I very much value your work in trying to redeem Derrida’s thought from the superficial view that he is anti-religion while still stating that he is anti-certainty. It seems that your application of this is to introduce doubt into the procedure of proclaiming God’s Word. If I am reading you correctly, you feel that we can never be certain that we are free from deception (on that we are agreed!) and that consequently, we must beware of any certainty that we are saying what God is saying.

While I am very tempted to agree with you, I must ask what value that puts on preaching or, more to the point, whether it exalts the human part of the equation? My understanding of much contemporary homiletics is that admitting human weakness does not necessrily have to lead to doubting the power of preaching inasmuch as we can and should acknowledge that God’s grace is made perfect in our weakness (2 Cor 12:9). It is not then that our weakness determines the power of the proclamation but that God’s grace, if and when and how He wills, can take our human words and use them for His Kingdom. Thus, God can use we weak vessels when and if we are submitted to Him. Might it not be that our inabilities do not reduce the power of the Word of God but simply represent another form of incarnation: perfect God working through and redeeming flesh for His purposes.

I would also ask how you deal with the absolutism inherent in much of the Scriptures: Jesus claims to be “The” way, truth and life and the only way to the Father (John 14:6). we are told that only in Jesus may we be saved (Acts 4:12) and in Galatians and Colossians Paul speaks of the exclusivity of Christ. Surely this stands against the postmodern suspicion of the definite article. Put another way, could one argue that, whille Scripture says that we cannot know God completely, it does seem to suggest that we can know (or experience) something of God.

Lastly, I would argue that the use of “translation” for proclamation is out of step with what we know about translation – which is the written (stable!) motivated representation of something in a target language on the basis of a stable text in a source language. Surely, given the postmodern love of instability and complexity, the better metaphor is that of interpreting: which is oral (or signed), unstable, imperfect and contextualised by its nature. Sure, we could post “Translation” as including both of these activities but then we would have to ask what we are foregrounding in that process: transfer? difference? language? (You might also want to compare your definition of “translation” to the work of Svenja Wurm and other from within the Translation Studies community.)