Struggle with meaning

I've started reading Ancient-Future Faith by Robert Webber. I have read through part 1, where he discusses the change from modern to postmodern thought, and part 2, where he discusses the centrality of Christ and the Christus Victor idea.

I am really struggling with some of the ideas presented in both sections so far. In part 1, he describes the modern and postmodern thought patterns and the assumptions that underlie them. A lot of it makes sense to me, but some of it does not. For example, he talks about the postmodern concept of the meaning of a text somehow being intrinsic to the text itself, rather than referring to some external reality outside the text. He calls this internal meaning "cultural-linguistic" and quotes George Lindbeck, whoever that is, as saying "meaning is constituted by the uses of a specific language rather than being distinguishable from it." Also, the truth of a text is "determined by how it 'fits into systems of communication or purposeful action, not by its reference to outside factors.'"

Now my first response to that is, "HUH??" What on earth is he talking about? It sounds to me like so much gibberish and gobbledygook. I was always taught that you had syntax and semantics. Syntax referred to the arrangment of symbols with no meaning attached. Semantics referred to the meaning, and the meaning was always external to the text. To try to find the meaning in the text itself seems like an exercise in futility, like looking at the finger that is pointing at the moon.

In this section, he lists some of the assumptions that he says underlie the modern view, then discusses how postmodernism questions and discards them. I look at most of the assumptions and think, well, yes, isn't that obvious? Yet postmodernism dismisses them. I find that a bit scary. Could it be that there is a foundational something that I am missing, that I just don't get?

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