A History of Inerrancy

A few quick thoughts on how I think the Bible's truthfulness has been conceived over time and has changed throughout church history.

Phase 1: Pre-Reformation
From the New Testament authors to the Reformation, there was an assumption that the Bible was the very words of God and that it was obviously truthful in everything it said. However, there was no restriction that would limit that truthfulness to the literal. If a passage seemed problematic from a literal standpoint, it could be interpreted allegorically.

Basically, the meaning of the Bible was tethered to the "rule of faith" rather than to history. Passages perceived to be difficult in relation to orthodoxy or their sense of the world were interpreted in a different way. We see this still in the church today in the pew, as church members who were not trained to read the Bible in context search for interpretations that fit with what they have already been taught to believe.

Phase 2: Reformation
The Reformation untethered the meaning of the Bible from orthodox tradition and forbid figural interpretation. Sola scriptura in effect retethered the meaning of the Bible to history rather than to the rule of faith. The moment this change of meaning orientation happened, Protestant liberalism and higher criticism immediately became one likely eventuality.

The orientation of meaning shifted from being a premodern mirror of common Christian understanding to an individual quest to "get back" to what it meant. The operating mode became one of pealing back, which would lead eventually to the quest for the historical Jesus and the pealing away of historical layers in the gospels.

It would take a few centuries for this to take its course. Luther, Calvin, Wesley continued to some extent to read the Bible in a premodern way, as a big picture mirror of their own theologies. They continued to read a single theology into the biblical texts taken as a whole. And of course they believed the Bible (meaning their own theologies which they saw in the Bible) was completely truthful.

Phase 3: The Princeton Calvinists
The modern doctrine of inerrancy was arguably born of Charles Hodges' support of slavery. (By the way, few people know that the Southern Baptist Church itself was also formed in defense of slavery.) Hodge's doctrine of inerrancy pushed the locus of meaning down to the verse level rather than the overall, big picture theological level as before. So since individual verses in Colossians, 1 Peter, etc. told slaves to obey their masters, Hodge argued that the abolitionist movement was going against the details of the Bible. Meanwhile, abolitionists such as my Wesleyan forebears argued from the big principles of Scripture.

We see this same hermeneutic in play today with the question of women in ministry. Rather than an overall theology informing the whole meaning of the Bible as before, individual, "inerrant" trump verses are brought to play in debates. This was a shift in the way the Bible's truthfulness is approached.

In the late 1800s, B. B. Warfield continued to push Hodge's approach to Scripture at Princeton. He argued literal interpretation of the Bible against my holiness, revivalist ancestors. It was during his time that historical criticism and evolution were coming into play, and he made some early responses. He did not completely rule out evolution (it's hard for us to "feel" that there was ever a time when emotions weren't as polarized as ours are now).  Warfield also accepted a kind of dual authorship of the biblical texts, with the personalities of the authors being involved.

My key take-away here is that modern inerrancy originated in direct opposition to the values of the Wesleyan tradition of which I am a part.

Phase 4: Fundamentalist Inerrancy
The form that inerrancy took in the mid-twentieth century was a defensive mechanism against developments in science and biblical studies. It set down assumptions that created a wall against these perceived threats. No matter what science says, you can't believe in evolution. No matter what Bible scholars say, you have to believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is the codification of these fences. The CSBI assumes an evidentiary, modernist approach but only within certain boundaries.  If the evidence seems to be pointing in a direction that crosses one of the boundary lines, the evidence must be reinterpreted. This is analogous to the way the patristic fathers reinterpreted biblical texts but now it is the historical and scientific evidence that is reinterpreted rather than the meaning of the biblical text.

Phase 5: Evangelical Inerrancy Today
As the new book, Five Views of Inerrancy, reflects, evangelical scholars today have resorted to more complex understandings of inerrancy in an attempt to be faithful to the biblical texts themselves. Kevin Vanhoozer reflects the complications of genre (the Bible does much more than affirm propositional truths). Michael Bird points to the cultural-embeddedness of the whole American debate and pushes us in some ways back toward the ways the truthfulness of the Bible was understood before Hodge. John Franke reminds us of the "plurivocity" of the biblical texts.

Some thoughts after walking through the book...

Inerrancy Book Review (Part 2)

Yesterday, I largely looked at the critiques of Al Mohler's understanding of inerrancy in Zondervan's new Five Views of Inerrancy.  I had three major take-aways:

• Christians throughout the centuries have always affirmed the complete truthfulness of Scripture. When the Bible speaks, God speaks.
• However, the way in which Christians have affirmed the truthfulness of Scripture throughout the centuries is not exactly the same as the way the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI) affirms it.  Most of the authors in this book affirm inerrancy without equating it exactly with CSBI.
• The CSBI is a product of twentieth century American evangelical culture. It has cultural features.

I wish I had time to delve into the intricacies of each author's thought in this book, as well as the responses of each author. Alas!  I will go ahead and stretch out the review one more day, so that I can at least give a little more brain space to Kevin Vanhoozer and Mike Bird today. So my hope is to finish up tomorrow with Enns and Franke.

Kevin Vanhoozer
Vanhoozer is a class act. Like Franke, I don't think he goes far enough with the polyvalence of the biblical text. But V's version of inerrancy is brilliant in relation to the original meaning of the biblical text.

His fundamental insight seems completely indisputable: God did not just speak in the Bible to convey information. He spoke to communicate in several different ways (215). He is worth quoting: "God's Word can be relied upon to accomplish the purpose for which it has been sent, and when this purpose is making affirmations, it does so inerrantly" (223, italics his).

For V, infallibility is the broader category into which inerrancy fits. Inerrancy relates to those instances when God's purpose in the biblical text is to affirm cognitive truths. But God has many other purposes--commands, promises, perhaps even to give us an opportunity to lament or vent. Other words are more suitable to those purposes. Commands are authoritative. Promises are infallible. Laments are cathartic. Assertions are inerrant.

Vanhoozer here is appropriating the insights of speech-act theory. V advocates a "well-versed" approach to Scripture that "acknowledges that what is said is not always an affirmation" (220). Again, this seems beyond dispute. To limit, as C. F. H. Henry did, the basic function of language more or less to the cognitive and to making propositional assertions (214-15) seems almost an incomprehensible position today. Henry may have had a Spock-like personality, but he is clearly the exception among us mortals rather than the rule.

V quotes with approval David Dockery's 1986 definition, which presumably stands behind the wording of inerrancy that Asbury Seminary seminary uses: "The Bible, in the original autographs, properly interpreted, will be found to be truthful and faithful in all that it affirms concerning all areas of life, faith, and practice" (207).

Dockery and Vanhoozer are making a crucial distinction here.  Not everything "mentioned" in the Bible is the point, what was being affirmed. Let me provide my own example. The point of Paul saying he was taken up into the third heaven was not to make a statement about the structure of the universe. Frankly, the point was not even to say that Paul was taken into the presence of God. What the passage was affirming was that no one has the right to boast before God, and though Paul could boast more than his opponents, even he was nothing next to God.

To me, this is a far more defensible version of inerrancy than Mohler's. I'll leave V there. He has some other valid clarifications to make. For example, to take the Bible literally is not the same as literalism. To read the Bible literally, to V, is to read it in terms of what the author was actually doing with the text, which might not actually be literal.

Michael Bird
I think one of the biggest purposes Bird had in mind in his chapter was to put American cultural myopia in its place. His basic point is that global Christianity has been doing just fine with its own affirmations of the Bible's truthfulness and doesn't need to import America's baggage to become more informed and holy.

He spends a couple pages going through a host of affirmations about the Bible used in global Christianity.  None of them use the word inerrant. Even the Westminster Confession, the cornerstone of Reformed faith, affirms the "infallible truth and divine authority" of Scripture (161). The Lausanne Conference comes closest, "without error in all that it affirms" (162). Most, he says, use words like "infallible" and "authoritative."

He does not consider "infallible" a retreat from confidence in the Bible's truthfulness any more than Vanhoozer does. Rather, it takes "a view to the purpose for which God has revealed himself" (163). For Bird, that focus of revelation primarily has to do with Christ and God the Father. "The Bible was intended to impart knowledge of God as Creator and Redeemer, and under that premise, the Bible is completely true in all that it says" (163).

The actual word, "inerrancy" is a relative latecomer on the theological scene. J. I. Packer suggests it was not regularly used in this connection until the 1800s (162-63). Bird can live with it, although he agrees with Donald Bloesch that it is not the preferable word (172). He doesn't see a material difference between it and infallibility (163).

He clearly considers it rife with Americanism and takes a few opportunities to mock us for peculiarities we don't know we have. "Only American evangelicals use Scripture to argue against gun control, against environmental care, and against universal healthcare" (156).

He notes that we have transported our myopia here and there around the world with our enculturated missionaries: "I have met some peculiar Christians from Africa and Europe with oddly American beliefs about taxation, end-times theology, the King James Bible, and prescribed styles of worship" (145 n.2). He excludes these transplants from his description of the global church.

