Preaching: As we try to communicate the gospel within our own cultural context, how do we as communicators tell the difference between substantive cultural change and temporary trends? How do we avoid locking ourselves into what is going to be a very temporary trend?

Martoia: As you know that is always a danger. We may not always know the situation of a trend being a trend burning itself out. Later we say, “Oh, that was a trend.” The question that you are asking is: are there ways to discern on the front end if this is going to be something that is short-lived or maybe actually longer? That is something that is far more complex.

For example, when we take a look at what is going on as our modern world is shifting to a postmodern world – whatever exactly that means – I think what we are realizing is how knowledge is perceived. Increasingly people recognize that just because there is a bunch of supposed evidence for something to be true, lots of people are saying, “There might be evidence, but if it is not true in my experience I don’t care.” We could say that might be a trend.

Yet if we look around at culture not just in terms of epistemology – how we know what we know – but in terms of art, literature, architecture, when we look at others areas and venues of experience, what we find is the breaking of the same sort of rules is occurring. Is that an earmark that we are not just in a trendy avant-garde deal but maybe we are actually facing some sort of underlying change?

Beyond that, there are some things we have to seriously consider. We have to constantly think in the context of community – where we are really wanting to be all things to all men in order to win some. We really do want to do that. I think that means having diverse voices. My concern is that we end up having people of the same persuasions in the room so the outcome is going to be exactly the same. All the people that say we like seminary the way it is are the people in the seminary system that have a vested interest to keep the seminary system the same. That is not a helpful conversation, gang. We have to be careful with that.

The goal is not to become trendy. But, for instance, the language shift, to come back to Static. The language shifts that I am trying to propose are not language shifts for the sake of trends. They are language shifts because I think they get us closer back to what the New Testament and Old Testament writers were trying to evoke in us. What I would argue is that the kind of shifts being proposed there are really moving us back to a more biblical view. Many of the views that we are holding onto here are just long lasting trends that were very culturally-conditioned.

For instance, the four spiritual laws – we didn’t have it in the middle ages. That is culturally-conditioned – let’s extract it, let’s boil it down, let’s reduce it down, let’s point of sale it, let’s make it happen. For those who have come to Christ that way, thank you Jesus. But for us to say that is probably an enduring artifact, I doubt it. I think that it is probably something very modernistic and something that will pass with that era.

Your question is a complex one, but one that needs a lot of conversation. It only illustrates the very need I mentioned earlier: we have to do good semiotics. Semiotics is going to be at least part of the new hermeneutics; I don’t have any doubt about it.

We have got to be great exegetes of both culture and text. I think in seminaries we have been given the one. It has almost put the Bible in a place where we can’t exegete the text because we are not sure how to exegete the text into a culture that it can speak to. Let’s be as careful culturally as we are textually. I think if we did that we would be so much further down the road.