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How Critical Theory Redefines Good As Evil

Bradley Green’s latest book, ‘What is Critical Theory,’ offers valuable insight into how Marxism threatens to undermine the family and subvert Christian morality.

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Although the word “metanarrative” was popularized by a postmodern French philosopher who did not believe that such a thing existed, Christians have adopted the word, using it in a positive sense to describe the overall shape of God’s providential plan. The metanarrative of creation, fall, redemption (many today add reconciliation and glorification) defines the movement from Genesis to Revelation, even as it contains all other stories. Sacred and secular stories alike are hallowed by their connection to the biblical metanarrative, a connection that infuses them with transcendent meaning and ultimate purpose.

Whether the story is told by epic fantasy writers, Hollywood movie moguls, Nazi propagandists, Marxist revolutionaries, progressive politicians, entrepreneurial CEOs, or snake oil salesmen, the same pattern of creation, fall, redemption emerges: There was a time when things were good and right and whole; something happened to disrupt and fragment that original wholeness; but all can be set right again. We are all of us trapped in the second act of the play, unable to go back to the lost time of primal innocence but yearning to go forward to a new age of gold.

Marx was an atheist who denied not only God’s existence but the existence of the supernatural; and yet, as a man made in God’s image, he could not break completely with the creation-fall-redemption pattern that is woven into the tapestry of reality. Like Rousseau before him, he looked back to a lost Eden of equality before the “sins” of private property and socioeconomic inequality chained the bodies of the poor and the minds of the rich. Still, both thinkers harbored a faith that utopia was coming when all would be equal again. That Rousseau and Marx’s perversions of the biblical metanarrative led, respectively, to the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror and to the Soviet Gulag and show trials has not disrupted the faith of their disciples.

In his judicious and lucid analysis of the key critical theorists of the Frankfurt School who reworked the ideas of Marx and passed them down to the architects of the sexual revolution and LGBTQ , the critical race theorists of BLM, and the progressive purveyors of woke education, Bradley G. Green makes effective use of the creation-fall-redemption narrative in his latest book, What is Critical Theory: A Concise Christian Analysis. By measuring the theories of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and, especially, Herbert Marcuse against the three stages of the metanarrative, Green skillfully unpacks the assumptions and implications of critical theory, exposing it as “a kind of Christian heresy.”

Green, professor of theological studies at Union University, begins by explaining one of the key motivators of the Institute for Social Research, which was established in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923. In the wake of the collapse of Germany after WWI, the Marxist intellectuals of the Frankfurt School expected a Communist revolution would take place to liberate the proletariat from the bourgeois capitalists who were exploiting them. Instead, living conditions and salaries rose as revolutionary zeal waned. To make matters worse, “the growth of Nazism and fascism from 1924 to 1933 (especially with Hitler in Germany) seemed to move against the much-hoped-for Marxist revolution.”

How could such things be? Had Marx not “proven” scientifically that man’s beliefs, actions, and consciousness were products of economic forces over which he had........

© The Federalist