He has no interest in our debates over inerrancy. He sees it used primarily as a weapon in American circles, "a way of forcing conformity to certain biblical interpretations, and to weed out dissenters in denominational politics" (157). "Inerrancy is primarily a weapon of religious politics to define who is in and who is out."

In the end, like John Stott, he is not so much interested in formulas of subscription as in practical submission (165). "How we live under the Bible is the ultimate test of what we believe about God and the Bible."  By the way, elsewhere in the book, Vanhoozer notes that Stott, a British evangelical, was uncomfortable with the word inerrancy because it seemed to reduce the Bible to a set of propositions (200 n.2).

I hope to finish up tomorrow with Enns and Franke.

Integrating Scripture

This now an excerpt from part 3 of the paper. Portions of Part 1 and Part 2 can be found at these links.
______________
Where we believe Vanhoozer’s program fails is, again, in his inability to let the new level of holistic Scriptural meaning involve significant changes or developments of meaning from the intended meanings of individual texts. He writes, “Does reading the Bible as Scripture change or develop its meaning? … On my view, to view the Bible as ‘Scripture’ best accords not with the illocutionary but rather with the perlocutionary aspect of communicative action.” In other words, the effect of these texts taken together as a whole involves new impact, but the fundamental meanings and purposes of the words do not particularly change. This is an important point for Vanhoozer, for he does not want the meaning of Scripture to depend on an interpretive community but to have a meaning of its own.

He is not even willing to lend such polyvalence to the Spirit. The Spirit bears witness to the meaning of Scripture. He does not innovate meaning. The Spirit is the one who “leads the community into the single correct interpretation: the literal sense.” “If there is a sensus plenior, then, it is on the level of God’s gathering together the various partial and progressive communicative acts and purposes of the human authors into one ‘great canonical Design’ Vanhoozer uses “literal” here in an interesting way. It is presumably the normal sense and purpose of Scripture as a whole to God.

As impressive as this construction is, it faces numerous serious and fatal challenges. For one, Vanhoozer’s sense of literal turns out to be rather figurative when it comes to any normal sense of the word. The literal sense of something, in normal usage, refers to the most straightforward sense in a particular context. To speak of Christ’s death as a sacrifice is thus a metaphor in terms of the normal sense of the word sacrifice in any of the original contexts of any of the biblical books. Vanhoozer might, on the other hand, consider us to have literal the wrong way around. The most literal sense of the word sacrifice is in relation to Christ’s death and, in that sense, the use of “sacrifice” in relation to an animal killed on a stone altar is the more metaphorical sense of the word.

This is not, of course, the way the meaning of the word sacrifice has been experienced by the mortals who offered them in ancient times. Such a meaning is not a part of any specific text of the Old Testament. Indeed, it is quite possible that only Hebrews in the New Testament has anything like what would become the fully Christian sense of sacrifice that would be the most “literal” sense in Vanhoozer’s schema—and the idea was still probably a live metaphor for its author. In Acts 21, for example, we find Paul offering a sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple in relation to a vow made by certain Jerusalem Christians. The event was apparently appropriate to the author of Acts, who interestingly was himself probably writing after the destruction of the temple.

Yet for early Christians to offer such a sacrifice seems odd and inappropriate from the standpoint of Hebrews. Vanhoozer would presumably consider Hebrews’ point of view to be the appropriate “literal” vantage point from which to integrate the rest of the biblical texts, including “the various partial and progressive communicative acts and purposes of the human authors” somewhere along the way to this understanding. But it is questionable that the author of Leviticus or Ezra would have agreed with Hebrews that the death of a single righteous individual might suffice to atone for all the sins of all time and that their own offerings did not truly take away sins. Indeed, it is not obvious from a historical-cultural perspective that the author of Acts would take this perspective.

This line of thinking points to two very important critiques of the way Vanhoozer formulates the relationship between the canonical meaning of Scripture as a whole and the historical meaning of individual texts. First, it is the nature of the situation that the integration of Scripture as a whole requires a vantage point from outside the individual texts themselves. In their original, contextual meanings, we do have some interaction between the New Testament and Old Testament that might suggest how to integrate them. Even at this level, Vanhoozer’s model of “interpretive virtue” is deconstructed by the actual way the New Testament uses the Old, regularly interpreting it in pneumatic ways that sometimes have little to do with its original meanings.

But we have little explicit interaction between New Testament texts, and the New Testament’s engagement with the Old Testament is not systematic but depends on the individual New Testament books themselves. In short the individual books of the Bible were originally individual books and so do not intrinsically provide us with a definitive fulcrum point from which to integrate the entirety. For example, there is nothing about the texts themselves that would keep us from considering Ezra the fulcrum point, with the New Testament books a horrible case study in deviation from orthodoxy. Indeed, this is something like how an orthodox Jew might integrate these texts together.

It is thus a Christian point of view outside the biblical text that would center the integrated perspective on sacrifice in Hebrews or the integrated perspective on the Old Testament Law in Romans. Vanhoozer might suggest that the integrated perspective comes from God who has an intended “literal” perspective for the whole. This is a perfectly appropriate position. It is just a perspective that does not derive from any of the individual texts in their original settings. It comes from a vantage point outside the texts that is not intrinsic to the texts themselves. It requires us to organize the texts in ways that their authors at times would have disagreed with. Imagine telling the author of Leviticus that none of the sacrifices in his book actually took away sins and that God’s real intent for the book was to point toward the death of a righteous Israelite who would live centuries later and do away with all sacrifices for good!

Magisterial Paper by Steve Lennox at Symposium

Steve is in the middle of a tremendous paper on the hermeneutic of 1800s holiness revivalists. It pulls the rug out from under the Hermeneutical Spiral and Vanhoozer's half-way reformation.

This quote from Daniel Steele (1894) is shocking and significant:

"It will not do to lean on the authority of a majority of experts; but on the practical question of the extent of gospel salvation from sin. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, the unlearned minority who have put the doctrine to experimental proof may be very much wiser than the learned majority of the magnates of the modern church, who have never subjected the question of the test of personal experience. Here the testimony of some Uncle Tom or Amanda Smith of the slave plantation may outweigh the opinion of a whole faculty of German theological professors. Experience outweighs theory; faith makes philosophy kick the beam" (Half-Hours with Saint Paul and Other Bible Readings, 239-40).

To read Lennox's paper, go here.

Monday BCS (Bible as Christian Scripture) 1.2

1.2 The Problem of Meaning
At the heart of the problem of Christian Scripture is the problem of meaning in general. In popular usage, words are imagined to point rather straightforwardly to things. The meaning of the word dog is thus aptly captured in the picture of a dog that appears in the bubble above my head when you say the word. In this sense the meaning of words is fixed by the things to which they refer and is thus relatively stable. Understanding meaning is simply a matter of finding the things to which the words point.

But this model has proved to be vastly inadequate for a number of reasons. For example, words often do not point to things. Concrete nouns may refer to things. But it is hard to say what picture will appear in the bubble above your head when you hear the word "righteousness" or "is." And the picture of a "wild goose chase" or a "red herring" will hardly help you understand the meaning of these phrases in English, and you will have to find completely different idioms if you try to translate them into Chinese.

A word may have also more than one meaning. As an instance of our conundrum, these meanings need not have anything to do with one another. It is simply not the case that getting "fired" from your job has some current semantic connection to the meaning of getting all "fired" up for a football game or the fact that a hunter "fired" a rifle.

We may sum up the situation of meaning in the following way. First, the relationship between words and meaning is arbitrary and constantly changing. To put it in more precise language, the relationship between "signifiers" and that which is "signified" is in no way fixed or constant. [1] I can write a note to my family in what seems the simplest of English language and in ten years those same words may have taken on quite new and different connotations than today.

This is the hidden irony of the use of the King James Version by so many English speaking Christians in the United States today. Such individuals may think to themselves, the meaning of the words is perfectly understandable to me. Yet they may at the same time not realize that the way the words strike them is sometimes different from how those words were used when the fifth updating of the language was made in 1789 to give the King James its current wording. A good translation into some language today will thus inevitably become less and less accurate and helpful over time. [2]

Secondly, meaning is a function of word use, not a matter of fixed truths to which words point. [3] The dictionary entry of a word is a snapshot of how that word is being used at a particular point in time, listed from most frequent to least. A dictionary thus technically does not tell us what a word means, but how it is being used at any given time. Meanings are constantly added and removed over time.

The implications of this simple shift in understanding are quite momentous for the meaning of the Bible. For example, what use of these words at what point in time is the one that renders the meaning that is Christian Scripture. Is it the way the words of the Bible were being used at the time the book in question was written (which will not clearly be the meaning of the words in the other books at the time they were written)? Is it the way Christians in general have taken the words over time? Is it the way the words strike me in my way of using words?

