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Postmodernism has thrown many of the things we used to take for granted "up for grabs," which in many ways is, at least, not a bad thing and may even be beneficial. It never hurts to test one's assumptions because it is precisly in our assumptions that we so often fail to distinquish between what is true and what is patently false. Postmodernists, however, tend to carry potentially useful insights to such extremes as to undo the value of the insight in the first place—which leads to the conclusion that postmodernism is roughly 10% right on the money and 90% hype. An article entitled by Edgar W. Conrad, "How the Bible was Colonized" (Scripture, Community, and Mission: Essays in Honor of Dr. Preman Niles. Edited by Philip L. Wickeri, 94-107. Hong Kong and London: Christian Conference of Asia and Council for World Mission, 2002.) provides a case in point.

Conrad begins his article with a brief exposition of the standard postmodernist understanding of the location of meaning in a given written piece of work, a text. Where it was once held that the intentions of the author determined the meaning of the text and, more recently, that meaning emerges from the text itself, postmodernists argue that the reader is the active agent in determining what the text means. Stated most radically, this position holds that a text means only what the reader thinks it means. Conrad acknowledges that the claim that the reader determines the meaning of the text appears chaotic in that one hundred readers will "construct" one hundred different meanings for one text. What holds chao in abeyance, he argues, is the fact that there are "interpretive communities" that "construct" a collective, communal meaning for the text.

This postmodernist perspective is helpful to a degree. It undermines the safe, old-fashioned ("modern") assumption that writers control the meanings of what they write, which assumption is patently false. We can hardly deny that readers do, again to a degree, impress their own meanings on a text as they read it. Readers do not read every word; they do not give equal attention to every paragraph and page; and they have to read a book or an article over a period of time, during which they forget some of its earlier content. Readers also have their own ideologies, beliefs, and attitudes, which shape how they understand the meanings of words. The idea that there are

There are, however, two related assumptions that this postmodernist approach does not question. First, it assumes that in the process of writing and reading there are three independent entities known as "writer," "text," and "reader." Second, it assumes that the writer is an entity that stands outside of the interpretive communities of readers. The theory fails to acknowledge, in other words, that writers are also readers; they are individuals who associate themselves with interpretive reading communities and who have some sense of what communicates within their reading community. Writers already share meanings with readers, and when they write they inject those communal meanings into what they write. Reader and writer form a community and the text written and read is an artifact of that community.

The postmodernist theory, helpful as it is in some says, simply cannot account for the fact that the contents, the meanings of a book, an article, or a particularly powerful speech can change a person's life. There is a leper in Nan Province, northern Thailand, who years' ago moved into a leper colony full of Christians and swore he would never become one himself. Then, however, he read in a tract about Christ's healing ten lepers. The idea, written down in a book, that a World Religious Figure would show that kind of compassion to people like him shattered his resistance, brought him to his knees, and transformed him into a member of a tiny minority religious group, the northern Thai Christian church. It is certainly true that this individual read his own meaning into the biblical text, which focuses on the idea that only one of the ten came back to thank Jesus for being healed. At the same time, however, the content of the text tran sformed his own self-image as a leper by recounting for him Jesus' compassionate treatment of other lepers. There is more to reading than simply imposing our meanings on what we read.

Conrad, unwittingly, exposes the particularly difficult problem facing postmodern Christian authors when it comes to the content of the Bible. He contends that over the course of the years the Bible has been subjected to all manner of ideological meanings, which biblical readers have to expose and, by implication, transcend. Given his own introduction, one can only ask, "Why?" What difference does it make? Your reading community reads it one way. Mine another way. His

Written works do have an integrity of their own, and that integrity cannot be disentangled from the originial intention of the author. It is more helpful and true, I think, to see author, text, and reader as three interconnected moments in an admittedly imperfect human communication process. The author's literary intentions and skill inscribe a set of meanings in a text. The way in which those meanings are assembled in the text, especially as the text becomes older, influences the meanings themselves. The text, particularly if it is a sacred text, does have a life of its own apart from the author. Readers bring their own meanings to the text and, again, reassemble the meanings in a way that makes sense to them. In doing so, however, they are still bound to the text itself, which in turn still contains the words of the author. The boundaries between the roles of author, text, and reader are fluid and indistinct and yet there still are three roles, however much the postmodern critics want to raise up one (the reader) and beat down the other two.