David Ford has argued that a ‘middle-distance realism’ that takes a course between realist and idealist perspectives is able to allow both a ‘finding’ and a ‘fashioning’ of the Gospel. This is consistent with the suggestion that the incorporation of a postmodern weak thesis within a critical- or internal-realist perspective is not incompatible with a notion of God as the ultimate reality and final judge of truth. One of the questions remaining to be considered is the extent to which human thoughts and words do fashion as well as find a theistic reality.

Reading and commitment

If on a postmodern view people are inseparable from their stories, arguably reading becomes primary. One of the consequences of the linguistic turn in theology is that theological concerns become hermeneutical ones. Revisionist theologian and hermeneut Werner Jeanrond emphasizes the hermeneutical dialectic between the text as witness to revelation and the reading of it as mediating that revelation, between texts themselves and theories of reading texts, and between genres and styles in both. As he points out, such a dialectic renders both the purely objective and the purely subjective impossible. Jeanrond proposes a pragmatic middle way akin to Putnam's internal realism, in which meaning is at least in part determined by use. As a language-using activity, reading ‘includes but transcends purely linguistic concerns’.

Where Tony Eagleton, another advocate of a pragmatic approach, contends that all language is socially constituted and therefore all theories political, Jeanrond questions whether this is the only or best way to employ the insight of the social nature of language.