Postmodernity, community, and meaning

A reader comments that some postmodern jurors deny any possibility of shared meaning.

Their basic position strikes me as having some valid points. Postmodern theory has, after all, uncovered some trustworthy insights. But without a doctrine (forgive my use of the word ;)) of creation and community, it becomes completely destructive, as those jurors demonstrate.

Against modernism: people are not exhaustive clones of one another, sharing all things without differentiation, especially not the 'rationality' rooted in one cultural milieu. But against postmodernism: neither are they autonomous gods, generating their own truth and their own realities, of necessity sharing nothing.

Rather, people are made in communication by the single God, sharing a God-given common source in both being and history. They can't escape this. They also share senses that are trustworthy for their purpose (because God is not a trickster). Thus they can reliably interact with a common environment, including others, in their vocation as God's images. Yet they are, in God's image, creative and exploratory, capable of creating and sustaining sub-pools of meaning, culture and significance. So they are at once unified and differentiated - modern and post-modern.

But in speaking to philosophers, we have more at hand than our narrative of creation in communication. For, God Himself has explicitly used the commonality He created to communicate to persons and people. And very significantly, this occured within the sub-pools of meaning and culture that they themselves re-created, acting in His image. This alone proves the trustworthiness of both unity and differentiation.

So, I suggest that the insights of postmodernity are useful only when subject to the constraints of a biblical narrative of creation and man. Shorn of those constraints, they only tear us into a false atomism, even as modernity only welds us into a false uniformity.