In light of the Christian confession of God as creator, redeemer, and sanctifier, we may say that God is the one who communicates himself—Father, Son, and Spirit—to others. God’s self-communicative activity results in creation, Christ, and church. The triune God is communicative agent (Father/author), action (Word/text), and result (Spirit/power of reception). I propose that we take God’s trinitarian self-communication as the paradigm of what is involved in all true communication.

—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?

Understanding for postmoderns is always contextual, never universal. Postmodernity does not mean the end of all authority, however, only of universal norms; local norms remain in force. Interpretation is always “from below,” shaped by the reader’s contextually conditioned context and regulated by the authority of community-based norms. Hence, if interpretation is indeed a form of power reading, it remains to be seen whose power it is and whether its force is liberating. For while truth has been described as a force that sets one free (John 8:32), postmoderns see truth as a rhetorical device used by the strong to justify their power over the weak. This leads us to a crucial problem for the postmodern critic: To what do we appeal when the context rather than the text is the oppressor? …

If the community’s interest and experience—the present context—provide the framework for interpreting Scripture, what happens when the framework itself is corrupt? To assign priority to the reader’s context and interest is to immunize one’s interpretive community from the very possibility of criticism by the text. Reading the text on these terms is like projecting one’s image onto the mirror of the text, a hermeneutic strategy that sentences the interpretive community to stare at its own reflection. Such a narcissistic hermeneutics stands little chance of expanding one’s self-knowledge, or for that matter, of achieving genuine liberation.

—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?

When you hear that we look for a kingdom, you rashly suppose that we mean something merely human. But we speak of a kingdom with God, as is clear from our confessing Christ when you bring us to trial, though we know that death is the penalty for this confession. For if we looked for a human kingdom we would deny it in order to save our lives, and would try to remain in hiding in order to obtain the things we look for. But since we do not place our hopes on the present [order], we are not troubled by being put to death, since we will have to die somehow in any case.

—Justin Martyr, First Apology

The first is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heart-breaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy