In his new book Preaching at the Crossroads (Fortress Press), David J. Lose points out that in contemporary American culture, “we are surrounded by competing truth claims. Some of these are religious, but many more are about material wealth, nationalism, or ethnicity. Significantly, each and every truth claim, whether it be proclaimed from a pulpit, touted on the cover of a major magazine, or hidden in the logo of an expensive brand, is part of a larger story about what constitutes the good, the Beautiful, and the true.
“But whereas postmodernism perceives in this swirl of competing truth claims a deterrent to our ability to make them in the first place, pluralism seems blissfully ignorant of such limitations and instead happily embraces any and all grand narratives and stories realities.
“In this context, the Christian story has not so much disappeared as it has shrunk. The proliferation of different and competing stories about reality, that is, has occupied more and more of our congregants’ attention, crowding out the biblical story as the narrative by which to make sense of all others and rendering it just one among a multitude. As a consequence, the Christian story no longer enjoys the privileged place it once did in the larger culture and in the marketplace of ideas.”