-be rational thinkers think for themselves and examine every proposed belief, weighing its credibility in terms of the evidence that supports it. Whereas the early church received the scriptures as a precious legacy and passes them on to each new generation to be read in faith with a view to obedience, modern biblical critics assert the right—indeed the obligation— to question the early church’s judgment at every point and relitigate every sentence. And yet, the process by which the earliest church received and passed on its knowledge of Jesus and the apostolic witness is largely lost to us, except what we have in the canonical New Testament. The process cannot be recovered. But the church of the 1st through the 4th centuries assures us that the end result of the process—the New Testament—is true to Jesus and the apostolic witness. Either we trust it or we don’t.

But modern historians claim to have developed criteria by which to reexamine every detail of the New Testament and judge its historical veracity. They speak with such confidence about “what really happened” you wonder whether they may have mastered the science of time travel! However, the more you read historical critical reconstructions of New Testament history, the more you realize that it’s all speculation and guesswork based on modern notions of what is psychologically plausible, metaphysically possible, and morally and politically desirable. Moreover, scholars reach wildly different conclusions even when they use the same methods. Apart from respect for the canonical texts as they are written, there are no objective standards for interpretation.

*You might be interested in a recent article by James A. Thompson, “Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Higher Critic,” 67. #4 (2025). Restoration Quarterly. Thompson addresses the first principle: read the Bible like any other book.

**See the excellent study by the renowned church historian Everett Ferguson: The Rule of Faith: A Guide (Cascade, 2015).

Next Time: We will see how progressive Christian interpreters use the historical critical method to find justification in the New Testament for acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living.

How Experts Stole the Bible

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This is the fifth in our series of essays examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of otherwise intelligent people. In this essay we will continue our discussion of biblical authority in hope of discovering how some Christian people could come to think that the church should affirm the whole range of LGBTQ+ identities and behaviors even though the plain sense of the biblical text and the unanimous tradition of the church forbid it.

Faith and Authority

In the previous essay I argued that the most basic reason that the earliest church received the Bible as the authority for its faith and life is that it contains the teaching and deeds of Jesus and the witness and teaching of his chosen apostles. Jesus and his apostles were authorities in the sense that you either believe them and follow them or not. This decision marked the distinction between becoming a Christian and a church member or remaining a nonbeliever and outsider. Late in the first century or early in the second, in the absence of the voices of living apostles, the written and unwritten words of Jesus and the apostles, treasured and passed on by the church, called for the same decision.

Note well that the decision to believe the Gospel was (and is) simultaneously the decision to accept the authority of Jesus and his apostles for all things pertaining to the new faith and life. Moreover, the authority of Jesus’s words and deeds and that of the teaching of the apostles was extended to those writings that the church believed preserved and passed on that teaching, the New Testament canon. That is to say, the church not only accepted the words of Jesus and the apostles as authoritative but it accepted the New Testament as the authority for the location of that inspired teaching.

As I pointed out in the previous essay, by the early part of the second century, the church had for some time been quoting the Four Gospels, Acts, and the thirteen letters of Paul as authoritative for defining Christian faith and morals. By the middle of the fourth century, all 27 books of our New Testament were recognized as canonical, that is, as authoritative. The New Testament canon of the fourth century has remained unchanged since that time—for Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant churches. Though Orthodox theologians tend to quote the ecumenical creeds and the Fathers as authoritative interpreters of Scripture, they recognize Scripture as the foundational authority. Roman Catholic theologians tend to argue from tradition and the authoritative teaching of the church, but they also acknowledge Scripture as the most basic norm. Protestant theologians claim to base all their doctrine and theological arguments on Scripture alone. Scripture, then, is the common language and authority for all three. It is the basis for ecumenical discussion. To refuse the authority of Scripture is to exclude oneself from the historic church in all its forms.

