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2 The Preacher and the Postmodern Bible Having examined a number of the challenges postmodernism and its relentless skepticism present to contemporary preachers, I want in this chapter to focus on one that has been especially vexing: given the variety of vested interests we each bring to the process of biblical interpretation and proclamation, how do we know what a text really means? Or to put it more plainly, how do we know which of its many possible meanings is, if not the right one, at least the best one? In the postmodern era, a text—whether drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare, or the editorial in the local paper—no longer has a single, identifiable meaning but rather can be interpreted in any number of ways. Meaning, once tied so closely to the author, has escaped such bonds and is no longer a matter of retrieval but rather of active construction such that no one—not the preacher or interpreter or even the author—can say with confidence what a given passage means. A remark once attributed to T. S. Eliot well captures our situation. “When I wrote this poem,” Eliot is said to have commented shortly after a poem of his became popular, “only God and I knew what it meant. Now only God knows!” In short, in the wake of the postmodern onslaught on traditional interpretive methods, establishing a text’s “true meaning” has become a dicey venture at best. Such a situation has enormous implications for the life and wellbeing of the church, as interpreting, applying, and above all else proclaiming the normative text of Christianity has been central to its enterprise from the outset. In response to this postmodern interpretive mayhem, I want to explore the possibility of reclaiming an old practice of the church called Sachkritik. Literally meaning “content criticism,” Sachkritik invites preachers to identify what they believe and confess is the central theological witness of Scripture and use that as a hermeneutical key. Often distrusted by modern scholars for the penchant 31 of interpreters to flatten the variety of voices in Scripture, such an approach to reading and preaching the Scriptures has in recent years fallen out of favor. But I have wondered whether it is possible to modify this kind of “theological interpretation” so that it does not silence the minority voices either in the Bible or in the congregation. Indeed, I am increasingly persuaded that, used with caution, it may offer us the potential for powerfully reclaiming the biblical witness for the church’s use in the postmodern era. Toward the end of sharing this emerging conviction, this chapter divides into three sections. In the first, I briefly describe the impact of the postmodern movement on biblical studies, giving particular attention to questions about the meaning(s) of a text. In the second section, I outline a proposal for fashioning a postmodern version of Sachkritik that I describe as “preaching from the center,” which may aid us in our reading and interpreting of Scripture. I conclude in the third section by suggesting several ways by which preachers can employ this approach with care and courage to addresses the postmodern challenge to biblical authority and proclamation while bolstering classic Christian convictions about the Scriptures as a meaningful word from God. Postmodernity and the Bible Before we jump into the question of meaning, it may be helpful to remind ourselves of several of the significant contours and attributes of the postmodern age that we explored in more detail in the previous chapter. Chief among these attributes are a resolute anti-foundationalism; a deep wariness of the notion that language is neutral and primarily descriptive; a sense of the constructed, even artificial, nature of reality; a keen distrust of the notion of objective reason; and a profound suspicion of all metanarratives. What links most of these various elements together, as we took up in the last chapter, is a thoroughgoing skepticism toward the reigning philosophical, religious, political, and economic assumptions about the nature of reality. By naming skepticism as the central attitude of postmodernism, we’ve also identified the direct, although admittedly ambivalent, relationship it bears to the era it seeks to transcend. For skepticism is by no means foreign to modernity; indeed, in many respects, skepticism was precisely what gave birth to modernity. From Descartes to Freud, the first move of the architects and adherents of modernity was to gaze with unrelenting suspicion on the traditions they inherited. But whereas modern suspicion was always...

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