Certainly meaning is not purely a matter of individual words added together. Combinations of words--especially into clauses but also into sentences and paragraphs--have a greater tendency to clarify and delimit the possible meanings rather than to further ambiguate them. [4] Nevertheless, even a careful reading of a text can frequently leave ambiguity--especially when the text is somewhat removed from us in context. And many readers of texts are far from careful.

When we couple the arbitrary nature of words as signifiers with meaning as a function of use, we begin to see the scope of the problem. The meaning of a word, phrase, or semantic unit at any point in time can differ widely from the meanings it previously had or subsequently will have. That meaning is tied to the way the word is being used at the time. Accordingly, the meaning of the same words will shift over time so that the same book of the Bible will inevitably take on different meanings depending on who is reading it against what general set of word uses. And thus we begin to appreciate better why there are over 35,000 different Christian denominations, most of which have little awareness of the fact that the way the words have struck them in their way of using words is different from the way other groups use words and still vastly different from the way the original authors and audiences of these books used words.

Thirdly, the use of words goes far beyond "denotation" and statement. Words can say things far beyond what they say on a surface level or on a literal level, and words do things far beyond simply making assertions. That is to say, we often use words in complex ways. If I try on some clothes I have not worn for twenty years and say to my wife, "Yeah, that fits," I may actually mean the exact opposite of what the words seem to say. When I say, "He went through the roof when I told him how much it was going to cost," I do not mean to suggest he is now dead or in the hospital with major head injuries.

Yet even these "non-literal" statements are statements--they are used to assert things. Words do many things other than make assertions. [5] When I see someone and say, "How are you?" I may or may not really be asking them of their current state. My words may rather simply be performing a social pleasantry--one that is completely sincere, but not a matter of an actual question. Some of our language is "cohesive" in nature, meant to perform social functions, rather than logical ones.

If I yell, "Fire!" in a crowed room, chances are I am telling everyone to get out of the building as quickly as possible. If I say, "I do," at my wedding, I am not simply making a statement. I am marrying a person with those words, making them my spouse with those words. Those who fight tooth and nail for the propositional nature of biblical truth thus ignore the fact that words do much more than make assertions--and even assertions are often figurative to one degree or another.

It does seem possible to make carefully worded absolute statements. "All single men are bachelors" would seem to be such a statement. When all the words in this sentence are taken in the way those words are normally used at this particular point in the history of the English language, the statement is always true in all times and all places. It is a proposition that is absolutely true because it is true by definition.

At the same time, absolute propositions are not the stuff of ordinary speech. They are the stuff of a Western philosophy class. Most statements we use in ordinary language are not meant to be absolute in scope, and we would "misinterpret" the statements of others to take them as such. And the "connotations" are often more to the point of our meaning than the precise "denotation" of our words. We frequently employ figurative language--understatement, hyperbole, irony. And we use metaphors.

A good case can be made that metaphor stands at the root of all or at least most human language. [6] Nevertheless, it still makes sense to distinguish between the "dead metaphors" that constitute the baseline of human language, and new meanings we create when we juxtapose unlike things together in new ways or at least ways that are new enough to be fresh in connotation. [7] The metaphorical use of language alone vastly multiplies the possible meanings that words can have in the use any individual makes of it.

The matter of genre also affects the meaning words have in a particular context. If I am reading fiction, I am not meant to take the individuals in a narrative as individuals who actually lived in history. If I am reading satire, I should expect irony and a more critical stance toward a topic than normal. The function of genre also changes over time, to where one cannot assume that what is appropriate for history writing today is the same as what it was at another time in place.

We thus face significant questions of meaning when we approach a library of texts such as the Bible. We have narratives, laws, prophecies, letters, and apocalyptic material. The overwhelming majority of the biblical material does not seem to be in the form of absolute philosophical propositions. We have irony, understatement, hyperbole, metaphor, allegory, and other non-literal language. We have not only language that asserts but language that honors and shames, language that binds author and audience, language that commands and wishes, language that expresses emotion, and so forth. The potential for a multiplicity of interpretations is enormous, as the history of interpretation embodies.

Fourthly, the use of words is a function of community and culture. The history of what words have meant in the past is interesting, but ultimately irrelevant to what words mean at any given point in time. Herein lie many of the fallacies of the way words are and often have been treated in Christian rhetoric. The etymological fallacy, for example, supposes that the way a word has been used in the past is somehow determinative of what it means today. Not so. Even if one could show that the Greek word "to sin" originally meant "to miss an archery target" (and that is incredibly dubious in itself), it would have no necessary connection whatsoever to what the word meant at the time of the New Testament or to how the word "to sin" is understood in a given Christian culture or sub-culture today.

The fact that the Greek word for "church" is a compound of "ek," "out of," and "kaleo," "to call," does not in any way imply that the meaning of ekklesia has anything to do with being called out. In fact, the word was used of an assembly of people for centuries before the New Testament with no apparent thought for its origins as a word. These sorts of semantic games that readers of the Bible often play with words give the impression of meaning as something present in each word and readily identifiable. But such is simply not the case.

The meaning of words at any given time and place is the individual actualization of potential meanings based on the way words are being used in a local community, which is usually bears a relationship to the way words are being used in a broader culture. If I am using the "sweeper" in Indiana, I am using something more typically called a "vacuum" in broader American language, although a "Hoover" in England. Local dialect has its own way of using words at a particular time and place.

The dynamics of word usage involve two poles of influence. On the one end is the understanding of the world in which language is used--paradigms, worldviews, the socially constructed nature of the way we think and talk about our worlds. On the other is the individual actualization we make of the potentialities of language, including all the metaphorical uses to which we put language. We are often unaware of how differently one group of human beings in one cultural or social setting think about the world in contrast to other people groups or subcultures. This is the most insidious factor in meaning as moderns approach the biblical text, for our default is to see our own paradigms behind language that originally pointed to quite different paradigms of a different socially constructed reality.

It is highly doubtful, for example, that the typical Westerner reads language of sacrifice and atonement with anything like the cultural lenses that the original audiences of the Bible did. Indeed, it is possible that New Testament audiences did not understand such language with quite the same glasses that Old Testament ones did. Our sense of families or of individual identity may differ widely as well. We read words like "father," "mother," "I," "we," "discipline," "wife," and may be completely unaware of the vast differences in connotation in the biblical worlds, deceived by the common denotations of these words.

So the question of the Christian meaning of Scripture comes into clearer focus than ever. We have not only the distinction between the way any specific group of readers might understand the Bible and the way its original audiences might have. But we have the fact that the books of the Bible themselves span a thousand year period involving not only vastly different individual situations but also vastly different cultural contexts. We thus have not only the question of the gap between us and the Bible in time, culture, and situation. We have the gap between the individual books of the Bible themselves.

The Bible itself largely does not address these gaps, wherein lies the incoherency of the notion that the Bible alone might serve as guide to the Christian. This view inevitably treats the Bible naively as a single book whose words have common meanings that are definable by a common human dictionary that is the same as the dictionary I use. Every element of this assumption is false. The Bible is dozens of books whose words were originally a function of the way words were used at particular times and places. There is no common human dictionary--human thinking differs far more from culture to culture than is usually appreciated. And the way I understand words is a snapshot of my time and place, not of universal linguistic meaning.

So the individual books of the Bible largely do not tell us how to integrate their words in their situations with the words of the other situations presupposed by the other books of the Bible. And the books of the Bible largely were not written with whether readers thousands of years later would know how to appropriate their words in quite different times and situations. The task of finding a unified meaning to these texts is far more an extra-biblical task than a task that the Bible itself can perform for us. Again, the multiplicity of Christian traditions is a witness to the multiple ways in which the varied content of the Bible can be configured in systematic form.

When we find a unified meaning to Scripture, the organizing principle of that meaning will be, of necessity, a function of something outside the text. Some current hermeneuticians speak of a different order of speech that is God speaking to us through the text of Scripture as a whole. [8] The problem with their suggestion is not so much the suggestion itself but their apparent sense that this overall meaning is in some clear relation to the particular original meanings these books had and their apparent sense that this meaning is still in some way "in" the Bible rather than a function of a particular point of view brought to the Bible read as Scripture.

Finally, meaning is ultimately a function of the individual reading (hearing, etc...) a text, not a function of the author of that text. [9] As one philosopher of language put it, a text becomes autonomous once it is uttered. [10] It takes on a life of its own that is not limited to whatever meaning its author might have intended it to have. Indeed, the meaning a "reader" finds in it may have little or nothing to do with the originally intended meaning.

This recognition is not to deny that author's have intentions in relation to texts or that authors intend to do things with their words. [11] This meaning, while not always easily accessed by others when the author is not present to confirm intention, is in theory a relatively fixed meaning and an appropriate object of inquiry. Nevertheless, an author cannot control the meanings a text will take on once it is uttered. Meaning is a ultimately function of "readers," regardless of authorial intent.

