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.

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.”

Resources

• What Is Critical Theory?: A Concise Christian Analysis
• Bradley G. Green at Southern 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