I just made the following query to an online friend with experience in such things, and thought I'd pass it on here to generate a discussion that might help us with questions I think others share with me. Here it is:

"G, after our recent sharing together I've been meditating some more on theological method in Christology, specifically on how we mediate the Word of God in Christ to our present culture, doing so as a counter-culture of God's Kingdom that exists for the world while not being of it. I know this is something you've given a lot of time to over the years for both personal and professional reasons, and would appreciate some of your thoughts when you have the time.

I'll lay it out like this:

I believe there are universal expressions, many in fact, in Scripture that transcend time and place. John 3.16 is perhaps the most powerful example. It is so centered in relationship! It is the word of Jesus about relationship in the Trinity and between ourselves and God, with an offering of eternal life that meets a timeless need in the simplest expression, the relation of father through son to us.

Along these lines as post-moderns, we (I certainly) feel an overwhelming desire for authentic connections, for heart-to-heart, soul-satisifying, loving, empowering relationships. These longings are stirred through decades of family disintegration (multiple divorces in mine) and other social upheaval. Questions of identity, belonging, and pervasive relativism in a global village deluge us. And then there is the endless stream of information calling for our thoughts and challenging our abilities to sort and discern the useful and relevant from the rubbish, the good from the bad. The very air feels polluted with distractions that threaten our souls.

In this I'm hearing God say that he is my Father and that he wants me to abide in his Son. I hear him saying relationship with him through the Word made flesh is what I need and that he has provided, even thousands of years ago, the reality and the metaphors for ministry in biblical "narratives" that feed our hunger for a real relationship with him and others.

Yet there are ancient expressions that have been turned into modern, soul-deadening cliches. With Biblical illiteracy rising in many quarters, perhaps now most in the West, I feel and too often succumb to the ease of old habits or traditions that are meaningful to me, but even incomprehensible to many outside my "tribe".

Of course, the very nature of the differences between ourselves in our brokenness and God in his perfect holiness make the mediation of Christ our only hope of knowing God. But it must also be true that only the mediation of Christ in his body, the church, makes it possible to communicate a living knowledge of him to those outside communion with God.

A summary way of putting all this after setting the context is to ask: How can we authentically speak of God today in a language postmoderns understand while not compromising the integrity of the gospel as revealed in the person and work of Christ in Scripture?

I'd like to hear what you think of my wrestlings."

[Edit: I realize this is a very basic question in Christology, not only today, but done through the history of time among the children of God. But we keep asking it in our daily lives as we change and I believe the church must continue to consider as it revisits it's mission and vision on that fulcrum between divinely-inspired revelation and our existence in a world that by nature is alien to God.]