Being a Christian theologian, Dr. J.C. Vaessen is interested in philosophical questions, and serves three goals with this book. First, he locates modern Western thought patterns emerging out of a specific underlying worldview in a broader perspective that also includes premodern (naive) and postmodern (nihilistic) thought with their respective worldviews. Second, he investigates the close relationship of these modern models of thought with various models of interpretation and gives some tools for interpreting reality or (Bible) texts that focus on this - in many ways transcendent - reality. Third, he searches, in Hebrew patterns of thought for an alternative to postmodern nihilism. The search for truth is as old as mankind itself. But what is truth? This question transforms the search for truth in a search for hope."