have a coffee

How can you seriously reject a metanarrative? Postmodern thinkers who do claim it is terrible how individual "local" narratives elevate themselves to meta-narratives beyond the
scope of their community context and claim to be universal, thereby judging other local narratives inferior. I'd say, by the same standards, the meta-meta-narrative of postmodernism, which elevates itself even higher, beyond all supposedly universal meta-narratives, judges them inferior and even oppressively rejects them as false, thus claiming to be the only true narrative itself, should be regarded as more horrid. But, in saying so, am I not creating a meta-meta-meta-narrative? Then, again, if I was, you'd never be able to tell me, because your statement would constitute a meta-meta-meta-meta-narrative. I think I'd better stop right here. Isn't this ridiculous?

In The Leap of Reason (1976), British philosopher (I refuse to call him a theologian) Don Cupitt uses a modification Plato's well known allegory of the philosopher in the cave to demonstrate the absence of meaning in all God-talk. In Cupitt's cave, there are no shadows of the outside world on the walls, simply because the cave does not have an opening. Living in the cave, an observer does not have the slightest indication of the very existence of something like an "outside world." In the language of the cave's population, vocabulary about such an outside world is therefore not needed and utterly meaningless.
Don Cupitt's analogy actually does work very well in the artificial world he has constructed for his example. What is missing, however, are parallels to the real world. For here, in our real world, there is no closed cave -- at least, not any more. Not since the God from outside has decided to come into the cave and reveal himself through his son Jesus Christ, who opened up the way into the world beyond for us. Read Hebrews 1:1ff, and talk about meaningless God-language!

In another chapter of his book, Thiselton shortly expound Paul Ricoeur’s model (mainly based on Time and Narrative, vol. 3) of self-identity. Ricoeur touches on the age-old quest for the “constant core” of the self, the element which links all individual experiences, impressions and moments into a coherent person. The basic problem has always been, that the self, as far as we know it, is anything but constant. With every moment, every experience, and every new element of learning the self is changing (This assumption is actually the very basis of the so-called “hermeneutical circle”). Yet, we always speak of this ever-changing self as “the same person.”

In RicoeurÂ’s model, there is no constant, unifying core of the self. Yet, at the same time, it is not reduced to the helpless self of postmodernity, either. Rather, there is something which provides an external structure to self-identity: narrative. The self cannot be understood apart from its temporality, its embedding into an ongoing narrative, whose plot helps to determine who exactly the individual is at any given time.

I find RicoeurÂ’s model attractive for a number of reasons:

In a seminar I attended today, Uwe Schäfer, vice-president of the German Pentecostal movement, made the following remarkable statement: "Whoever claims to take the Bible literally and still has his right arm and eye is proving himself wrong" (cf. Mt 5:29-30).

Continuing my reading of Thiselton's Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation and Promise, I have come upon a very interesting series of points on textual interpretation. Thiselton presents a model that seems to reverse the usual direction in interpretation, which moves from the -- supposedly objective -- interpreter towards the text as an object to be examined. In a chapter, which he entitles "Five Ways in which Textual Reading Interprets the Self", he offers the following list:

So far, I am not entirely sure what to make of Thiselton's list. I'll have to think about it. To be sure, it presents an interesting alternative to the one-sided empiricist view of textual interpretation which stands at the basis of modernity. However, while this might provide a much needed counterweight, I think it's jumping the ship on the opposite side: What I am missing is a clear indication of the role the informational content of the text is supposed to play in the whole of interpretation. Of course, Thiselton does say a couple of words on this in the last paragraph of his chapter, namely, that a certain understanding of informational content might even be a prerequisite for transformation. Yet, I still get the feeling that this is not enough.

As so often, the truth between the two extremes seems to lie somewhere in the middle (Shannon Buckner should love this: "It's all about balance ...&quot.