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[Back in the first installment of this diary, I interacted with the Emergents' fear that evangelicalism's entrenched, conservative church culture is just not reaching a young generation. Deep in writing my own "Patron Saints for Postmoderns" course, book, and blog, I suggested that the time might be ripe for telling and hearing stories—in particular, stories of our "foreparents" in the faith. Why not turn to the historical cloud of witnesses and see how they engaged their own cultures? That would seem to be one good way to learn how to translate the gospel for our own cultural moment.

[In the second (most recent) installment, I defended this idea of translating the gospel for new cultural situations against one potent objection: that such translation involves a dangerous compromise. When we set out to do such a translation, say some critics, we are allowing sinful human cultures to set the terms of the discussion. We are adapting and compromising Christ's essentially countercultural message in illegitimate ways. The church, as Stanley Hauerwas and others argue, should be its own culture. My answer to this objection was to try to bridge the "translators" and the "separators" with a kind of ecumenical position that sees value in both approaches.]

Dear folks,

Perhaps, if you have read the first two installments of this "diary," you are ready to launch into a lifetime of fruitful biography- and history-reading. But some of you may still be standing on the path, obstructed by one more roadblock: the postmodern claim that the cultural frameworks that have formed us as individuals so strongly condition and define us, that the experiences and ideas of people from other cultural frameworks (that is, other places or times) can never really speak to us or help us.

More technically put, this is the "strong-constructionist" view that every society, led and shaped by the agendas of its most powerful members, forms its own distinctive set of symbols. These symbols, embedded at the level of the language that every child learns from its mother's knee, shape both individuals' experiences of the world around them and their sense of their own personal identities in that world. This is what the word "culture" means in the lingo of the strong constructionists. Everything about our experience and identity is constructed by the symbol-set imposed on us by the social group in which we are formed.

We may recognize this assumption from the use the multiculturalist agenda-setters have made of it. These folks have been telling us for years that we must not ever try to convert, or judge, or even assess any distinctive "community" ("the Native American Community," "the Gay Community," etc.) against a purportedly higher universal standard.

Though we may not agree with this strong form of the "cultural uniqueness" assumption, most of us have absorbed it to at least some degree. It has become part of our mental furniture. And when this assumption takes temporal form (as, if you like, a species of what C. S. Lewis once called "chronological snobbery"), it can block us from gaining anything from accounts of past lives. Take for example this note posted to my blog by "Van," a seminary student with Emergent sympathies:

I think there is a hesitancy for many in emergent to draw similarities between our current cultural scenario and those of the past. For one to do so would be to concede that this moment in time isn't … unique. Many of my emergent friends suffer from an ecclesiology infused with American progressivism; if we can innovate enough, we'll find salvation. The idea that some of the questions we ask have answers in our past seems distasteful.

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