Is There a Meaning in This Text?

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780310831709
• Edition: 10
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

Is there a meaning in the Bible, or is meaning rather a matter of who is reading or of how one reads? Does Christian doctrine have anything to contribute to debates about interpretation, literary theory, and post modernity? These are questions of crucial importance for contemporary biblical studies and theology alike. Kevin Vanhoozer contends that the postmodern crisis in hermeneutics—"incredulity towards meaning, " a deep–set skepticism concerning the possibility of correct interpretation—is fundamentally a crisis in theology provoked by an inadequate view of God and by the announcement of God's "death." Part 1 examines the ways in which deconstruction and radical reader–response criticism "undo" the traditional concepts of author, text, and reading. Dr. Vanhoozer engages critically with the work of Derrida, Rorty, and Fish, among others, and demonstrates the detrimental influence of the postmodern "suspicion of hermeneutics" on biblical studies. In Part 2, Dr. Vanhoozer defends the concept of the author and the possibility of literary knowledge by drawing on the resources of Christian doctrine and by viewing meaning in terms of communicative action. He argues that there is a meaning in the text, that it can be known with relative adequacy, and that readers have a responsibility to do so by cultivating "interpretive virtues." Successive chapters build on Trinitarian theology and speech act philosophy in order to treat the metaphysics, methodology, and morals of interpretation. From a Christian perspective, meaning and interpretation are ultimately grounded in God's own communicative action in creation, in the canon, and preeminently in Christ. Prominent features in Part 2 include a new account of the author's intention and of the literal sense, the reclaiming of the distinction between meaning and significance in terms of Word and Spirit, and the image of the reader as a disciple–martyr, whose vocation is to witness to something other than oneself. Is There a Meaning in This Text? guides the student toward greater confidence in the authority, clarity, and relevance of Scripture, and a well–reasoned expectation to understand accurately the message of the Bible. Is There a Meaning in This Text? is a comprehensive and creative analysis of current debates over biblical hermeneutics that draws on interdisciplinary resources, all coordinated by Christian theology. It makes a significant contribution to biblical interpretation that will be of interest to readers in a number of fields. The intention of the book is to revitalize and enlarge the concept of author–oriented interpretation and to restore confidence that readers of the Bible can reach understanding. The result is a major challenge to the central assumptions of postmodern biblical scholarship and a constructive alternative proposal—an Augustinian hermeneutic—that reinvigorates the notion of biblical authority and finds a new exegetical practice that recognizes the importance of both the reader's situation and the literal sense.

PART ONE

Undoing Interpretation: Authority, Allegory, Anarchy

He is a slave to a sign who uses or worships a significant thing without knowing what it signifies.

St. Augustine¹

There is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the play of signifying references that constitute language…. This [play], strictly speaking, amounts to destroying the concept of ‘sign’ and its entire logic.

Jacques Derrida²

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

W. B. Yeats³

CHAPTER TWO

Undoing the Author: Authority and Intentionality

The authority of the holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof.

Westminster Confession of Faith¹

Why is there something rather than nothing? This is the age-old question of metaphysics, the study of what there is. “Is there a meaning in this text?” is a metaphysical question inasmuch as it interrogates the reality of meaning: Why is there meaning rather than nonsense? What kind of reality does meaning have? Why is there something rather than nothing in a text? The answer to this latter question has typically involved the notion of the author. Textual meaning, so the standard view goes, is the creation of an author. Specifically, meaning is located in the author’s intention to convey a particular message through signs. According to Derrida, however, the notion of a mental intention is a metaphysical chimera that supports the further illusion that signs correspond to reality. The notion that signs represent the world in the mind or otherwise facilitate commerce between thought and reality is strongly contested by Derrida and corresponds to what I have called “the idol of reliability.” What postmodernity most puts into question is the notion that signs are reliable indicators of the way things really are.

This chapter reviews the hitherto central role played by the author as ground of textual meaning and the reasons for the author’s demise. Is there a voice in the text and, if so, is it the author’s? Is the author the source of textual meaning? Can the author “control” the meaning of a text? And just what do these questions have to do with the philosopher’s attempt to formulate theories about the nature of ultimate reality, with metaphysics, or for that matter, with theology? I shall argue that there is more than a coincidental relation between the so-called “death of God” in the nineteenth century and the death of the author in the twentieth.

AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY: THE BIRTH OF THE “AUTHOR”

What is an author? Have texts always had authors, or is the author a relative novelty in the history of ideas? Must a text have an author? Is there anything particularly authoritative about authors’ statements concerning the meaning of their own texts, and if there is, whence comes the author’s authority? It will be helpful to review some salient facts about the life of the author before turning to examine the circumstances surrounding the author’s untimely demise.

