How the biblical story offers hope without asking us to look away from a broken world.

There are two easy ways to misunderstand the world; One is to insist that everything is basically fine; the other is to assume that everything is hopelessly corrupt.

Associate Professor, Dr Christopher Watkins in his outstanding and robust academic work, Biblical Critical Theory, offers a more demanding alternative: take evil seriously, but refuse to treat it as the deepest truth about reality – the very thing a post-modern and post-truth world western culture all to readily leans into. 

However, what is imperative to land on as we commence here, is that the Judeo-Christian narrative begins with goodness, not corruption—and it ends with redemption, not defeat. This very much changes how we understand ourselves, judge our culture, and respond to injustice.

Goodness comes first

Watkins uses the term, the “asymmetry of good and evil.” The phrase sounds technical, but the idea is straightforward: good and evil are not equal forces with equally strong claims on the world.

In Genesis, God creates a good world, and sin enters that world later. Consequentially, evil damages what already exists; it does not create the underlying goodness it damages. Watkins draws on C. S. Lewis’s excellent insight that evil as a parasite rather than an original thing.

Another way to look at it is to think of trust and betrayal, betrayal hurts precisely because trust matters. Or consider injustice: its force depends on violating something genuinely valuable—dignity, fairness, or another person’s good. These examples help illustrate the argument that evil corrupts goods it, but it cannot supply for itself.

This does not make evil imaginary or harmless. A parasite can cause devastating damage, but it does mean that corruption is not the whole story of what it corrupts.

The Biblical narrative moves from creation through the fall toward redemption and final restoration. Goodness comes before evil, remains present under its distortions, and will ultimately outlast it – this is just part of the ‘Good News’ that is the Gospel of the Kingdom. 

Broken, but not worthless

This perspective matters especially when we think about human beings.

Watkin’s asymmetry of good and evil resists reducing people either to their dignity or to their wrongdoing. We bear God’s image, yet we are capable of deception, cruelty, selfishness, and violence, neither truth cancels the other. 

That gives Christian thought a reason to reject both flattering innocence and crushing contempt. We cannot honestly say that people are untouched by sin. But neither should we treat sin as the deepest or final definition of a person.

Genesis chapter 3 brings these tensions together. Adam and Eve face the consequences of their disobedience, yet God does not abandon them. He clothes them, replacing their inadequate attempts to cover themselves with his own provision. Watkin’s posits this as a sign of care and mercy within judgment. 

It also finds hope in the promise that the woman’s offspring will defeat the serpent. This, typologically speaking, points forward to Christ: the story of humanity’s failure already contains the promise of its eventual overcoming.

Judgment is real – Ah! But so is grace.

The practical implication is demanding; taking responsibility for wrongdoing need not mean surrendering the possibility of restoration. Equally, recognising someone’s dignity need not mean excusing what they have done.

Neither gullible nor cynical

How should this shape our engagement with culture—with books, films, music, institutions, political movements, and even churches?

In this excerpt, Watkins posits that Christians should be neither gullible nor cynical. No cultural work or institution is beyond criticism, however admirable or explicitly Christian it appears. Equally, nothing is so thoroughly corrupted that it entirely erases the goodness of creation.

That invites a more careful kind of attention – Rather than asking only, “Is this good or bad?”, we can ask:

• What genuine good does this express or protect?
• Where does it distort that good?
• What does it reveal about human dignity and human failure?
• What deserves appreciation, and what needs to change?

This is not a demand to consume everything. The passage explicitly distinguishes thoughtful cultural engagement from indiscriminate openness: something can contain genuine value without being beneficial for every person to read, watch, or hear.

The same balance applies to making art. Drawing on Francis Schaeffer, Watkins identifies two themes that Christian art should recognise: the meaningfulness and goodness of life, and the reality of sin, suffering, and decay.

Art becomes misleading when it excludes either one. A world of unbroken sweetness can turn into sentimentality. However, a world of uninterrupted despair can become just as false, treating brokenness as the only truth worth telling.

The point is not that every story needs a cheerful ending. It is that sorrow should not be mistaken for the whole of reality. The chapter’s discussion of Mozart’s clarinet concerto offers an evocative example: music can acknowledge grief while making room for a joy that does not depend on denying it. This too, echoes the need for a Biblical and Gospel focused balance that avoids saccharin triumphalist postures and remnant theology exclusivism. 

The present is not permanent

The argument’s presented also has political force.

If the world as it currently exists is our only guide to how the world ought to be, we risk treating familiar injustice as natural or inevitable. We end up with very unhelpful concessional postures such as, “That’s just how things are” which can all too quickly migrate to, “That’s how things must remain.”  It is here that I am reminded of a hundred plus year old quote by G.K. Chesterton, who quipped “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”

Ah, but Watkins rejects that transition; present conditions belong within an unfolding story, not a frozen reality. Creation gives grounds for affirming dignity and goodness; the fall gives grounds for scrutinising existing arrangements; redemption and final restoration give grounds for expecting more than the continuation of the status quo.

Very importantly, this creates space for radical criticism without requiring despair. Christians need not defend an institution merely because it exists, nor assume that every proposed alternative will escape human wrongdoing. It is discernment – and divine discernment at that – which is required. 

I personally recall many decades ago sitting with a then retired minister of the Gospel, and somewhat of a mentor to a young emerging pastor. He said to me; ‘Shane, the gift the church will desperately need in its last days, is the one it will all too often be lacking – the gift of discernment.’

The guiding question, Watkin’s hints at and becomes more searching is: does this arrangement honour the good, or does it normalise its distortion?

Peace offers a useful example. Watkins argues that peace is more than the absence of violence, defining it only as “nonviolence” risks making violence the starting point and peace merely its negation. A Christian account instead treats peace as a positive good, rooted in God’s character—not simply an interval when conflict stops.

The absence of harm matters, but it is not the same as the presence of flourishing.

Hope without looking away

Perhaps the most useful insight in these pages is that hope and honesty need not compete.

Christian hope does not require us to minimise suffering, excuse injustice, or put a cheerful gloss on failure. It asks us to see those things clearly without granting them ultimate authority over our understanding of the world – this clearly smacks of the discernment needed and that I previously referred to.

To reiterate, evil is real, but it is not original. It is pervasive, but it does not erase every good. It is destructive, but it will not have the final word.

That is a sturdier hope than optimism. Optimism can falter when circumstances deteriorate. Hope is not only the positive expectation of good, but the reasonable grounds for it. The Biblical hope rests on a larger story: goodness is not an accidental interruption in a fundamentally cruel universe.

It is where the story begins—and, in the Christian vision, where it is going

Disciplesplanet

Source:  Watkin, C. (2022 pp. 166–177). Biblical critical theory: How the Bible’s unfolding story makes sense of modern life and culture. Zondervan Academic.