The Scientific Revolution Again

As I argued in Parts 2 and 3 of this series, in developing their empirical/mechanical philosophy Galileo, Descartes, and Locke destroyed the classical and common-sense belief that creation reveals itself truly—even if only partially—in the way it appears to us. They drove a wedge between the human mind and the “external” world. For Locke, human identity, the self, is not determined by one’s place in the order of creation or even by dwelling in a particular body but only by consciousness. The identity of the self is its continuity of consciousness or its consciousness of continuity. One cannot achieve scientific or reliable knowledge of nature or the self by faith, uncritical acceptance of tradition or submission to authority. One must apply the methods of science to examine all truth claims and judge for oneself. Only then can one claim to be a reasonable person.* What, then, of the authority of Scripture?

The Rise of Modern Biblical Criticism

If you’ve read the previous essays in this series, it won’t surprise you when I assert that modern biblical criticism owes its genesis to efforts to apply the methods and standards of modern science to the Bible. From the second to the seventeenth century, the Bible had been quoted, preached and studied by the church as an unimpeachable authority. In its creeds, confessions of faith and theological disputes, the church quoted the Bible as the final word on the subject under discussion. Faith, tradition and received authority had been for eighteen centuries the grounds of the authenticity, truth and certainty of the Bible.

But by the dawn of the 18th century, the philosophies of Galileo, Descartes, and Locke had made faith, tradition, and authority seem unreliable sources of knowledge. The new science demanded that all traditional truth claims be critically examined by rational/scientific methods. To refuse to examine one’s traditional beliefs critically was to risk being labeled superstitious, gullible, irrational, or in other ways backward. From what I have read, this cultural shift in what it means to be a rational person lies at the beginning of modern biblical criticism.

Of course, the Bible is not a physical object that can be studied by empirical science and expressed in mathematical language; it is a historical text. And some biblical scholars began to develop a science of biblical studies in analogy to the new science of nature.** Among the first principles of such a new historical science of the Bible as it developed in the 18th and 19th centuries are (1) read the Bible just as one reads any other book, (2) biblical studies must rid itself of all dogmatic presuppositions, such as those about divine inspiration or the authority of the creeds, (3) interpret the biblical texts within their ancient cultural, religious, and literary horizon, (4) fact or truth claims within the biblical texts must not be taken at face value but must be examined and accepted only to the extent that they are supported by historical evidence.

At first reading, these critical principles may seem to lead only to radical skepticism and unbelief. In fact, however, these four principles were used in the 18th and 19th centuries to reach conservative as well as radical conclusions and the whole range of opinion between. Conservative scholars, who trusted the church to have preserved and passed on the original and true faith, used historical critical principles in their efforts to justify the traditional faith on rational grounds. Theodor Zahn (1838-1933), for example, argued that the Four Gospels and the letters of Paul were considered canonical before the end of the 1st century. In our own day, N.T. Wright (b. 1948) carries on the project of using historical critical principles to support a conservative reading of the gospels and Paul. Other scholars of a more skeptical bent argued that much that had been accepted on faith and authority in the past could not be supported by sound historical examination. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) argued that much of the New Testament teaching about Jesus is not history at all but myth. Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860) concluded that hardly any of the letters attributed to Paul were actually written by him and that much of the New Testament was written in the 2nd century. According to Baur, the development of the earliest church was driven by division between the extreme Jewish party led by Peter and the Hellenistic party led by Paul. The resolution came only in the 2nd century with the creation of the catholic church.

The story of the rise and triumph of modern historical criticism is much too long and complicated for me to tell in these essays. But I believe the essential feature of all its forms is this: since the triumph of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment based on it, a person who wishes to be known by peers as an intellectually responsible thinker must not appear to accept any truth claim on mere faith, tradition, or authority. One must, instead, place all truth claims on the witness stand for cross examination. Only those that withstand scrutiny may be accepted with intellectual integrity. As a corollary to this principle, because the number of things we can know with absolute certainty are few, the quality of beliefs may be ranked on a scale that ranges from certain knowledge through various levels of probability to the clearly false. Intellectual integrity demands that one proportion belief to the level of probability. It does not take much imagination to guess that many biblical critics severely reduced the extent of our knowledge of Jesus and the early church compared to that assumed by tradition.

