Re: Why the historical Jesus matters

Yes, I’m afraid the discussion got severed from the original comment.

Postmodernism may argue in principle that there are no universal or absolute truths - or at least that it is meaningless to assert that such truths exist. Any statement that we may make - with perhaps a few mathematical exceptions - is subject to various limitations of perspective, provisionality, prejudice, and so on.

But I don’t see why the postmodern or emerging church should not self-consciously affirm or confess that it has made a particular narrative uniquely and exclusively its own. I have no wish to worship a localized, culturally and intellectually contingent god. I worship the God who is creator of all things, who is sovereign over all things. But I hold to that truth while swimming in a sea of stories from which I cannot escape.

The question I had regarding what is ‘deep and universal’ was not whether universal truths exist but whether we negate such truths by reading the scriptures historically. I’m not persuaded that we diminish the significance of Jesus for ourselves by locating the Gospel narrative firmly in the flow of first-century Jewish history. I certainly don’t see that as a relativization of truth. My point is that narrative structures may convey the ‘truth’ that we wish to confess in some ways more effectively than our universalized abstractions.

We feel uncomfortable with this approach because we have bought into i) the platonic assumption that the historical narrative of scripture is merely clothing for abstract theological truths, and ii) the modern assumption that the highest form of truth is the rationalist-absolute one. But if we subject the biblical testimony to these assumptions, we are bound to distort it. My argument is that the best way for us to reconstruct biblical truth for ourselves in a postmodern context is to go back in an act of the critical-realist imagination and hear the stories as though for the first time, stripped as far as possible of interpretive overlays; then we can set about the creative and complex task of restating those stories for worship, for mission, for personal piety, and so on.