Dear Post-Modernist

You are entitled to your opinion, and I don't want to begrudge you that. But for me to agree to your terms of dialogue - to leave behind the foundations of my thinking - would be to concede the argument. Words by themselves do not have meaning, it is the speaker who places meaning on the words, but in order for us to discuss anything there has to be mutually agreed upon definitions for those words. This does not have to be spouting sources and textbook definitions at each other, but we should not ignore those sources or those definitions which have influenced our definitions of the concepts we discuss.

I think we are both on a search for meaning, but I don't think your definition of meaning is the same as mine; however, I'm glad you stated it - that meaning is "what is" - because that gets us somewhere. Once we have our terms defined, we can then move to the crux of the argument. The definition of meaning I would use would E. D. Hirsch's definition, that meaning is the message the author intended. And by intention I would take the Aristotelian definition that intention is mental states, like thoughts or feelings, that are of or about things in reality. In a way this is similar to your definition for assumption - our made up individual perception of reality - but I feel that you are creating a rift between reality and the one perceiving reality; whereas my view joins reality to meaning by allowing the one perceiving reality to really see reality, not just his version of it. I fear that you have fallen into the phenomenological trap of Martin Heidegger, who thought that we interpret everything and never really see anything. The only escape from this is to have all knowledge and all wisdom and all power but since we don't, he argued, we can never really know or perceive anything; post-modern philosophers work from this premis. My hope is that we, as believers in a transcendent Creator God, can see past this trick since we do know One who does know everything, and since He is not only transcendent but also personal, He has given us His word that the creation we perceive is real, we can then base our "assumptions" as you like to call them, or what Alvin Plantinga might call our popular basic beliefs, our most fundamental presuppositions, squarely on God. Of course our perception is limited due to our finiteness, but God's percpective is perfect because of His infiniteness and He provides the link between our senses and reality by giving us His word. Because all of us have presuppositions, we must recognize them, and the most fundamental of all of them is the existence of God. Once that belief is recognized - not necessarily proved, but recognized - then things start making sense. Without that belief, nothing makes sense. This is not existentialism any more than it is empiricism, rather this is the view of reality that I believe the Bible presents. The Word of God does not try to argue for its validity based on objective laws of logic and truth, because non exist, that is, laws about the way the universe is run are not autonomous, they need something to rest on, and like everything else in the Universe, they rest on God. That is not to say that they are a part of God, but that God provides that basis for truth and reality.
As far as my doctrine goes, I hold to no creeds but the written word of God. There we meet God and He reveals Himself to us, our job is to listen, then to tremble at His word, then to believe and obey His word because it is the only sure word we have in our broken world.