Review: Preaching Parables to Postmoderns
By Brian C. Stiller
Reviewed by Carl Trueman
Preaching Parables to Postmoderns
Fortress Press, 2005, 200 pp., $19.00
In this book, Brian Stiller, president of Tyndale University College and
Seminary, Toronto, offers guidance on preaching the parables in the contemporary
world. He regards parables as particularly useful in this context because,
rather than teaching in a direct, didactic fashion, parables offer
narrative-like views of the world which challenge the listener in more subtle,
yet more disturbing ways. Parables involve less a transmission of information
and more a transformation of the reader or the hearer.
The book is an interesting mix. To focus on the good first: the careful reader
will find many insights into the biblical text. In chapter 3, for example,
Stiller offers his own views on ten parables, offering particular help on how
the preacher should analyze them in sermon preparation. He examines the text,
draws out the various twists and turns in the parable’s plot, reflects on how
the parable might give a church access to "postmodern" ears (of which more
later), and then offers exegetical and homiletical outlines as well as
reflections on homiletical applications. Then, in chapter 4, he provides four
sample sermons as examples for the reader.
These chapters certainly make the book a helpful addition to a pastor’s library.
Yet I have some hesitation concerning Stiller’s continual need to emphasize that
he is writing for postmoderns, a need which shows up in the title and throughout
the book.
The treatment of postmoderns has a second-hand flavor. There is nothing wrong
with that in itself; the problem is that Stiller repeats some typical
shibboleths about postmoderns which need to be challenged. Thus he premises his
discussion on seven characteristics of the postmodern era, all of which are
highly questionable:
1. Postmoderns reject reason as the only avenue to truth. Well, yes, but has
anyone ever really argued that reason is the only avenue to truth. Poetry, for
example, is not the preserve of postmoderns, nor was it rejected by the
Enlightenment (Goethe being a great example).
2. Postmoderns reject truth as objective. Agreed, but there is a distinction
between "objective" and "neutral" which needs to be made. A Christian
can—indeed, must—concede we're not neutral toward the truth—we can only speak
from our perspective—but an objective truth exists nonetheless. Stiller's
argument at this point would have been more cogent had he at least acknowledged
this distinction and, with it, the fact that many moderns knew their knowledge
was not "neutral" (cf. Kant, Marx, Freud, to name but three). One can reject the
postmodern attack on objective knowledge without being required to subscribe to
a naive belief in the neutrality of knowledge.
3. Rejecting authority as "will to power" leads to seeing history as a
distortion, written by those who wield power. This may sound facetious, but
having worked as a professional historian for some fifteen years, I cannot begin
to describe how marginal history is to the real centers of power!
4. Postmoderns reject the notion of metanarrative. But here’s the rub:
Christianity is metanarrative. To fail to set the parables within the
metanarrative of the Christian story may be the reader’s choice, as Stiller
says; but, if Christianity has any transcendent validity, one cannot avoid the
conclusion that this is a wrong choice.
5. Postmodernism rejects the Enlightenment’s view of the autonomy of the
individual for more communitarian approaches. Again, a valid point as far as it
goes, but the Enlightenment developed numerous concepts that were key to much of
its philosophical content, that were far from individualistic in nature, and
which clearly stand in continuity with this allegedly more recent
communitarianism—for example, the concepts (and language) of race, class, and
nationality. This basic point must surely qualify dramatically any simple
generalizations about Enlightenment individualism.
6. Postmodernity emphasizes the culturally conditioned nature of the world and
views language as a prison. Stiller never makes it clear how this "linguistic
prison" view really connects to what he is trying to do with the parables.
7. Postmodernity rejects the optimism of the modern era. Highly questionable.
Many of the great modernists (Conrad, Eliot, Huxley) were profoundly
pessimistic. Modernism’s optimism (and that generally a middle class phenomenon;
not too many child laborers or chimney sweeps in the Industrial Revolution, I
suspect, were very optimistic) is too often overplayed as a means of making the
contemporary era seem exceptional and discontinuous with the immediate past.
Other comments on postmoderns are also strange. We are told that ethics are
particularly important to postmoderns (45), and that that postmoderns are
preoccupied with human rights (55). I doubt that ethics and human rights can be
grounded in the kind of postmodernism described by Stiller. Both require
believing in some kind of metanarrative, some universal concept of "human
nature." To the extent that postmoderns are preoccupied with these things, to
that extent they remain children of modernity.
In the end, I was perplexed by the book. There was plenty of thought-provoking
material on the biblical text and the task of preaching, but there was also a
rather contrived view of postmodernism that seemed to have little connection to
the book’s practical advice. Maybe I’m cynical, but I wonder if publishers are
to blame, putting pressure on authors to add the "p" word to their titles in
order to shift more copies?
Carl Trueman is the professor of historical theology and church history at
Westminster Theological Seminary, and the author of The Wages of Spin, Luther’s
Legacy, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology, and other titles.
May/June 2007
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