Origin Story
To really understand critical theory, you have to understand its origins, its provenance. What gave rise to it? The critical theorists came out of 1920s Germany. They are virtually German-Jewish Marxists. And they looked longingly from Germany over to Russia and saw the Russian Revolution of 1917. And they’re sitting there in the early 1920s saying, Well, if the conditions were right for revolution in Russia, why isn’t it happening in Germany? So it’s an attempt to say, Well, we’re still Marxists, but maybe our Marxism needs to be rethought.
The best way to grasp the critical theorists is to realize they were frustrated Marxists, saying, Maybe economics doesn’t explain everything. Maybe other factors are impeding the revolution. And so the critical theorists began to theorize in Frankfurt, Germany and center there. But then, as Nazism began to rise and become more dominant, many of them fled Europe and went to the United States. Some would eventually come back, and some would stay in the US.
In this book, Bradley G. Green offers a thoughtful Christian analysis of critical theory, its key philosophers, and their views regarding creation and reality; sin and the human dilemma; and redemption, history, and eschatology.
If you’re wondering what animated the theorists, they said that as Hitler arose, they began to really give attention to how to stop the next Hitler and how to stop fascism. And once you grasp that, you can begin to see why they wrote what they wrote, and you can begin to see how critical theory has seeped into contemporary Western thought today.
Today, at least amongst folks who are left of the center—more progressive folks—communism is not really the bogeyman. It’s fascism. At least genealogically or conceptually, it goes back to the critical theorists of the 1920s.
Bradley G. Green is the author of What Is Critical Theory?: A Concise Christian Analysis.
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