Further, we do not come at texts as objective thinkers detached from our own biases and presuppositions. And we will meet the horizon of the text as it meets us, possibly with all sorts of semantic baggage that text has accrued over time, if we read it within any sort of tradition at all. [12] But if we affirm that communication can take place at all (and thus would seem to be a useful suggestion if we at all use words), then we must affirm that authors have intentions when they make utterances, and that we can at least in theory receive their communication appropriately to their intention, even across the span of time and place.

However, the assumption that the intended meaning is the only or the most valid one is an one that bears significant examination, especially when it comes to the question of Christian Scripture. Some hermeneuticians have argued that it is an ethical duty to try to read an author's words in terms of their intended meaning. [13] The New Testament authors in general felt no such compunction in relation to the Old Testament text. It is one thing to consider it a loving obligation to try to listen to a living speaker trying to communicate with you. It is quite another to extend that duty when an author has been dead for thousands of years and was writing to someone else.

As we will argue in the remainder of the chapter, the "Christian" meaning of Scripture turns out to be distinct to varying degrees from the original meanings and connotations of the biblical words. We will argue in this chapter, and then assume and demonstrate in the rest of the book, that the Christian meaning of Scripture is a significance that the words of Scripture take on when read from a Christian point of view. We will further argue that the most appropriate starting point for identifying such a point of view is the consensus of Christendom throughout the ages, a fairly stable point of view on key issues.

[1] de Saussure

[2] Ironically, many King James only advocates do not realize that the version of the King James Version that they use has already undergone four revisions to update the language. In other words, their adamancy over fixing the wording of the Bible was not shared by those most responsible for the wording of the King James itself. This is particularly true of its original translators, who made the translation in a day when the Geneva Bible was the translation of choice. Some King James advocates, upon realizing the incoherency of their position, have turned from the ridiculous to the sublime by beginning to use the 1611 version of the King James, whose language is even further removed from current English usage than the fifth revision of 1789 currently in use.

[3] Wittgenstein

[4] This is the strength of Ricoeur's response to Derrida.

[5] J. L. Austin. Searle and subsequent attempts to standardize the various things words do have been less helpful.

[6] Lakoff and Johnson

[7] definition, Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor

[8] Vanhoozer

[9] A "text" of course need not be words.

[10] Ricoeur

[11] Vanhoozer, Thiselton

[12] Gadamer

[13] Vanhoozer, who then negates his claim with his notion of the Bible as a whole as a divine speech-act, which requires one to discard the originally intended meaning in deference to this new meaning of the whole.

Monday Editorial: The Postmodern Biblical Consultant

I'm in the final stages of a piece I'm writing on Hebrews and the worship of Jesus. In the process of writing, I've engaged heavily with Richard Bauckham's impressive interpretive construct of how Jesus' enthronement at the time of his exaltation to God's right hand connects to his inclusion within the divine identity since eternity past. Bauckham's exegetical conclusions are so different from mine that it has been difficult for me to get inside his head.

But I think I have and, as you might expect, his interpretation is ingenious. Jesus inherits the name, YHWH, at his enthronement, but Jesus has been included within the identity of the one God since eternity past. The early Christians would have recognized this fact as soon as they understood Jesus to be on God's divine throne a la Psalm 110:1. Only the one God can be on that throne, so Jesus must be included in the identity of the one God. He therefore must have been involved with creation as part of the one God and he must be worthy of the worship of the one God.

As I said, I find this ingenious. It applies all Bauckham's exhaustive knowledge of second temple Jewish literature to the particulars of the New Testament text and comes up with an interpretation that sees the later Christian affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon about Jesus already there in a nutshell in the NT, "the earliest christology was in nuce the highest christology," as Bauckham says repeatedly in the string of works he's written related to this topic.

This ought to be great, right? He's done what Christian Bible scholars are supposed to do, right? He's found a way to configure the biblical evidence in its historical context so that an interpretation of the original meaning fits with later Christian faith. I don't think he would put it that way, but we should expect it to work out that way, right?

This post really isn't about Bauckham. It relates to my sense that theological hermeneutics can't quite seem to admit to itself that it is a form of reader response. In his piece on biblical monotheism, Bauckham suggests at one point, in so many words, that when we can't know for sure what a historical conclusion should be, why not assume it fits with the conclusion most convenient for faith. Again, he doesn't quite put it that way, but that's what I take him to be saying.

The problem here for me is that, in my experience, there often is a distinction between the eyes of later faith and the original, historical eyes. The way the NT interprets the OT is a case in point, and it is both predictable and amusing that some of the key hermeneutical players have devoted some energy to the NT's interpretation of the OT. Why? Because this is a point of "naughty data" that truly threatens to deconstruct the paradigm.

Kevin Vanhoozer wants to see the authoritative meaning of the biblical text as the original meaning, yet see the significance of the text as something that can vary. I would say that theological hermeneutics often goes further to change the meaning of the text by reading it against the context of the later church. I don't have a problem with this way of reading the text. What I have a problem with is what I see as the frequent slight of hand to argue that this reader response approach is really the same as an original meaning approach that gives the benefit of the doubt to Christian faith.

Perhaps I have misread what theological hermeneuticians are really trying to do. But it seems to me that the theological hermeneutic approach is a bit like having someone from your team referee the game. It's like letting the people who stand to gain from the bailout decide how to dispense the money from the bailout. It's like chairing the rank improvement committee when you're up for rank improvement. It's like having all your friends on the jury and being able to change the judge if you don't like what he or she decides.

It seems to me there is an inherent conflict of interest in the current, very popular postmodern drive to wed theology back to Bible.

My thoughts here will not be popular, and they won't open up for me an opportunity to write one of the many new commentaries that are now coming out from the standpoint of a theological hermeneutic. But after much reflection I believe that the wedge between biblical interpreter and theological appropriator should be retained, like the division of powers in the United States government. It is not that the same person can't perform both roles, it's that there is an inherent conflict of interest between the two approaches to the text.

What I want to suggest is that it is ultimately unhealthy to go completely in the way of theological hermeneutics as it currently seems to be practiced. Its current approach, as I read it, seems to be that, since the original meaning is uncertain, why not go with whatever option fits best with Christian faith. Yet this approach seems to me only a sophisticated version of the older fundamentalism. A postmodern reading of the biblical text doesn't need to be tied to the original meaning at all.

I think another, more healthy postmodern approach to biblical interpretation would see a biblical interpreter as a consultant for many readers across the spectrum. For the original meaning part of the consultation, I might suggest several possible ways of reading the biblical text depending on varying assumptions. If you believe in the possibility of miracles, here are some possible meanings the gospel texts might have had. If you don't, here are some possible meanings the gospel texts might have had. If you are interested in the original meaning of the text, here are the most likely options. If you are interested in reading these words in the light of later Christian faith, here are some possible resonances.

To let the text be the text, and not let it become a slave to theology, this is how I believe it must be. Otherwise we are only playing games with the biblical text, never truly listening to it. Of course this does shift the onus of Christian faith to the theologian. The ministerial and Christian curriculum of the postmodern age will end up having more theology than Bible or, contrariwise, the Bible taught will focus on theological readings and/or appropriations, rather than the original meaning.

We'll still want some biblical consultants around to keep theology honest and to give it historical depth. And while I'm arguing for the old division of powers here, I'm not at all suggesting that the same person can't both consult and theologically appropriate. I'm arguing for maintaining the firm distinction rather than blurring it in the manner of contemporary theological hermeneutics.

3 Postmodern Complications

Somewhere in the middle of this section I passed my word limit. Oh well, I'm sure some of you could easily cut out parts of what I've written. I think I'm finally ready for my conclusion after this section. Then the pruning... or I suppose rewriting... will begin.

______________
The post-modern critique of meaning has forced at least some modifications to modernist evangelical hermeneutics. We would argue that these modifications actually cohere better with the hermeneutic of John Wesley and the nineteenth century holiness movement than they do with late twentieth century evangelical hermeneutics. For example, we have already seen the (professed) contemporary evangelical aversion to reading Scripture in any way other than with its original meaning. Richard Longenecker exemplifies this tendency in his study of the way the New Testament itself interprets the Old Testament.[i] His work and the work of evangelical scholarship in general have attempted to minimize the non-contextual orientation of New Testament exegesis.[ii]

Nevertheless, Longenecker is forced in the end to acknowledge that the biblical authors themselves come up short when evaluated by the canons of evangelical hermeneutics.[iii] Rather than let New Testament practice legitimize the pneumatic exegesis that typified groups like nineteenth century revivalists and twentieth century charismatics, he instead gives precedence to the evangelical perspective over the practice of the Bible itself. He relegates New Testament methods of exegesis to an aspect of ancient culture that does not transcend to the present! The guiding principles of evangelical hermeneutics are thus recognized to be based on principles brought to the Bible rather than derived from Scripture itself.

