Scripture and Culture

N.T. Wright has laid some interesting words to be considered... (by the way, I am just quoting because I do not claim to have any answers worth writing - yet)

"The continuing and much-discussed interplay between "modern" and "postmodern" culture has created a mood of uncertainty within Western society at least. There are three areas that can be easily identified." (Last Word, p. 6) NOTE, I will list only two of these points on this post...

"First, the big, older stories of who we are and what we're here for have been challenged and deconstructed. This is, in a sense, turning modernism's rhetoric on itself. Modernism (the movement which began with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment) made its way, through writers like Voltaire, by attacking the big, overarching story told by the church. Postmodernity has now done the same to all the great stories by which humans bring order to their lives ('meta-narratives'), not least the stories of 'progress' and 'enlightenment' which modernism itself made its stock-in-trade. The Bible... Like all metanarratives,... is instantly suspected of being told in order to advocate someone's interest. It is, people suspect, some kind of a power-play." (p. 7)

"Second, the notion of truth has been under scrutiny and indeed attack. Many today operate with two quite different types of 'truth.' If we asked, 'Is it true that Jesus died on a cross?' we normally would mean, 'did it really happen?' But if we asked, 'Is the parable of the Prodigal Son true?' we would quickly dismiss the idea that 'it really happened'; that is simply not the sort of thing parables are. We would insist that, in quite another sense, the parable is indeed 'true' in that we discover within the narrative a picture of God and his love, and of multiple layers of human folly, which rings true at all kinds of levels of human knowledge and experience."(p. 7)

"...Now postmodernity has pushed us in the other direction: toward supposing that all 'truth,' including the supposed 'facts' of scientific experiment, can be reduced to power-claims."(p. 8)

He then states a strategy he wishes to pursue:
"...I shall be arguing neither for a variety of modernism, nor for a return to premodernism, [see Sire] nor yet for a capitulation to postmodernism, but for what I hope is a way through this entire mess and muddle and forward into a way of living in and for God's world, and within the communtiy of God's people, with Christian and biblical integrity." (p. 10)

I really had no idea when I began this project that I would quote N. T. Wright so much.