Demystifying Modern Historical Criticism

The social location of the leading historical critics plays an important part in our assessment of their project. To engage at the highest level of modern historical criticism a student must gain an elite education in one of the great universities in the Western world under the supervision of a recognized scholar in the field. One must spend 10 years or more mastering ancient languages and cultures and undergoing thorough socialization into the history of the discipline. The only social location where such rigor can be sustained is the university. The modern university—especially from 1800 to 1960***—is a community of intellectuals bound together by shared academic values: respect in the community depends on adhering to the critical principle mentioned above, that is, the scholar’s conclusions must be supported by reason and evidence alone, not by faith, tradition, or authority. People who do not live within (or near) this elite subculture do not feel the same pressure to conform to this rigorous rationalism as do those whose identity and livelihood depends on its good graces. Indeed, they may find it snobbish, abstract, irrelevant, arrogant, speculative, and irreverent.

Though the number of elite biblical critics is small and they live within the cloistered walls of the university and speak an obscure language hardly anyone outside can understand, their influence extends beyond this narrow circle. (1) Many college students take religion or Bible courses during their college careers at secular or church-related universities. Not many of these courses are taught by top historical critics, but they are taught by the second and third tier students of those elite scholars. Or, students read textbooks that present the skeptical conclusions of biblical criticism as if they were established facts. Perhaps more importantly, students absorb the enlightenment skepticism toward faith, tradition, and authority. (2) University educated people, especially those who attended graduate schools, tend to adopt an elitist identity, which views people of traditional religious faith as unenlightened and backward. They couldn’t defend their elitist views or explain why faith, tradition, and authority are not good grounds for belief. They simply adopt the snobbish attitudes of their teachers. (3) Even professors of Bible, theology and ethics who teach in Christian universities and colleges for the most part received their graduate training under the influence of modern critical scholars. Some of them uncritically adopt the critical methods and conclusions of their teachers and pass them on to their students. (4) The clergy of most denominations are taught some form of historical criticism in their seminary educations and socialized to some degree into the skeptical and elitist academic attitude.

Notes

*Locke himself applied these methods to Christianity in his book The Reasonableness of Christianity.

**Many books have contributed to my understanding of this subject. One of the most important is Werner Georg Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems, trans. S. McLean Gilmour and Howard C. Kee (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972).

***Beginning in the 1960s the postmodern model of the university began to compete with the modern/enlightenment model. The postmodern university abandons rationality to embrace leftist ideology and activism.

Next Time: How progressive exegetes and theologians use the principles of modern biblical criticism to ignore the plain meaning of the biblical texts and find their own thoughts behind, underneath, and beside the words of the biblical texts.

The Logic of Biblical Authority

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This essay is the fourth in our series examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of otherwise intelligent people. In this essay we change our focus from the culture in general to the church and the Bible. Perhaps we can stretch our minds to understand how a culture that has abandon reason common sense, and knows nothing about the Bible, could fall for the new gender ideology. But now we ask how it came about that the Bible, which so plainly affirms the created order of male and female in its moral teaching, could be taken by many self-identified Christian people as affirming LGBTQ+ identities and ways of living as legitimately Christian. Today we focus on biblical authority.

The Genesis of Biblical Authority

The earliest church looked to the Old Testament, the teaching of Jesus, and the apostolic witness as the authorities that defined its identity. As we see clearly in the gospels, Jesus came to call the Jewish people to repentance in preparation for the coming kingdom of God. He spoke with a new authority, not to reject the law and prophets, but “to fulfill them” (Matt 5:17). Jesus prayed to the God of the Jews as “our father” (Matt 6:9-13). The early church proclaimed the resurrected Jesus as the long-anticipated Messiah (King) of the Jews. It understood itself as a continuation of the chosen people of God. Hence it treasured the Old Testament as one of its defining authorities.

The church, however, read the Jewish scriptures in light of the new thing that happened in Jesus. Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom, his miracles, exorcisms, welcoming of outcasts, conflict with the Jewish religious authorities…and above all his crucifixion by Jerusalem and Rome and his resurrection from the dead—all of these things signaled that God had done something new and completely unexpected in Jesus the Messiah. From now on, the people of God must gather around Jesus, trust him, listen to him, remember him, and follow him (Mark 9:7). Everything must be understood in his light: the meaning of the Old Testament, the character and purposes of God, and the moral life. Hence the words and deeds of Jesus were treasured by the church as of equal (if not greater) authority with the Old Testament.