Ironically, Vanhoozer himself is a good illustration of the incoherency of evangelical hermeneutics as it attempts to respond to the post-modern critique of meaning. At the same time that he champions the literal meaning of Scripture, we find him deviating to a different hermeneutic, seemingly unaware, as he searches for a way from the particular meanings of individual passages to an overarching, coherent significance for Scripture as a whole.[iv] Scripture as a whole, he suggests, is a speech-act from God, which means that God has determined the meaning of Scripture as a whole. Certainly we do not fault him for this theological understanding of Scripture—it coheres well with John Wesley’s sense of the analogy of faith.

What it does not cohere with are his own claims with regard to the proper meaning of the Bible as its “literal” meaning. However the audiences of the biblical texts understood the books of the Bible, they did it from within their particular socio-cultural matrices and their accompanying symbolic universes. These diverse meanings constitute the plain (what he means by “literal”) meaning of the books of the Bible. Whatever it might mean to say that Scripture is an overarching, divine speech-act, it is de facto quite distinct from the several, “literal” meanings of the words.

On the other hand, others have taken the post-modern critique on board to the extent that they no longer seem to distinguish between the original meaning of the biblical texts and their own theological appropriation of it. Joel Green, for example, eschews the modernist hermeneutic that bids us think of the books of the Bible as “someone else’s mail.”[v] Unless we are willing to hear ourselves as the “you” of James, he writes, “we are not in a position to hear well the Letter of James as Christian Scripture."[vi] Again, these comments cohere well with the hermeneutics of both Wesley and the Christians of the ages, as well as with the nineteenth century holiness revivalists.

The issue with theological hermeneutics, as we might term Green’s approach, is that it seems to put its head in the sand and simply ignore the elephant in the room, namely, the fact that the meanings we see in the biblical text are almost certainly different from those of the original audiences. On the one hand, the twentieth century philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer rightly pointed out that we inevitably bring along the perspectives of our past, especially the traditions to which we belong, as we try to interpret texts such as the Bible.[vii] The result is that our understandings of the biblical books always blur our context with the original contexts, which inevitably remain somewhat inaccessible to us. Accordingly, Green’s hermeneutic largely gives up the chase. Indeed, it almost impugns the chase as inimical to understanding the Bible as Christian Scripture.

Again, we might easily conceptualize Wesley’s analogy of faith as the appropriate theological context within which to read the books of Scripture, the appropriate tradition within which to fuse our “horizon” with the “horizon” of the biblical texts. The diverse books of the Bible thus take on the coherent structure of faith that we bring to it and become unified Scripture. At the same time, we must recognize that although we may not be able to determine with full certainty what the original meaning of the books of the Bible was, we can say with a high degree of certainty that it must have differed in significant ways from the holistic theological perspective we bring to it by way of the analogy of faith.

We can say such things because of the principle of anachronism. Although we do not know the original meaning of the Bible definitively, we know enough about ancient symbolic universes to see that, for example, Christian understandings of the Old Testament must often differ from the understandings its original audiences would have had in the ancient near east. Similarly, unless we wish to suggest that the Christian thinkers of the second to fifth century had simply lost touch with the original meaning of the New Testament, we must conclude that their conclusions on the Trinity and the dual nature of Christ forged new ground with the biblical texts that differed to at least some degree from their original meanings. Otherwise they would not have had so much to debate.

In short, we see that the coherence of the Bible is as much a function of us as Christian readers as it is a function of the original meaning of these texts. The books themselves, as far as their original authors are concerned, largely were not written with a view to each other. The authors of the “Jewish Bible” by and large did not interact with each other to explain how, for example, comments the prophetic tradition makes about sacrifices (e.g., Jeremiah 7:22; Psalm 40:6-7) might fit with the assumptions of the Levitical tradition. It is true that New Testament authors do provide a certain perspective from which to find unity in the “Old Testament.” But the very label, Old Testament, implies a perspective that is not intrinsic to the Jewish Bible itself in its several original meanings.

Nor do the New Testament books tell us how to integrate their teachings with one another. James does not have a footnote at James 2:24—“a person is justified by works and not by faith alone”—that explains how this statement coheres with Romans 3:28—“a person is justified by faith and not by works of law.” Whether we like it or not, we are forced to take these two diverse biblical comments and construct from them a unified Scripture. We do this work of integration by assuming a unified stance in relation to the biblical text as a whole. We will presumably draw the elements of this unified stance from the materials of the Bible itself, but the stance must de facto be one assumed from the outside of the Bible looking in. We have no other choice; we can do no other.

[i] Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period.
[ii] Ben Witherington on Nazareth.
[iii] Longenecker
[iv] Meaning, First Theology
[v] Seized by Truth, 51.
[vi] ***, 55.
[vii] Truth and Method

2 Modernist Evangelical Coherence

Pre-modern interpretation might find coherence between diverse portions of the Bible in several ways. For example, Origen (ca. 185-254) believed that at times it would be “absurd and impossible” to take the biblical text literally.[i] To be sure, he believed that far more of the biblical text was meant literally than the portion “with a purely spiritual signification.” But at points where the literal meaning did not coincide with Origen’s overall understanding, he interpreted the text allegorically.[ii]

Augustine (ca. 354-430) similarly set down the rule:

"Whatever exists in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or sound doctrine, you may set down as figurative. Purity of life has reference to the love of God and one’s neighbor; sound doctrine to the knowledge of God and one’s neighbor."[iii]

Both Origen and Augustine thus used allegory and non-literal interpretation as tools to affirm the truthfulness of Scripture. They could interpret allegorically when the text said something that did not fit with their understanding—for Augustine especially when something did not fit with the rule of faith or the law of love. But they could also use it as a tool of coherence, to fit diverse parts of Scripture together that seemed to conflict in some way with each other.

The Protestant emphasis on the literal—or more accurately, the plain meaning of Scripture—thus removed a handy tool for affirming the truthfulness and coherence of the Bible in the face of apparent contradiction. In good evangelical fashion, Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart give as one of their foundational hermeneutical principles the notion that “a text cannot mean [today] what it never could have meant to its author or his or her readers.”[iv] If we apply this dictum to Genesis 1:27 (which Fee and Stuart do not), we cannot understand the “us” in the statement, “Let us make humanity in our own image,” as a reference to the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity was not hammered out until the fourth century AD and thus Genesis would hardly have had this meaning to anyone in the second millennium before Christ. Unlike Wesley, the modernist evangelical hermeneutic gives priority to the probable historical meaning of the text over a theological significance such as Wesley himself drew from it.

Kevin Vanhoozer similarly writes, “The Spirit may blow where, but not what, he wills.”[v] Such language is striking in its restrictive tone, but it is a reflection of Vanhoozer’s theological sense of the Spirit as one who bears witness to the Son, the Word (e.g., John 16:13), rather than being the word itself or the one who generates truth. For Vanhoozer, the function of the Spirit is as “the one who leads the community into the single correct interpretation: the literal sense.”[vi]

It is at this point that we might point out that the Wesleyan tradition for which this book is written has John Wesley himself more for a grandparent than as a parent, namely, the Wesleyan traditions that formed their identities in the holiness revivals of the late 1800’s: Wesleyans, Nazarenes, Free Methodists, and so forth. For those in these traditions, a “Wesleyan” hermeneutic cannot simply turn to John Wesley for precedent, but must look at the hermeneutic of its revivalist parents—even if to dismiss it. Mark Noll would call our forebears “fundamentalists,” but his use of this label skews the historical phenomenon—conspicuously in a way that exonerates his own theological sympathies of the label.[vii]

Rather than apply the term to individuals like J. Gresham Machen, who actually took the “fundamentalist” side in the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy within the Presbyterian Church, he applies it to “Pentecostals, holiness revivalists, and dispensationalists.”[viii] In other words, he applies the term to those whose reaction to the challenges of modernism were emotional, experiential, and who tended to remove themselves from the discussion rather than those who reacted intellectually and actively. This is a one-sided perspective on history at best. It also obscures the nature of the fundamentalist hermeneutic as a mechanism for finding coherence in the biblical text.[ix]

We have classified Wesley’s hermeneutic as “pre-modern” because of his relative inattention to historical-cultural and literary context. Nevertheless, he was quite forthright about the “analogy of faith” as key to the coherence of his interpretations. By contrast, the holiness-Pentecostal movements of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s were more “pneumatic” in their use of Scripture.[x] The Spirit might reveal directly to you what He wanted a specific passage of Scripture to mean for you.

At the same time, these movements had interpretations they held in common, such as Acts 2 as a reference to entire sanctification. Unlike Wesley, however, who looked more to the common tradition of Christianity for the coherence of Scripture, these groups found the coherence more in the theology of their particular group. They mirrored American culture in its democratic form, where everyone gets to vote and everyone’s vote counts the same.[xi] Distinctive theologies were often set from the beginning of such movements by charismatic founders whose stamps continue to this day.

