Friday, December 29, 2006

Pomo Hermeneutics

I was thinking the other day about about a particular paragraph from Vern Poythress's review of Kevin Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text? I just found it online and thought it might be worth reproducing here for your consideration:

A second tension arises from the book’s prolonged analysis of postmodernism in Part I. Christian readers are all too prone to ignore or rush through discussions of postmodernism, because they immediately see in it atheistic, relativizing, and nihilistic tendencies. Commendably, the book is patient in its analysis. And so it arrives at a positive result, in the form of a critique of “interpretive pride” (p. 184). But for the Christian reader, this final result, though satisfying, ought also to be disappointing. Should we not have known this all along? Do we really have to go through the painful, intellectually difficult analysis of Derrida and postmodernism to learn what the Bible has told us a hundred times? And of course, the Bible is far more powerful in exposing sin than is the frustrating mixture of insight and idolatry in secular postmodernist worldviews. “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, . . . discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12 RSV).