Jesus’s words and deeds were heard and seen by many people, especially by his chosen twelve apostles. The Twelve and many other disciples, including Paul, were granted an appearance of the resurrected Jesus. It seems that strictly speaking an “apostle” is one personally commissioned and sent by the resurrected Jesus as a witness (Acts 1:21-22; 1 Cor 9:1-2). Because of their unique relationship to Jesus as his designated witnesses and the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, the apostles possessed authority to proclaim the teaching and deeds of Jesus, to interpret the meaning of his death and resurrection, and to govern the early church with wisdom. Hence the writings that preserved the teaching and the deeds of Jesus and the apostolic teaching were received with the same reverence as the teaching they contained.

These three authorities—the Old Testament, Jesus’s teachings and deeds, and the apostolic witness and teaching—are reflected in our Bibles today: (1) Old Testament, (2) Four Gospels, and (3) Acts, the letters, treatises, and the Apocalypse. Hence the authority of the Bible to which the church appeals today is derived from the authority of Jesus and his apostles. Specifically, the Bible’s unique authority is grounded in its preservation and communication of the original teaching of Jesus and his apostles.

What is Authority?

So far, I have used the word “authority” without defining it. But it is important to get a clearer idea of this concept. Authority is a quasi-legal concept. It implies power, legitimacy, and competence. Authorities are identified as directed to a particular community or subject area—Roman law, the US Constitution, the King of Spain, etc. An authority has the first (as author) and last (as power) word on a subject. Authorities declare what is or shall be and invite trust and obedience or disbelief and disobedience; they do not propose opinions for negotiation or debate. Jesus taught “as one who had authority,” not as a mere commentator or one offering a likely opinion (Matt 7:28-29). He spoke with divine authority, which called for decision, not quibbling. The apostles spoke with authority derived from Jesus—that is from their firsthand knowledge of Jesus and their appointment and empowerment by Jesus to speak on his behalf (Matt 28:18-19).

For those who wish to be recognized as disciples of Jesus, that is, as Christians (Acts 11:16), submitting to the apostolic authority and teaching is essential. Recall what Jesus said to the seventy in the limited commission: “Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me; but whoever rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16). And who can forget what Jesus said to Peter: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matt 16:19).

The Bible Today

The church of today appeals to the Bible consisting of the 36 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament as the authority to define and regulate all things Christian. The Old Testament scriptures collected in our Bibles were already current in Jesus’s day and were held by most Jews to be holy. As one can see from the quotations in the New Testament, the early church appealed to the full range of Jewish scriptures, the law, prophets, and writings. The story of the collection of the 27 books of the New Testament is a bit more complicated.

As far as we know, Jesus did not write down his teachings. He traveled around Galilee, Judea, and eventually Jerusalem teaching by word of mouth. His disciples followed him and listened to him. They witnessed his miracles, words, and his death and resurrection. The apostles, too, after Pentecost proclaimed and taught by word of mouth. After persecution broke out in Jerusalem, believers were scattered everywhere preaching as they went. They spread throughout Judea, Samaria, and Syria (Acts 7-9). The Christian gospel was first proclaimed, passed on, and remembered by word of mouth by faithful disciples and institutionalized in such offices as prophets, elders, and bishops. And as long as the first generation of disciples and apostles were alive there was no great impetus to write it all down. The essential gospel could be memorized and recited in a few minutes. Besides, they possessed the Old Testament with its moral teaching, prophetic admonitions, psalms, and wisdom.

Paul’s letters are our first preserved Christian documents. Paul wrote First Thessalonians around 50 AD, about 15 years after his conversion. With the exception of Romans, Paul wrote his letters to deal with problems that had recently arisen in churches he founded. He did not write with a view of preserving the history of Jesus and the church. But his letters are invaluable witnesses to the gospel and history of the early church.