Needless to say, the pre-modern hermeneutic of both Wesley and the holiness revivalists stands in significant tension with the contemporary evangelical hermeneutic we saw in Gordon Fee and Kevin Vanhoozer. Contemporary evangelicalism grew out of the fundamentalism of the early twentieth century as an attempt to read the books of the Bible in context while also affirming the coherence and truthfulness of Scripture in its historical meaning. It was, however, more sophisticated in its understanding of context and in its method of integrating diversity in the Bible than those groups that would become the fundamentalists of the late twentieth century. Many holiness groups joined the evangelical movement mid-century either unaware of the difference with the pneumatic interpretations of their past or, perhaps, to distance themselves from them.

We might thus speak of two Wesleyan hermeneutics in the late twentieth century, with many hybrids. Wesleyan scholars and academics largely absorbed the evangelical, contextual hermeneutic. For this group, we can hardly speak of a distinct Wesleyan strategy for finding the coherent meaning of Scripture, other than the fact that they looked at the biblical text with Wesleyan interests in mind. At the same time, perhaps the bulk of Wesleyans continued to interpret and integrate Scripture by defining the words and integrating them “as it seemed right in their own eyes,” eyes forged by Wesleyan sociology, using the inherent flexibility of words to make them take on meanings that could fit together and cohere with Wesleyan tradition.

[i] “On First Principles,” 18.
[ii] “On First Principles,” 19. When it comes to the law of Moses, Origen speaks of the “irrationality” and “impossibility” of observing many of the laws literally (“On First Principals,” 17).
[iii] “On Christian Doctrine,” 3.10.14.
[iv] How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 74.
[v] Is There a Meaning in This Text? 429.
[vi] Meaning, 415.
[vii] The Rise of the Evangelicals. The Scandal of the American Mind
[viii] ***
[ix] Frei.
[x] Dayton
[xi] Noll.

Hermeneutics Review for Final

Here is some review material for the final exam of my advanced hermeneutics class at IWU:

1. "autonomy of the text"
Paul Ricoeur. He suggests that once a discourse has been fixed in writing, the author loses control over its meaning. Vanhoozer disagrees because he views texts as "communicative acts." The text thus bears the intended (illocutionary) force of the author. Schenck is not as pessimistic about recovering the intended meaning of an author as Ricoeur, but he accepts the reality of the text's detachment from intended meaning far more than Vanhoozer.

2. "surplus of meaning"
Ricoeur. Because texts don't have their author's intent to "fix" their meaning, they are susceptible to multiple interpretations. Vanhoozer agrees that there are "gaps" (see next entry) that can make the meaning of texts ambiguous, but argues that the goal in filling those gaps should be to recover the author's intended communicative act. Schenck agrees with Ricoeur that texts have a surplus of meaning and with Vanhoozer that one such meaning is the intended meaning of the author.

3. "gaps of indeterminacy"
Wolfgang Iser. All texts make assumptions, assumptions that are gaps of meaning that the reader must fill in. Iser was what Vanhoozer calls a "conservative" reader-response critic, because his goal in reading was to fill in the gaps in terms of the intended meaning. Vanhoozer accepts the necessity of this task. Schenck agrees that these gaps are the source of Ricoeur's "surplus of meaning." He thinks that filling the gaps with our best guess at the intended meaning is legitimate, although that there are other legitimate "fillings" in other contexts.

4. meaning as a function of "interpretive communities"
Stanley Fish. Fish does not believe that texts in themselves have any stable meaning. Rather, the meaning of a text is a function of the interpretive community reading that text. Vanhoozer disagrees and would consider Fish a radical reader-response critic. If a text only mirrored the beliefs and values of the community reading, then a person/community could never come away from a text changed from when they came to it. But this often happens. Vanhoozer believes that a text has a single legitimate meaning. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer that it is possible to be changed by texts and is not as "pessimistic" as Fish. Nevertheless, the interpretive communities to which we belong often has a far greater impact on how we read texts than anything else, including the intended meaning.

5. ideological criticism
Ideological criticism is the name we give to approaches to the text that embrace the ideas of specific ideological communities such as feminist critics, liberation critics, African-American critics, etc... Vanhoozer would disagree with these approaches just as he disagrees with Fish. Schenck recognizes the possibility of such approaches in such contexts. He would merely note that such readings stand in a nebulous relationship to Christian readings of the text.

6. "fusion of horizons"
Hans Georg Gadamer. The two horizons are the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader. On the one hand, the author of a text does not play any role in interpretation distinct from the text itself. The reader, on the other hand, does not come to the text as a neutral or objective observer or as an all-knowing "subject." A reader comes to a text with pre-understandings, with the effect of traditions in his or her thinking. Text and reader meet and their horizons fuse. The reader reads the text and, in a sense, the text reads the reader. Both are changed in the process.

Vanhoozer critiques Gadamer on both horizons. The text, V believes, is the communicative act of an author and thus bears within it the intended meaning of an author. Meanwhile, V does not believe we are simply doomed to read texts with traditional glasses but believes we can more or less determine the intended meaning of a text.

Schenck believes we can at least try to supercede traditional pre-understandings and to grasp the intended meaning of authors. It is not always necessary to do so--sometimes traditional readings are more important. He is not as pessimistic as Gadamer about intended meanings.

7. subject-object distinction
René Descartes. Traditionally Descartes is blamed for setting up the modern era with a sharp distinction between the "I" as an all-knowing and objective knower who looks out at the world as object. Vanhoozer rejects the possibility for anyone to approach the world neutrally without some pre-understanding, something that can be a plus rather than a minus if it is the right pre-understanding. Schenck has less aversion to the language of subject and object, although he agrees that none of us have a God's eye, neutral, or objective apprehension of the world or truth.

8. "properly basic"
Alvin Plantinga. As one of the key figures in Reformed epistemology, Plantinga suggests that a number of beliefs are "properly basic" and do not need to be justified. These include things like the existence of the world outside ourselves, the existence of other minds, and for Plantinga it includes the existence of God, which he does not believe needs to be defended but inherently is a reasonable thing to assume. Vanhoozer agrees and adds to the list meaning in texts as properly basic. Schenck believes that such things are reasonable to believe in by faith, although he does not consider them immune to examination.

9. Reformed epistemology
Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff. Reformed epistemology is based on the idea that certain beliefs are "properly basic" and do not need to be argued for or defended. This is particularly true of Christian perspectives, which (elect) Christians should recognize to be true intuitively. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck has a hunch that Arminian theology will emphasize the need for personal response before some intuitions will come, and that in the end God is more concerned to move our hearts than our heads.

10. critical realism
[Ben Meyer, not on the test] Critical realism holds by faith that reality exists outside ourselves, but that our apprehension of that reality is never fully objective or neutral. We see that reality from where we stand looking. Vanhoozer is okay with this, although I suspect he prefers the term regulative realism (see next). Schenck is also okay with this, although he suspects that the typical "critical realist" is more optimistic than he is about the degree of literal correspondance between our perspective and reality.

11. regulative realism
[not sure] Vanhoozer likes the idea that we guide our apprehension of reality by assuming the truth of "properly basic" ideas about reality. Schenck prefers a view of reality that is critical realist by faith, pragmatic realist (see next) by practice.

12. pragmatic realism
Richard Rorty. Rorty is a non-realist. He does not affirm the existence of any reality for us to know. However, he believes that certain assumptions about reality work, help us to function in the world. The world is thus "real" for pragmatic purposes. Vanhoozer thus classifies him as a "user" and "unbeliever." Certainly V disagrees with him. Schenck things that Rorty gives us the best "rational" perspective on us as knowers of reality, but that as believers we can make affirmations about reality by faith as well.

13. "There are no facts, only interpretations."
Friedrich Nietzsche, late 1800's. As a prophet of many things, Nietzsche recognized where Immanuel Kant's particular version of the subject-object distinction might lead. Kant believed that we could not know things-in-themselves, the world as it is outside of our apprehension of it. We could only know the world as it appeared to us. He reached this point when he concluded that the content of our knowledge comes from our senses, but that the organization of that content into meaning was a function of our minds.

In the case of Kant, he believed that the truthfulness of God guaranteed that the categories of our mind did in fact correspond to truth about the world (not dissimilar to the earlier perspectives of Descartes and Locke in their own ways). Nietzsche of course did not believe in God, so he was left with the conclusion that all we know are the interpretations of our minds, not facts about the world.

Vanhoozer sees Nietzsche as the consummate "unbeliever," whose failure to believe in God is reflected in his failure to believe in interpretive facts. Schenck once again sees faith as essential to any beliefs about the world outside ourselves.

14. "There is nothing outside the text."
Jacques Derrida. Derrida basically is packaging Nietzsche's claim on his own terms. When he says there is nothing outside the text, he is saying something very similar. All reality is something like a text we are reading. But there is nothing outside the text, no reality apart from words. And we shouldn't think that Derrida thinks this is a text with a certain meaning. Derrida is thus one step further than Fish, who at least sees meaning in interpretive communities.

