About
ThinkingThroughThe Bible.
Explaining the Bible to the culture—and the culture through the Bible.
Welcome to Thinking Through the Bible. This site is a home for Christian cultural engagement that starts where Christian thinking must always start: with Scripture—not as a slogan or a proof-text bank, but as the living Word of God and a richly textured, patiently unfolding story that forms our imaginations as much as it informs our arguments.
Here you’ll find resources for reading the Bible with open eyes in a complex world: essays, videos, podcasts, book excerpts, and teaching materials that aim to be biblically faithful, intellectually serious, and culturally alert.
What you’ll find here
1) Tools for discernment
Not hot takes—tools. Ways of reading, naming, and “seeing” that help you notice what a culture loves, fears, worships, and assumes—so you can respond with clarity and charity.
2) Bible-first critique
A consistent emphasis on letting Scripture set the agenda, rather than baptising today’s questions and then searching for verses to back them up.
3) Resources for academics
Practical help for thinking Christianly inside secular institutions, and for resisting the twin temptations of anxious defensiveness and uncritical assimilation. Explore the stream.
4) Teaching content to share
Talks, seminar recordings, and course-style materials that work in churches, small groups, schools, and university contexts. Browse courses & seminars.
Philosophy
A few guiding commitments
01. The Bible is both true and useful
Not only for private devotion, but for public wisdom—helping us interpret our moment without being captured by it.
02. Audi alteram partem
“Hear the other side”: a stubborn determination to listen carefully to views we disagree with, and to represent them fairly before criticising them.
03. Slow thinking in a fast world
Careful reading, careful distinctions, and patient argument—because Christian truth deserves better than rush, heat, and performative certainty.
Start here: five good first stops
If you’d like a guided on-ramp, here are five posts that represent the “shape” of the site:
Video talk: Introduction to Thinking Through the Bible
01. Diagonalisation: Let the Bible disrupt our culture’s comfortable dichotomies
02. Academic Navigation: Developing a Christian approach to your discipline
03. Seminar: Storyboarding your discipline
04. Biblical Critical Theory: The hub page of related content
05. Series Experience: Browse structured series content
Who’s behind this site?
I’m Chris Watkin, an Associate Professor in European Languages at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), working at the intersection of theology, philosophy, and cultural analysis.
My writing ranges from academic work in modern European thought to public-facing Christian cultural engagement. In recent years that has included:
Biblical Critical Theory (Zondervan Academic, 2023) — a biblical framework for interpreting late-modern life and culture.
The State of Nature and the Shaping of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2025) — tracing how “state of nature” stories shape modern politics, culture, and moral imagination.
If you’d like more of my academic work (French philosophy, secular modernity, the human, atheism, ecology, Michel Serres, and research “hacks”), you can find it here: christopherwatkin.com.
Watch, listen, and follow
If you prefer audio/video, start here:
Audio + video on this site
YouTube Channel
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Facebook Page
A final word
My hope is that this site gives you something I wish I’d had earlier: a set of biblically grounded tools for clear thinking, humble learning, and courageous cultural engagement—especially if you’re trying to follow Christ in settings where Christian conviction is misunderstood, marginalised, or simply assumed irrelevant.
Thanks for dropping by, and welcome.
Chris