It is important to distinguish between the act of writing the New Testament documents and the acts of collecting, copying, distributing and recognizing them as authoritative. As we can infer from the Prologues to the Gospel of Luke (Lk 1:1-4) and Acts (1:1-3) and a reference in Hebrews 2:3, the second and third generations began to feel the need to compile and record the teaching of Jesus and the history of the early church. Before the end of the first century Paul’s letters were being copied, collected, and distributed as witnessed by the New Testament book of 2 Peter, the letter of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians (95 AD) and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (110 AD). The Four Gospels were probably collected and circulated in the late first or early second century. All were listed in the Roman Church’s Muratorian Canon (170 AD) and in Irenaeus’s list of NT books (190 AD). It seems that by the end of the second century most of the 27 books of the present New Testament were recognized as authoritative (i.e., as canonical). A few, however, were disputed and not universally recognized until later: Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter. The gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul were never disputed and were passed on as part of the apostolic tradition. The disputed books were questioned because of doubts about their apostolic origin. By the middle of the fourth century, they were universally and formally accepted because their connection with an apostle or the apostolic tradition was acknowledged.

A few observations are in order at this point: (1) The teaching of Jesus and the witness of his apostles did not become authoritative because the church recognized them. They are foundational for the church in that the church came into being by accepting them. (2) The first century church taught and passed on the same authoritative tradition by word of mouth and written word without distinction or tension between the two. Only in the middle of the second century did questions arise about the limits of the written canon. Hence only with respect to a few writings—Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter—can it be said that the church deliberated and decided the canon of the New Testament. The heart of the New Testament canon was determined before the church became conscious of the need to set limits to the canon. (3) In this process—whether informal and unself-conscious or formal and self-conscious—the authority of the oral and written tradition derived from the divine authority of Jesus’s words and deeds and his designated witnesses, the apostles. Hence the authority of our Bible derives from its role as the unique deposit of the tradition of Jesus’s words and deeds and the apostolic witness to Jesus.

Next Time: we will pursue the questions: do our Bibles perform this function, and how do we know this?

The Imprisoned Mind and the Disengaged Self: How Personal Identity Was Separated from the Created Order

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Today’s post is the third in our series examining how the statement, “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, p. 19), came to be taken seriously by millions of intelligent people. In previous posts, we examined the differences between pre-modern and the modern ways of experiencing the created order. Before the modern scientific revolution, people experienced the appearances as revelatory of the inner reality of things; they used such concepts as substance, essence, soul, beauty, goodness, purpose, and meaning to designate real qualities of things that could be known by contemplating the appearances. Galileo and other early modern scientists drove a wedge between the appearances and the inner reality of things. Things may appear meaningful, good, beautiful, hot, cold, sweet, loud, etc., but these qualities exist only in the human psyche as caused by—but in no way resembling— material impacts on the senses. The only knowable aspects of the reality of things are those that are mathematically measurable. In other words, the only truths our minds can know about things in themselves are mathematical expressions and equations. All else is mere appearance.

As I read the history of modern philosophy—not being an expert but a well-read non-expert—the new empirical/mathematical/mechanical science set new standards for what counts as genuine knowledge of nature. Indeed, it set a new bar for what it means to know anything. In this way, the scientific revolution set the agenda for all areas of study—political philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, theology, history, biblical studies, etc. Every area of study measured itself by the gold standard of mathematics. Because mathematics can be applied to the mechanical aspects of nature there is a tendency to reduce nature to material atoms (or quanta) organized and interacting in a mechanical way.

We see here two of the central challenges the new science posed to philosophy in the seventeenth century: (1) It must develop a new epistemology for the empirical age—what does it mean to know and how can we attain knowledge within the limits of empiricism? (2) It must work out the implications of the new science for all areas of study. For this series, I am interested in philosophical anthropology and theology. How shall we understand the nature and operations of the human mind, if we assume that the entire world outside our minds—including our bodies—is a material machine with which we make contact only through sense perception and can know truly only in mathematical categories?

John Locke and The Imprisoned Mind

Though he wrote at the end of the seventeenth century and many thinkers had already worked on the two challenges mentioned above, John Locke’s book Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1698) proved a watershed in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Many leading European philosophers for the next century—until Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—wrote either in support or in opposition to Locke.

I will again quote Locke’s statement about the distinction between primary and secondary qualities:

“These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number. Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colors, sounds, tastes, etc. These I call secondary qualities” (John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1698, II. 8).