Vanhoozer disagrees and considers Derrida the consummate "undoer" who is also an "unbeliever." Our belief in God includes our belief in things beyond ourselves and beyond texts. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer by faith.

15. Deconstruction
Derrida and a/friends. Deconstruction is the idea that there are no stable meanings in texts. As soon as one tries to "contruct" meaning that meaning unravels. All texts, no matter how apparently clear in meaning, can be misunderstood and taken differently. Vanhoozer disagrees. Communication happens all the time and is a properly basic concept. Schenck agrees with Vanhoozer, although he also accepts Derrida's very important footnote that even the most obvious texts can be taken differently than intended.

16. "logocentrism"
Derrida. This is the word Derrida coined for the idea that "Platonic" truths underwrite the meaning of words. Derrida of course disagrees. Truth is not behind words--more words are. There is nothing outside the text. Vanhoozer of course disagrees and labels Derrida an unbeliever, an undoer of meaning and truth. Schenck believes that God knows absolute truth and that He underwrites truth. However, Schenck believes there is a significant divide between our language and that truth. Human words do not correspond in any direct or straightforward way to God's truths.

17. différance
Derrida. He coined this word by combining the French words différence with deferance. Words do not point to meanings for Derrida, they "defer" to other words. We find meaning in the space or "difference" between different words which are only signifiers, never signifieds. Vanhoozer disagrees for all the same reasons. Schenck also believes there is more to words than just signifiers.

18. signs as combinations of signifiers and signifieds
Ferdinand de Saussure. In the background of Derrida's philosophy is Saussure's idea that a "sign" such as a word consists of two parts--a signifier, which is an arbitrary sound or image, and a signified, which is that to which the signifier refers. Derrida of course believed that we can never get beyond arbitrary signifiers to stable signifieds. Vanhoozer follows Ricoeur (see next) in believing that any workable concept of language must move beyond the level of the word to the level of the sentence. Schenck agrees, although he recognizes the basic usefulness of Saussure's approach in many cases, as well as its potential to "derail" intended meaning. However, Saussure's approach is seriously inadequate without some sense of Wittgenstein's language games.

19. the sentence as a higher order of meaning
Ricoeur. Ricoeur argued against Derrida chiefly by arguing that a sentence constitutes a higher order of meaning that is not simply the addition of individual words together. Aristotle of course argued that a proposition must have both a subject and a predicate. Vanhoozer agrees, as does Schenck with the further comment in the preceding note.

20. Langue and parole
de Saussure. Saussure argued that langue or language constituted a system of interrelated signs. Parole, on the other hand, refers to the specific use a speaker/writer puts the words of that langue to. As far as I can tell, Vanhoozer does not object to this distinction, nor do I.

21. Structuralism
[Claude Levi-Strauss, not on test] Structuralism was a passing phase of text-centered approaches to meaning that focused primarily on langue, language as a system or structure of binary oppositions. It tended to look for the universal aspects of a specific story or text's meaning rather than the specific meaning of a specific text or some intended meaning. Vanhoozer of course is much more interested in parole, the specific use to which an author puts language, rather than some abstract system to which all individual speech must conform. I similarly find some of the patterns of structuralism useful but only as one tool in a much broader toolbox.

22. Narrative Criticism
Narrative criticism was a much more useful application of the "deep structure" principals of structuralism to narratives. Rather than the rather complex structuralist model, narrative critics used categories like characters, events, settings, point of view, implied author, implied reader, story time versus discourse time, etc. which are more readily understandable. Vanhoozer would disagree with the early narrative critics of the 80's who tried to bracket historical and background knowledge as much as possible, making this method a text-centered approach to meaning. Schenck finds its tools useful for more than one approach to the meaning of narratives.

23. "world of the text"
Ricoeur. Since Ricoeur does not aim at the intended meaning of an author, some meaning "behind the text," he is not interested in the text as a reference to the real world. He believes that the "reference" of a text is a world that the text creates, a world within the text. Vanhoozer of course believes that this world does indeed have something to do with the world behind the text, principly the intended force of the text by an author. Schenck can see texts as extra-referential as well, but finds Ricoeur's concept of the world of the text a useful one when one is trying to methodically aim at the intended meaning of a text.

24. "intentional fallacy"
Wimsatt and Beardsley. In a famous article of the late 40's, these individuals argued that it was impossible and undesirable to think of the meaning of a text in terms of an author's intention. We do not have access, after all, to the mind of an author. They inaugurated what came to be known in literary circles as "new criticism." Vanhoozer recognizes the validity of some of their arguments, but follows the lead of Hirsch and Thiselton to develop a sense of authorial intent that is not fallacious. Schenck also agrees that W and B overstated their case.

25. New Criticism
An era of interpretation in literary criticism in which texts are read without concern for authorial intent. See above for Vanhoozer and Schenck.

26. "thinking the author's thoughts after him"
Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Around 1800, these scholars saw "getting into an author's head" as the proper goal of interpretion. A person should not only try to think the author's thoughts, but even think the author's thoughts better than he or she did, recognizing inconsistencies that the author was not able to recognize. Vanhoozer agrees with Wimsatt and Beardsley that this approach tries to do more than is possible. We simply do not have access to an author's psychology. We can only only know an author's intent on the basis of what has made it to a text. I agree, although feel free to speculate :-)

27. text as "object of consciousness"
E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch makes his way around the problems of Schleiermacher and Dilthey's approach by speaking of the "object" of an author's consciousness. This object as it were leaves the mother ship of the author and lodges in a text, where a reader is able to hold that object in common with the author. Vanhoozer largely agrees, although he is uncomfortable with the "subject-object" language Hirsch uses.

28. meaning as "performative act"
Kevin Vanhoozer. V prefers to think of the meaning of texts as a matter of an author's performative act, drawing on the speech-act theory of Austin and Searle (see below). Schenck accepts the validity of this model as it relates to the intended meaning of authors. In practice, however, Wittgenstein's more basic language game model proves a much more flexible explanation of how meaning actually works in practice.

29. "language games" in "forms of life"
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Words do not have meanings in themselves. The meaning of a word is a function of its use in a particular "language game" in a particular "form of life." We thus do not know what the word "fire" means unless we know what language game is being played--whether that of jobs, firing squads, pop songs, or something burning. Vanhoozer agrees with some of this, but clearly prefers to go on to Austin and Searle. Schenck things Wittgenstein's approach is more all-encompassing.

30. speech-act theory
Originated by J. L. Austin and further systematized by John Searle. Speech act theory recognizes that words do not only inform, but they "do" things. When a couple says "I do" at a wedding altar, they are not only informing each other of their willingness to marry--they indeed marry each other with the words. The words do something beyond informing. Vanhoozer strongly agrees and builds his hermeneutic on these principles. Schenck agrees that words can work this way.

31. locutionary content
Austin and Searle. The part of speech that is fairly obvious is the (propositional) content, the sense of the words. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck says fine.

32. illocutionary force
Austin and Searle. The key to authorial intent for Vanhoozer is the illocutionary force of the words. This is what the author intended to do with the words--promise, command, assert, etc... Schenck says fine.

33. Vanhoozer's definition of infallibility and inerrancy
Using the concept above, Vanhoozer seems to process the above terms in the following way. To say the Bible is infallible is to say that it always does what it is intended by God to do--its illocutionary force is always accomplished. To say the Bible is inerrant is to say that when the illocutionary force of a Scripture is to make an assertion, the locutionary content of that assertion is always true.

34. perlocutionary force
Austin and Searle. If the locutionary dimension of a speech act is the sense of the words and the illocutionary force is what the words are intended to do, the perlocutionary force of a speech act is its effect. Authors of course usually intend for their words to have a certain effect on their audiences. Of course they do not always have that effect. Vanhoozer agrees. He does not consider the intended perlocutionary force of a speech act to be part of the meaning, but rather of the significance of the utterance. Schenck says fine.

35. meaning and significance
E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch makes a helpful distinction between the meaning of a word and its significance. An utterance will only have one legitimate meaning, the intended one, but it may have countless significances. Different readers thus change the significance of an utterance, but not its meaning. Vanhoozer agrees. Schenck thinks this distinction is very helpful, but ultimately believes there are potentially far more than a single meaning that may be found in the same words as well, depending on the "language game" a reader plays with them.

36. Vanhoozer on the role of the Spirit
Vanhoozer sees the role of the Spirit as one of illuminating a reader's mind as regards the meaning of a text, its intended locutionary content and illocutionary force. Yet the Spirit may bring about countless different significances to the text, perlocutionary forces, depending on the reader, audience, and situation. Schenck believes that the Holy Spirit certainly can do these things. But the NT and church history indicates that the Holy Spirit also plays with the potential meanings of biblical words as well.

