In relation to the Truth Conference, I have been wandering around Vanhoozer's Is There a Meaning in This Text? I found many of his presentations of postmodern and late modern philosophers helpful in the first half. But his "solutions" are, in my opinion, wishful thinking.
Some of his adventures in wonderand include:
1. The book's fundamental hypothesis:
a. Alvin Plantinga says Christian philosophers need to get on with their own agendas (in other words, who cares what the philosophers of the first half of this book think, I'm going to ignore them and just tell you what I think), p. 199.
b. So here's what I (Vanhoozer) think: God designed words for communication between people, so you've got to listen to what a speaker is saying (esp. 205-206). Therefore, a Christian has to link the meaning of a text to the meaning the author intended.
Or as I would put it, you can't ignore the original meaning because, well, you just can't.
Thank you Vanhoozer for giving us yet another example of modernist evangelicals showing that they can swim in the waters of people doing deep thinking, well summarize and analyze what those others think only then to given the conclusion you started with in as sophisticated language as possible. ..more of the cop-out artistry I've come to expect from modernist evangelical scholars. 467 pages of rough sledding summarized in a circular argument.
2. Vanhoozer and sensus plenior
Here's the real rub: the New Testament authors often couldn't have cared less about the original meaning. This deconstructs Vanhoozer's fundamental claim. When we find the original meaning of Scripture, we find that the original meaning was not the emphasis of the biblical authors. At times they ignored it when they must certainly have known it. At other times their operative paradigms probably led them not to be aware of what the original meaning actually was.
On the one hand, Vanhoozer: "The divine intention does not contravene the intention of the human author but rather supervenes on it" (265). "[T]he Spirit is tied to the written Word as significance is tied to meaning... the role of the Spirit is to serve as the Spirit of significance and thus to apply meaning, not to change it" (265). In other words, the Holy Spirit is not allowed to make the words mean anything contrary to their original meaning (boy, I hope the Holy Spirit is reading all this so He doesn't disobey!)
So how close is Paul to the original meaning of the Hagar-Ishmael passages when he makes Hagar symbolize the literal Jerusalem on earth and Sarah symbolize the heavenly one (Gal. 4)? How close is Matthew to the original meaning of any passage when he sees Jesus growing up in the city of Nazareth as a fulfillment of more than one set of words in the Old Testament that had nothing to do with such a (at that time) non-existent village (Matt. 2:23). He seems to be building off of the similarity between the Hebrew word branch (nezer) in Isaiah 11:1 (which has nothing to do with a city). I think he is also playing of the words of the prophecy about Samson ("he will be called a Nazirite"), but this has nothing to do with Jesus, since he was not a Nazirite, as Samson was and it still has nothing to do with a village.
In short, you could only see the fulfillment in Matthew 2:23 as highly interested in the original meaning of these if you, well, just have to and refuse actually to listen to the text itself. Modernist evangelicals at this point apparently just have to, because ultimately it isn't really the text that's important to them but their idea of the text. And they will feel free (subconsciously) to twist the meaning of the text and shove their presuppositions down its throat to make sure their paradigm works.
The best modernist evangelical cop-out I've heard on this one is relayed by Ben Witherington, maybe the village of Nazareth was founded by descendents of David who looked to the future coming of the "Branch," the Messiah. Ingenious! No one ever should accuse such modernist evangelicals of stupidity. Au contraire. The only way to prop up such a failed paradigm is to be a genius.
An example of a biblical author probably not knowing he is reading out of context but doing so paradigmatically is perhaps Matthew 2:23: "a virgin will conceive and bear a son." Matthew's paradigm may have led him to think this verse was literally in its first sense in reference to Jesus. But in the original context of Isaiah, this was a sign to Ahaz in the eighth century BC. If the sign didn't come until 700 years after, it wasn't much of a sign to Ahaz. It must originally have referred to (I think) an heir to the throne, probably a child of Ahaz (perhaps Hezekiah).
With this example, Vanhoozer might argue for some supervening meaning, a somewhat allegorical one.
3. "The context that yields this maximal sense is the canon, taken as a unified communcations act" (265).