Locke’s self-appointed task is to explain how the human mind gains understanding of the external world, given the new science. From where do the mind’s ideas come? Locke rejected the traditional belief that the human mind comes into being furnished with ideas that refer to the external world, morality, and God. Locke asserts, instead, that the mind begins as an empty slate, ready to receive sense impressions from the empirical world through its mechanical causality.

If the mind is an empty slate, as Locke contends, how does it receive, interpret, and organize ideas into the vast system of concepts, categories, memories, and laws that constitute our mental life? What are the native powers of the mind. As far as I can tell—as a well-read non-expert—we are endowed at birth with the passive power of sense perception, an active power of reason, and an instinctive drive toward pleasure and away from pain. The external world possesses primary qualities (powers) that strike our perceptive organs and cause the mind to form simple ideas. For Locke, an “idea” is any intelligible object within the mind. As a reasoning power the mind associates compatible simple ideas to form more complex ideas and so builds up our conceptual world. Notice that it is not already existing ideas, forms, and essences that are communicated from external things by means of the senses to the mind. Locke is agnostic about the existence of such things. External things contact the senses only as mechanical/material impacts. In a way Locke never explains, the mind receives these physical impacts and the physical changes they make to our sense organs as intelligible ideas.

Locke’s Disengagement of the Self from Its Body and Soul

As I said above, Locke is agnostic if not skeptical about the existence of forms, substances, and essences. In any case, we cannot attain scientific knowledge of them. We gain all knowledge from the senses as I described above. Locke applies the same empirical limits to the human person. Our knowledge of ourselves and our minds must also come—at least indirectly—from the senses and the ideas impressed on our minds through them. What is a person, and what is personal identity? How do you know that you are the same person you were five years ago? Previous thinkers argued that persistence of personhood (or continuity of personal identity) presupposes the existence of the immaterial, substantial soul. But Locke contends that we cannot experience the substantial, immaterial soul so as to be able to use it as a guarantee of persistent identity.  Hence Locke disengaged the two and made personhood a matter of continuity of consciousness, which we can experience as an activity of mind in awareness of its ideas as its own. I am the same person because I am conscious of being the same self. Consciousness, not substance, constitutes the self. Consciousness (the self) is not a substance. To illustrate, he imagines the same self (a person) inhabiting different bodies and different souls at different times and finds no contradiction. On Locke’s premises one can imagine a person, that is, a consciousness of being oneself, inhabiting a male body/soul at one time and a female body/soul at another—though to my knowledge Locke did not conduct this thought experiment.

Takeaways

1. John Locke applied the methods and assumptions of the new mechanical/empirical science to the human mind and its workings. He rejects the belief that the human mind possesses inborn ideas, forms, or any information in common with the external world or that it receives such information from outside the mind by way of our senses. Our minds construct the world we know out of simple ideas created by mechanical impacts on our sense organs. Creation is thus silenced.

2. It would be too much to say that John Locke invented the modern self. But he disengaged the personal identity (the self) from both body and soul. The self or person refers not to the human as a biological being or to the soul understood as a metaphysical substance or form but to our consciousness of being the same self through time.

3. Locke’s view of personal identity is not exactly the same as such modern concepts as intersectionality or gender identity. However, these modern views presuppose something like Locke’s disengagement of the self from the human body and soul. Perhaps the modern assertion “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” could not have occurred to Locke as a possible combination of ideas because of the biological meaning of the word “woman.” On a biological level male and female are incompatible. However, if by “woman” one means “consciousness of possessing qualities usually associated with persons inhabiting female bodies” Locke’s definition of person/self would seem to allow its possibility. Possessing a male or female body could not be taken as a revelation of one’s created identity. Indeed, I am not sure Locke’s view of the person could accommodate the concept of a given or created identity communicated to us, for example, by means of the appearance of the human body or its reproductive function.

Next Time: Background to the progressive/liberal view of the authority of Scripture for Christian faith and life.

Biology and The Nature of the Sexes

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I write this post to recommend a new book recently published by my colleague and friend Tomas Bogardus: The Nature of the Sexes: Why Biology Matters (Routledge, pp. 156). Bogardus has been publishing for the past six years in the areas of the philosophy of sex and gender. In an era when expression of feelings, language manipulation and political rhetoric dominate public discussion of sex and gender, Bogardus calls us back to biological reality and rational rigor.

