Stephen aside, I love your “I am related to, therefore I am.” For Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and for many more, it seems to me, the po-mo / moderist problem always and only reduces to the binary. It’s so Logic-al. And if Helene Cixous’s translators have their wonderful way, It’s so Phallo-Logo-Centric. Which is why she said, warned, declared, cajoled, encouraged, pleaded: ecriture feminine. Which is why she sounds like you, and John, and dare I even say like Jesus? She won’t let the modernists make up the rules, and so how then can the post mods claim to break them without claiming them first? Why did John the Baptist come in swinging, “You brood of vipers, snake bastards!”? Repentence makes some weird demands on the mind-after-the-fact, not to mention on the body under water for a time. Not just heady stuff, although in a blog in alphabets . . .

Thanks, as always, for your great insights!

• I believe the texts of the scriptures mediate the reality of God and God’s speaking to us through the meanings intended by their writers when they wrote, through the meanings discovered by their readers past, through the meanings discovered In our present experience of attentive hearing, imaginative interpretation, and faithful loving.

I admit, this is the point I’m struggling with. We have the texts, but what do they mean? There is so little agreement, even among Christians, who ostensibly inhabit a shared paradigm! As I said in an earlier comment, Christians agree on only the most insipid of theological statements.

Of what utility, then, are the texts, if they fail to shape our thinking? If we believers are only confirmed in our prior commitments?

I wouldn’t be conceding very much if I were to acknowledge that, once in a while, an exceptionally open-minded individual is actually converted from one metanarrative to another through reading a text. Particularly since it isn’t only biblical texts that bring about that sort of conversion. Darwin’s Origin of Species converted a lot of people, too.

In fact, Origin of Species is a much better starting point than the Bible if you want to argue in support of objective truth. But such things are relative: the field of the “hard” sciences is relatively objective, as compared to the Bible’s claims about the spiritual and ethical realms.

Still, it would be nice if there were some consensus on what the Bible actually teaches. People might disagree on whether the spiritual or ethical claims are true, but they might be expected at least to agree on what the claims are!

Perhaps. But I was careful to preface it, “I wonder whether Doug would agree with the following statement.” The argument was constructed to put a specific proposition on the table ("The truth is objective; we’re just unable to agree on it") and solicit a response from you.

• Failure to perceive something does not mean there is nothing to be perceived.

I agree with that statement. In fact, I think you’re the one who is collapsing epistemology into ontology. My argument is,

Objective truth may exist in pristine purity in some other realm. But clearly we are unable to access it in human society. Because if someone pulled it out like a rabbit from some hat, other people ought to be able to look at it and say, “Yep, that’s objectively true, all right.”

When you respond, “Failure to perceive something does not mean there is nothing to be perceived,” you’re ignoring the crux of my argument. The existence of objective truth in some other realm, where we can’t access it, doesn’t carry us very far in the here and now.

It’s the latter point that you need to respond to: i.e., you need to demonstrate that objective truth exists here and now.

• All we can do is tell stories that invite people to enter a different paradigm and find it a more satisfying story. … The fact that this happens suggests that “reality” as an external something can indeed impinge on, and transform, our ways of knowing it.

No; that line of reasoning concedes the very point I’m trying to make. People sometimes exchange one metanarrative (or paradigm) for another. Again, I concede the point that you’re defending.

But “reality” continues to depend utterly on the paradigm the individual inhabits. How is this a defence of objective truth?

Too bad you eschew celebrity endorsements in favor of competent scholars. Think of all the press and free publicity you’d get with endorsements by James Cameron and Simcha Jacobovici.