But Vanhoozer's token canonical suggestion will fail just as Childs' did. Even the text of Scripture as a whole will need to be informed by later church history to take on a truly canonical, Christian sense. The canon is a product of the church and the properly canonical sense of Scripture must take into account the definitions, prioritizations, and significations of the consensus ecclesiae to get Vanhoozer where he is really trying to go.
My thoughts... yours?
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10 comments:
Ken,
This is a wonderful summary. I wrote a paper earlier this year towards developing a hermeneutic that is rhetorically political. Basically, this hermeneutic is rhetorical as it is guided by aspects of rhetorical criticism, but it is political in that it speaks to the polis of the Church. Thus, Old Testament material speaks directly to our contemporary context through attention to characters, typologies, and plot progression. The only problem was that I couldn't find a way to work in the stuff I learned in Inductive BIble Study. It's not perfect but then again, I've never claimed Biblical interpretationas my forte :)
Kevin, I agree that narratives are by their very nature highly polyvalent and maleable. This makes them easily appropriated by readers in all times and places. Each individual will find him or herself in the story.
Finding oneself in the story - is this not the beauty of the biblical narrative? I mean, the Bible is 66 (or more, depending on your tradition) books put together to form a whole by the church. However, we have a multiplicity of voices speaking that we can find ourselves in, relate to more than others, and attach ourselves to.
Dr. Schenck, thanks for the summary. I've always struggled with Vanhoozer. He seems to want to take Ricoeur seriously, but then never does. I have always found this quite problematic (and by the way, for a good article by Ricoeur on revelation, see his Toward a Hermeneutic of Revelation which can be found online at religion-online.com I think - Google it if I am wrong).
Also, I was wondering if you saw Witherington's new commentary on Mark, suggesting that Mark was supposed to be read rather than heard. I'm really curious what Dave Smith thinks about this. I find it a bit, well, typical of Witherington.
Yes, he likes Ricoeur as a corrective to Derrida, but then seems basically to ignore the first half of his book in the second (I welcome correction from anyone who's read the book more carefully than I have. Thanks for the Ricoeur link!
What does Wither based the reader thing on? I haven't seen Dave Smith for over a week so don't have access to ask him. I've taken "let the reader understand" these last few years as a reference to someone reading Mark out loud to a church. I.e., as an oral cue.
Ken,
How about posting this on the Bible Forum?
Can do.
First, in case you haven't found it, Ricoeur's "Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation" can be found here (as part of his Essays on Biblical Interpretation, found here).
Second, one of the primary problems with reducing meaning to authorial intent is that often enough us authors do not understand the full meaning of what we say. There are always ideas that are not worked out, biases that are not apparent, further questions that arise from any given assertion we make, and, if Heidegger et al. is right, a range of background understandings and practices that make our analysis possible but which themselves may be suspect (e.g., modernism, technology, etc.).
Whatever your view of Freud's overall work, some idea of the 'unconscious' seems to be true, meaning that there seems to be a whole world that undergirds our surface-level thoughts/ideas that we are generally unaware of. I think Ricoeur does a good job on elucidating this point in his work, particularly The Conflict of Interpretations (a good primer to his Freud and Philosophy, which I still need to get my hands on). Furthermore, if we take deconstruction and Heidegger's later notion of truth as any indication, every disclosure of beings simultaneously covers over other aspects of that being, meaning that every disclosure, every attempt at making the entity completely exlicit, will miss something that is unsaid.
So, the issue becomes: if we can discover the authors explicit intent, what then of these other implicit aspects that are just as important for the meaning of the text as what the author had in mind? When authorial intent itself gets put into question by cogent reasons, it is no longer a safe place to find refuge.
A non sequitur (forgive me), but have you heard about the Being and Time reading blog that's been started? It's still in its initial stages, but I thought you might be interested.
Thanks Kevin--I read one or two of Ricoeur's articles in medias PhD. I was quite taken by them at the time, although I don't think his sentence/word distinction always pans out (I'm sure he's qualified the distinction to account for my thoughts on exceptions). I'll check out both of these--thanks!
I'm obviously rather late to the game here, but I think Vanhoozer's use of Searle should still be noted (and maybe only noted). Searle does have a point that the context of the sentence token has room for much less play than the sentence type. For example, the fact that everyone understood "a point" to be about achieving a purpose and not the end of a stick, a mathematical mark, a geographic location, etc.
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