Overview

In Chapter 1, “Introduction,” Bogardus explains the significance of the debate and whets our appetite for the book’s argument. In Chapter 2, “What the Sexes Could Not Be,” he surveys four unacceptable proposals for specifying the differences between the sexes. All four views take sex to be “complex” in a variety of ways: (1) the word “sex” is an ambiguous term, (2) the meaning of sex depends on the research context, (3) the word “sex” is indeterminate and can apply to a range of things, (4) according to the “property-cluster hypothesis,” there is no one property necessary to the definition of sex. Bogardus examines and rejects each of these views.

In Chapter 3, “What the Sexes Could Be: The Gamete View,” Bogardus builds up to his understanding of the defining characteristics of the sexes. (Just so we are clear, a gamete is a reproductive cell, sperm or egg, that when united form a zygote.) The gamete view in general, defines males as organisms capable of producing sperm and females as organisms capable of producing eggs. Bogardus surveys three views within the umbrella of “the Gamete View” and finds weaknesses and strengths in each one. Combining the strengths of the surveyed views, Bogardus defines the sexes this way:

Put simply, a male is an organism with the function of producing sperm, and a female is an organism with the function of producing eggs. Put more carefully, the sexes are particular kinds of functions—activated higher order functions—of entire organisms, coded in master programs specifying the development, organization, and maintenance of components themselves programed to produce (and transport, etc.) some type of anisogamous gamete, for example, sperm or ova (p. 68).

Chapter 4, “Gender is Defined in Terms of the Sexes,” argues that “gender” should be defined in terms of biological sex. Gender talk cannot be disengaged from reference to biological sex or it becomes meaningless. Bogardus explains why: “To understand what gender identity is, one must understand what a gender is, and to understand that, one must understand the sexes” (p. 104). To say, “I am a woman trapped in the body of a man” uses the word “woman” in a confused way. It fuses typical “feminine modes of presentation of women” with the female sex. Although simultaneous hermaphroditism is a reality in simpler organisms, humans are never both male and female in the biological sense of “activated higher order functions” capable of producing both sperm and ova. Bogardus recommends avoiding the word “gender” altogether and using such “sex-based alternatives” (p. 104) as “biological sex,” “norms of the sexes,” ‘roles of the sexes,” “adult sexes,” “juvenile sexes;” or one can continue to speak about man and woman, boys and girls.

Chapter 5, “When Biology Meets Politics,” addresses the thorny issues circling around the politicization of sex and gender. Bogardus argues that we should defer to biologists in the matter of defining sex, and he refutes those who wish to enforce linguistic norms designed to engineer a new understanding of sex that better conforms to the political aspirations of certain groups. As an example, suppose we attempt to enforce the rule that “a person is male only if he identifies as male.” The circularity of such expressions is glaringly obvious. How can maleness be something that exists only because of an act of identification unless maleness is something objective one can identify as? Apart from reference to biological reality, how could we know what the expressions “is male” and “as male” mean?

In Chapter 6, Bogardus defends using pronouns that track with biological sex. Among other reasons for this contention, Bogardus points out that in our social relations there are good reasons to know the sex of the person we are speaking with. Compelling examples include finding a mate and keeping female spaces safe from predators, who overwhelmingly tend to be males.

Recommendation

The Nature of the Sexes cuts through the linguistic fog and political posturing that plague public and academic discussions of sex and gender. It calls us back to common sense and biological reality. In contrast to talking heads on cable news and ideologues in academia, Bogardus sounds like the voice of reason itself. I learned something new on every page! I recommend this book highly!

Bogardus Podcasts

If you listen to podcasts, you may enjoy these three presentations by Bogardus. Very informative and entertaining:

Here’s a talk from September summarizing the main arguments of the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI6g5iuRL14

Here’s a recording of a lecture Bogardus gave at the University of Maine a couple years ago, with a Q&A from students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGYI4sWhAfI

Here’s a popular level debate Bogardus did a few years ago with a popular left-wing Youtube influencer who goes by the name ‘Vaush’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHxHSD4qWEM