37. typology versus allegory
An important distinction for modernist evangelical scholarship of the late twentieth century was to distinguish allegory from typology as interpretive methods. In particular, typology is said to build figural interpretations off of literal ones, while allegory is said not to be concerned about the literal meaning. Vanhoozer acknowledges that there are allegories in the biblical text, but sees these as explicit ones that recognize the literal meaning. He would distinguish sharply between allegory and allegorizing, where the latter is said to be an orientation around meanings that disregard the literal meaning or original intent of the words.

Schenck does not think the NT knows or cares about this distinction, which is more modern than ancient. Even the distinction between so called Antiochene and Alexandrian exegesis is overplayed as modern controversies have over-read the distinctions of another day.

38. Vanhoozer on literal versus literalistic
The literal meaning for Vanhoozer is the intended meaning in his locutionary and illocutionary force. A literalistic reading is one that insists on taking a text literally even when that is not the author's intent. Schenck says fair enough.

39. definitions of metaphor
For Aristotle, a metaphor was little more than the substitution of one thing for another. For Ricoeur, however, a metaphor involves the creation of new meaning by the juxtapositioning of two unlike things. Schenck agrees and thinks that Vanhoozer is okay with this as well.

There you have it. The second half of our advanced hermeneutics class at IWU in a nutshell.

Friday Review: Vahoozer's Is There Meaning chapter 3

In last week's review we looked at Vanhoozer's two chapters on the author: chapter 2 where he treats the deconstruction of the author and chapter 5 where we reconstructs his vision of authorial meaning.

The key to authorial intent for V is the illocutionary aspect of a text. Texts are acts of communication in which an author does something with a text--commands, asserts, promises, etc... Or to put it more lightly, when Voldemort tries to kill Harry Potter, some of his powers are transferred to Harry. Texts bear the scar of the author's intent on them.

OK, maybe not the most helpful illustration :-)

It is late enough in the day that I've decided to post my summary of Vanhoozer chapter 3 today and my summary of chapter 6 tomorrow. Unfortunately, Piper and Wright will have to wait till Monday for my next summary.

Chapter 3: "Undoing the Book: Textuality and Indeterminacy"
Chapters 2 and 5 had to do with the author. Now chapters 4 and 6 will have to do with the text itself. Chapter 3 will deal with deconstructive movements afoot. Chapter 6 will give V's attempt to reconstruct meaning in texts.

It seems to me that there are two key issues under discussion in this chapter. I want to apologize to Vanhoozer if I ever misrepresent him. Each time I pass by the material I gain some clarity on what I think his "design plan" was, but it has not always come easy. If nothing else, my attempts to systematize will start you out reading much further along in the understanding process than otherwise...

1. The first key interpretive issue in this chapter is the question of the "autonomy of the text" from its author, that is, the extent to which a text inevitably takes on a life of its own after it has been created. To be sure, this topic is to some extent the same as that of the previous chapter on the author, except now we are looking at it from the standpoint of the text receiving meaning from the author rather than an author giving meaning to a text.

a. Derrida, Rorty, and Fish
So it is no surprise that we hear the names of our old friends again. V gets into some issues of metaphysics a bit more at the beginning of this chapter (although this was really the professed topic of the previous one, chap. 2). He discusses Rorty's pragmatism as a User of reality. Rorty does not believe we can say that claims about the world are anything more than ways to function in the world--we can't say they're about anything truly "out there."

He mentions Paul Feyerabend's philosophy of science. From elsewhere, Feyerabend believes that ultimately there is no difference between a witch doctor's conception of the world and that of a medical doctor.

With regard to Derrida, we have already heard of his attack on "logocentrism" and his dictum, "there is nothing outside the text." Now in this chapter V discusses his sense of "grammatology." Grammatology is a word meant ;-) by Derrida to replace logocentrism. If logocentrism thinks words refer to things outside themselves, grammatology focuses on letters as arbitrary symbols that do not refer to anything but other letters. Derrida thus speaks of the end of the "book," since the idea of a book is the binding of ideas together. For him we have rather a text that has no glue.

b. Gadamer and Ricoeur
In this chapter, however, Vanhoozer's sparring partners are more the likes of Gadamer and Ricoeur. V of course likes them in some respects. They both believe that texts exists as "other" from us. They are not like Fish, who largely sees texts as mirrors of the communities reading them. They are not like Derrida, who sees meaning as an elusive dog chasing its tail. But V disagrees with the way that they divorce authors from the meanings of texts.

For Gadamer, the process of reading is a "fusing of horizons." My horizon, the horizon of the reader, fuses with the horizon of the text. What is key to understanding Gadamer is to realize that we cannot step outside ourselves to fuse with the text--we bring our "tradition" with us to the text, our pre-understandings. Unlike Descartes and modernism, which would bid us become "objective" about our approach to truth and the world (or the text, for Hirsch), Gadamer suggests that our pre-understandings are a good thing.

By the way, I am more and more convinced that this is the underlying hermeneutic of Green's book, Seized by Truth. As a good case study, we embrace the "traditions" with which we come to the text to fuse our horizon to it. For Vanhoozer, Gadamer does not take into account the authorial dimension of a text as a communicative act. Also, because we as readers all bring different traditions to the text, we do not have anything like a single correct interpretation in this scheme (106).

As far as Ricoeur is concerned, a text is "discourse fixed by writing" and as it is fixed it becomes autonomous from its author. It takes on a "surplus of meaning" that, again, precludes a single correct interpretation (107). But for both Gadamer and Ricoeur--unlike Derrida and Fish--a text is "other" from the reader and has the capacity to "read the reader," to change the reader's thought rather than merely mirror it in some way.

2. The second key interpretive issue in this chapter is the question of a text's polyvalence. In keeping with Vanhoozer's quest for the single correct interpretation, he takes a substantial part of this chapter addressing literal versus allegorical interpretation. Here he draws on the stereotypical distinction between Antioch (Theodore of Mopsuestia) and Alexandria (Origen). Predictably, he endorses literal interpretation over allegorizing interpretation.

a. Literal versus Literalistic
V does make some valid distinctions. First, he is not trying to make things literal that were never meant to be literal. There are many parts of Scripture whose "plain sense" is figurative. When Revelation depicts Jesus as a lamb, it is not being literal. V is not arguing for some thoroughgoing literalism in instances where the Bible never intended to be literal.

b. Allegory versus Allegorizing
V also acknowledges that the Bible uses allegory at some points. What V would argue is that the Bible is upfront about such allegories. What it does not do, he would say, is allegorize as an interpretive method in a way that dismisses the original meaning. This is important for much evangelical hermeneutics for, as I've said before, one of the core values of much evangelical hermeneutics is the importance of reading the Bible in context.

But what happens if, as we try to read the Bible in context, we find that the NT does not try to read the OT in context? A good case can be made that this finding would deconstruct evangelical hermeneutics or at least (as in my case), require some shuffling of it.

So V endorses typology as the way. Typology, so the story goes, acknowledges the original meaning before attaching a figurative meaning to it that is in continuity with it. Allegorizing, on the other hand, might not pay any attention to the intended meaning at all. It might even dismiss it in preference for some spiritualized or allegorical meaning.

I personally think there is much to commend Augustine's use of allegorical interpretation. Whenever the literal meaning of the biblical text would seem to contradict the "rule of faith," we are permitted to spiritualize the text in some way. This is, in my opinion, the way the NT authors themselves interpreted the OT.

I am aware also that this approach involves a host of interpretive and theological worms. I would also claim, however, that we are fooling ourselves if we think they were ever in a can in the first place.

c. Metaphor
The final part of this chapter is dedicated to various views of metaphor. Let's present three approaches to metaphor: 1) the Aristotelian approach, 2) the Ricoeurian approach, and 3) the Derridaian approach. My read is that V favors the second, as long as an author intended to use metaphor :-)

1) Aristotle apparently bequeathed us with a sense of metaphor as a poor substitute for the literal. Metaphor simply substitutes y for x. Hermeneutics is a can of worms. Aristotle would apparently say you should just say it literally: Hermeneutics involves all sorts of difficult questions.

2) Ricoeur rightly rejects this impoverished understanding of metaphor. For Ricoeur, a metaphor creates new meaning that was not present literally. It does this by placing two unlike things next to each other.

Tell me, I ask you, what is the literal equivalent of "the trees will clap their hands"? It doesn't nearly carry the meaning of the metaphor. I pronounce at an end the impoverished era of religious history in which things like ritual, myth, and symbol were derided as defective because they do not function on a literal level.

Hogwash! These are the richest levels of meaning--far greater than can be expressed in literal terms. I decry the embarrassing myopia of centuries of stupidity.

3) But Ricoeur does believe in literal meaning, as do I and as does Vanhoozer. Derrida, and a host of theologians in his train, however, do not accept that there ever is such a thing as literal meaning. Everything is metaphor without us being able to distinguish more from less literal.

I have a really big footnote to add to this comment. Someone who has followed my philosophical ramblings will recognize that my comment here seems to contradict things I have said elsewhere. For the moment let it suffice to say that I find the distinction between literal and figurative a distinction that works very well.

Chapter 6 tomorrow (d.v.)