Problem 3

To understand this aspect of the problem, you have to put on your post-modern glasses. (I’m not suggesting that you keep them on so long that you get a headache. But you need to see how the post-modern person is able to expose some serious flaws in the modernist view.)

First, let me make some “quick-and-dirty” definitions. By “modernism” I mean the philosophy that grew out of the Enlightenment. Most Christians are so deeply immersed in modernism that they cannot imagine any other way to view reality. They can’t imagine Christianity without a modernist foundation. (And some theologies are so entwined with modernism that it may not be possible to extract the modernist assumptions without “killing” the theology.)

And “post-modernism” is the reaction against the assumptions of modernism. The extreme expression of post-modernism proclaims that there is no objective truth (except, of course, this objective truth).

The modernist view is that a text is an object that can be examined objectively by a scholar and then explained to a listener or reader. The post-modern view takes the other extreme and says that a text has only subjective meanings that change with each new context: the culture, the examiner, the student, etc.

While the post-modern view is essentially self-refuting, it does help us to see that modernism has some glaring problems.

Here is Fitch’s analysis:

“The text becomes an object in the hands of the preacher as it is broken down into three points to be given out as something the listener can use. Once the sermon is given, the text becomes an object to be consumed by the parishioner, who in turn listens, analyzes, takes notes, and goes out to be a doer of the information just heard, which consequently distances the listener from the text” (p. 137).

As long as the text is an object, it has no authority and no power to transform lives.

Here is the great irony. While the preacher and the congregation are proclaiming the superiority of their high view of the Bible, they are shifting the control of the meaning of the Bible from the Bible itself to the autonomous (Cartesian) minds first of the preachers and then of the listeners.

The listeners are able to keep their egos firmly in place as they manage their consumption of God’s Word. They return home with what they think they heard or what they wanted to hear.

The method that was devised to give authority to the Bible has deftly robbed it of its authority and power.

So what do you think?

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”