When Was Critical Theory Born?

Our lives are busy, and our time is precious. Which of us wakes up in the morning thinking, You know, I wish I had more mid-20th-century German-speaking Marxist philosophers in my life? Well, if we care about our society, perhaps we should. Good luck trying to make sense of today’s culture wars without some grasp of concepts that passed from German idealism into what’s known as the Frankfurt School.

That’s why Carl Trueman wants us, amid our hectic schedules, to care about what a group of theorists working at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt wrote and taught from the 1930s to 1960s. A tall order, perhaps, but I think he succeeds. Not least because his book To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse shows how grappling with these obscure Frankfurt School thinkers gives us deep insights into our society.

Three Ideas That Shape Our World

Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, expertly lays out three big ideas that the Frankfurt School adapted from Hegel and Marx. The first is historicism. For Hegel, our understanding is deeply influenced by our historical and social context. What we think we know about concepts like justice and identity is shaped by the economic and political forces of the day, and often serves the interests of the powerful.

The second big idea is emancipation. For the Frankfurt School, the point of critical theory isn’t just to understand the world but to change it, specifically to emancipate us from those powerful interests shaping our understanding. This means institutions like “science,” and the belief in the “naturalness” of identities and social hierarchies, need to be unmasked as part of an oppressive ideology.

The third big idea is the importance of recognition. For Hegel, we all want to see ourselves reflected in the world and in the eyes of others: we want them to recognize and value us in the same way we do. This deep desire for recognition is understood by critical theorists as the key driver of social and interpersonal relationships. If we don’t have it, we’ll fight for it.

Critiquing the Critique

Trueman’s main take on the Frankfurt School theorists is that they’re consumed with critique, lacking any positive vision for society. Quoting Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, the book’s repeated refrain is that critical theory is “the spirit that always negates” (13). It negates traditional norms like family structures and national identities because they’re deemed oppressive. But when those norms are dismantled, it offers no alternative that can sustain a society in the long term. Briefly, though tellingly, Trueman contrasts this lack of a positive agenda with a Christian vision centered on grace, forgiveness, and the inherent dignity of every person—a vision that aims not merely to critique but to redeem and that is concretely lived out in the body of the church.

Critical theory negates traditional norms like family structures and national identities because they’re deemed oppressive. But it offers no alternative that can sustain a society in the long term.

Trueman’s critique of critical theory doesn’t stop there. He identifies three further ironies at the heart of its project and legacy. First, it replaces one set of dominant categories (like due process and meritocracy) with another set (like systematic injustice and privilege), which does nothing to disrupt the tendencies to arbitrary judgment against which it inveighs.

Second, although critical theory champions marginalized voices, it was shaped largely by bourgeois white males from affluent countries.

Third, the failure of the German working class to join a revolution after the First World War led to a notion that the marginalized don’t understand their oppression. Therefore they must, to borrow a phrase from Rousseau, be forced to be free by the intellectuals who understand their situation more clearly than they do.

Meat and Bones?

So what should Christians make of this influential tradition of thought? Trueman cautions us to avoid two unhelpful positions. We mustn’t think critical theory is simply a tool we can pick up and use as is, or even that Christians can “eat the meat and leave the bones” of critical theory (109). But neither should we dismiss it as irrelevant.

Trueman acknowledges critical theory’s insights. Its critique of social injustices resonates with the Christian imperative to stand against oppression and uphold human dignity. Critical theory is on the money when it points out that capitalism is now attempting to solve problems it has created. Furthermore, the way modern media and consumerism reduce people to the status of things is “clearly something that a Christian should repudiate” (219). In short, Christians should “acknowledge the importance of critical theory but also . . . refute it” (225).

In the spirit of this double imperative to acknowledge and refute, I offer a caveat to Trueman’s approach. I find his line of argument persuasive, yet as I was reading To Change All Worlds, I regularly thought, Yes, but . . . My hesitation isn’t with what the book says but with what’s lost in what it chooses not to say.

The issue begins with Trueman’s genealogy of critical theory. He spotlights two main antecedents: Hegel and Marx. Understandable. Nevertheless, the genealogy he chooses to foreground has knock-on implications for the book’s direction and blind spots.

The Hegel-Marx-Frankfurt genealogy is one piece of a much larger jigsaw puzzle of a Christian response to modern critical theories’ complexities. It’s an important piece, but if it’s taken for the whole puzzle then Christians will have a lopsided, truncated, and unnecessarily dichotomized sense of the relationship between Christianity and critical theory. I’m not arguing that this book should say it all: such a demand would be silly. However, it’s important to read To Change All Worlds within the context of a critical theory, and a genealogy, that cannot be reduced to Hegel, Marx, and Frankfurt.

Begin with Moses

What if, instead of with Hegel, we began with the Hebrew prophets and their critique of their society’s excesses and abuses? Or what if we began with that first and defining work of cultural critique in the Western tradition: Augustine’s City of God? This longer view wouldn’t make the arguments in To Change All Worlds incorrect, but it’d show how they’re incomplete.

What if, in Marcuse’s claim that history bends in the direction of freedom, we saw an indebtedness to an Augustinian (because it’s biblical) notion of time as linear and heading for a final judgment and righting of wrongs? What if we saw Karl Kautsky’s thesis that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions as derivative of Augustine’s argument—drawing heavily on Revelation—that the earthly city cannot sustain itself on its own assumptions and commitments?

What if we began an understanding of critical theory not with Marx but with Moses, not with Hegel but with the Hebrews?

Take the Long View

Taking the long view in this way by no means leads to a Christian embrace of critical theory, or even to an “eating the meat and leaving the bones” approach. However, it helps us to elaborate a more richly and uniquely Christian critique, distinct in its tenor and content from recent secular critiques of the critical tradition like Bruno Latour’s essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” and Rita Felski’s book The Limits of Critique.

The Hegel-Marx-Frankfurt genealogy is one piece of a much larger jigsaw puzzle of a Christian response to modern critical theories’ complexities.

Taking the long view also opens the door to approaching critical theory with the rich, supple incisiveness to which Paul subjects the Greek search for wisdom and the Hebrew desire for miraculous signs in 1 Corinthians 1. He engages wisdom and signs as cultural tendencies to be both utterly subverted (“Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?” v. 20) and transformatively fulfilled (“The foolishness of God is wiser than men,” v. 25). This view enhances but also transcends Trueman’s ambition to acknowledge the importance of critical theory while still refuting it.

To Change All Worlds is a profound and valuable critique of some of the most important trends of our age. It offers a constructive call for Christians to reclaim a positive, lived-out vision of humanity amid contemporary society’s fragmented and often despairing voices. Providing we don’t mistake this jigsaw piece for the entire puzzle, Trueman’s book offers a crucial contribution to the ongoing efforts of Christians to understand and minister within our late-modern world.