Towards Developing a Christ-ic Critical Lens

What would a Christ-centered Critical Theory even look like? Would it be redundant (i.e., is there something else out there already doing what it would do)? What would is be used for?

What about models? Is the medieval period the place to look for a model of such a thing (I am only glancingly familiar with this period)? Do I look to the different writers of the different Testaments (very, very familiar with these)? To the early Church Fathers (I am mostly familiar with random quotes--excepting Augustine: I've read the Confessions and City of God)? To Puritans such as William Bradford (I've read Of Plymouth Plantation)? To modernists such as C. S. Lewis (I've read some of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, a discourse he gave entitled "The Inner Ring," and various quotes)? All of these together? None of them at all?

If I am to employ a Christ-ic critical lens (so to speak), I suppose that I will have to come to terms with all of these, just as a Marxist scholar must come to terms with, and be familiar with, Stalinism and Leninism. However, that does not mean that I must accept any of them. 

And with that statement, we begin a framework for a Christ-ic critical lens.  

For a scholar who's ideas are founded upon the teachings of Jesus, Jesus's ideas must be the principle source and model of ideas, the origin of all other assumptions.[1] Indeed, each of the previously mentioned interpreters of Jesus's words must, themselves, be evaluated and critiqued according to the teachings of Jesus, and not the other way around (even the teachings that purport to be the teachings of of Jesus must be evaluated in terms of the teachings of Jesus); regardless of what other interpretations of his teachings have been passed around, I cannot accept those interpretations on their own merits, any more than a Marxist scholar should confuse Marxism with its Stalinist and Leninist (or even Lennon-ist) interpretations.

Since we are working out definitions, perhaps it would be best to start with some definitions. 

I know I'll get some flack for using Wikipedia (although it is increasingly acceptable in academic circles), but their definition of "Critical Theory" will suffice. Critical theory is defined there as "an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities." From this very broad definition, we get that critical theory is simply criticism, or close evaluation, of anything--art, culture, politics--that is founded upon some theoretical framework. This definition gels quite well with the illustrious M. H. Abrams definition of critical theory as it is applied specifically to literature, where "literary criticism" is an "overall term for [. . .] defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating" literature and "theoretical criticism proposes an explicit theory of literature, in the sense of general principles" that direct both the production and evaluation of literature (A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed., 49-50).


Any critical theory, then—whether it is applied merely to literature or to something broader—is based upon some "theory" [2] or another about how social systems should be structured, how they should function, and whether or not they are accomplishing those goals.  That theory, in turn, is itself based upon a set of assumptions about the world--how it should work, how people should act, etc. . 


So, for example: feminism (I could have used any theoretical framework--if you want to explore others, look here). Despite all the bad press it gets, feminism at its simplest is a social theory claiming that women, historically and/or actually, have been unequal to men in their "political, economic, and social rights and [. . .] opportunities" (Wikipedia), and thinks or feels that this is not a good thing. Ostensibly, then, the efforts of "feminists" are designed to rectify that perceived wrong. 

Feminist critical theory is a framework (or a group of frameworks) based on this initial (and, I would argue, not irrational) assumption. So, when feminists look at art, or politics, or culture, with an eye to analyze and evaluate, they look through that particular theoretical "lens;" they seek expose (and often vilify) with the intent to rectify, perceived injustices between the sexes. That these inequalities are realities is a given assumption for a feminist. That these inequalities are bad is an equally given assumption.

Marxist critical theory does roughly the same thing as feminist critical theory, except it's primary concern is with class (one could argue that these are two sides of the same coin). Marxist theorists seek to expose the inequalities they claim exist between the classes, a situation they blame on Capitalism. That Capitalism is bad is, from a Marxist perspective, a given assumption; it is the very idea that creates and perpetuates all inequality. 


Moreover, Marxist critical theory assumes that Karl Marx was right when he proposed his ideas about culture and the causes of inequality. Marxists assume that Capitalism is to blame for inequality; they assume inequality of opportunity is a reality and that it is bad and that it is a wrong that need to be rectified. 


I could go on and on with other examples but hopefully this suffices.  


So, from this basic template, I can begin to get a sense of what would need to happen in order to develop a Christ-centered critical theory, and what that theory would entail, something I'll get into in the next entry.

---

[1] I am well aware that NONE of the writings that we have are Jesus’s writings; however, this poses only minimal problems for examining the world critically from a Christian perspective. While there are assumptions that must be made—the charitable assumption, for example, that the Gospel writers are genuine and that they were genuinely attempting to present Jesus’s teachings as sincerely and authentically as possible, rather than merely presenting a self-serving interpretation of his teachings—and while I can see how such assumptions could be problematic to some, but I do not think that they are any more problematic than the accepting a Marx or a Burke or a Derrida as one’s primary critical perspective. In fact, such assumptions would only make Christianity one more critical voice in what Gerald Graff has characterized as the “conflicts” in academic discourse.

[2] The word “theory” has an interesting and, I think, pertinent etymology, what Samuel Weber refers to as a “well-known an often-discussed fact” that was neither well known nor often discussed for me until I read his book Theatricality as Medium, that is the fact that the terms “theory” and “theatre” come from the same place: “the Greek word thea, designating a place fro which to observe or see” (2-3). It is reasonable, then, that a “theory”—itself a metaphoric construct—is now explicated by an appeal to the another sight-centric metaphor: the “lens.” Theories figuratively focus and define our intellectual vision, our way of seeing, helping us know not only what to look at, but determining how we what we are looking at. A theory is, itself, a medium, and could be defined as a cognitive framework from which one "looks at," or intellectually understands and interprets, the world.