The connection between authors and authority is clearly seen in debates about the nature and interpretation of the Bible.² Most religious people are prepared to acknowledge God as the ultimate authority. There is no such consensus, however, when it comes to the locus of divine authority: Where is the voice of God to be heard? Who is in a position to speak for God? Jews and Christians traditionally acknowledge the right of the prophets and apostles to speak for God. They confess the Bible to be the supreme norm for faith and life because it claims to be, or to contain, the Word of God. Jesus himself could invoke no higher authority than to preface his remarks with the formula “it is written.” Of course, one must go on to say what the word as written means. Authority without meaning is a merely formal and empty principle. Disputes about authority quickly turn into disputes about interpretation and about who determines which interpretation is correct. What exactly is the role of the author in such disputes?

Is There an Author Behind the Text?

In the beginning was the Word; yes, but what was the status of the Word before it was uttered? Do words really precede their speakers, or are words begotten from the mind of an author? In the case of the Logos in John’s Prologue, we know that this Word was with God, was God. This Word was light and life, full of grace and truth. In this one case, at least, Word and Author fully coincide. Jesus is the sign of God, the incarnate token of God’s presence, a fully reliable (“exact”) representation of his being (Heb. 1:3).

Are all words as reliable as God’s Word? Do human beings stand behind, or accompany, their speech the way God does his? Is there an author in this text? This is a question about the nature of authorship, not of the author’s existence.³ Do we believe in authors? On the one hand, the existence of authors is unproblematic. Indeed, it is often difficult to escape the presence of the author. The author is virtually omnipresent in contemporary society: signing lucrative publishing contracts, producing the books that fill our leisure hours, promoting their work on talk shows, autographing first editions. But what is the relation between authors and their works, apart from these economic, legal, and marketing connections? What, if any, connection is there between an author and the meaning of the text?

One way to conceive the author-text relation is to think in terms of cause and effect.⁴ The author is the historical cause of a textual effect; his or her intention is the cause of the text being the way it is. No other explanation adequately accounts for the intelligibility of texts. The author, an intelligent cause, is the necessary and sufficient explanation of the text, an intelligible effect. The text thus serves as a kind of surrogate presence, a reliable expression and extension, of the author. As we shall see in due course, however, this modest picture of the historical author raises deeper, more metaphysical, questions. I turn first to examine the historical origins of the very idea of the author.

“Maker of Story and Verse”: The Author As Origin of Meaning

Christians confess, in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, their belief in God “the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” Is the author a God-like creator, an almighty maker of meaning? Recent studies of the rise of modernity suggest that the famous “turn to the subject,” and the individualism that accompanied it, were actually theological, or counter-theological moves, in which powers and prerogatives formerly reserved to God were reassigned to human beings. As God stands behind the created order, its origin and source of stability, so the author stands behind the text. On this account, authorship is a distinctly modern development.

According to the so-called “secularization thesis,” modernity is basically a transformed version of medieval Christianity.⁵ The attributes of the medieval concept of God—a sovereign subject whose will is all-determining—gradually came to be transferred to the modern concept of the human self: “In the modern period the finite human thinker takes over some of God’s functions as subject.”⁶ The modern self comes to resemble an absolute willing and thinking subject. This “turn to the subject” fueled an intellectual revolution that came to be known as the “Enlightenment.” Modern philosophers such as Descartes and Kant were confident in the mind’s ability to know the world and to make rational decisions. Knowing and willing subjects were free to think for themselves rather than to rely on tradition and authority.⁷ The individual, as a free agent and free thinker, is autonomous—a law unto self. The modern subject, in short, has become an author: a creator of texts and a maker of meaning.

The modern self is, furthermore, the author of its own existence. According to Nietzsche, the individual self is the author of all value, meaning, and truth. Subjectivity is the “home” of meaning. It is in the individual’s consciousness, then, that words and the world come together. The mind mirrors reality, and language mirrors thought. Thanks to the light of reason, the knowing subject, like Adam before the Fall, sees the world as it is and names it truly. Consequently, though there obviously were authors before the modern era, only modernity viewed the author as a sovereign subject of meaning. In the words of Roland Barthes: “The author is a modern character, no doubt produced by our society as it emerged from the Middle Ages, inflected by English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, thereby discovering the prestige of the individual.”⁸

This parallel between God and the modern author also suggests a reason for recognizing the author’s authority. The author is one who originates. The etymology of the term “authority” is “right, based on origin.” Because the author originates meaning, “it is the author who has authority, author’s rights.”⁹ That the author has proprietary rights over meaning is amusingly expressed by Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s fictional reflection on language and logic: “When I use a word …it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.”¹⁰ Humpty Dumpty is a stand-in for the modern subject, for whom the mind is the dispatcher of meaning. There is no question as to who is the Master and what is the Slave. The subject alone is active; language is but the inert medium that the mind uses to express itself.

Traditional interpreters read for the author’s voice. The text is a shell that contains a spark of the author’s soul. The meaning is the message, which the reader extracts as from out of a bottle. Like Aladdin’s lamp, a text might contain a genie, or a genius. To read is to fraternize with the great minds of the past. The goal of interpretation is to recover the original meaning of the text. Many methods have been proposed for recovering the original meaning of the biblical text: the grammatico-historical method, form criticism, and redaction criticism, to name but a few. Despite their differences, which stem from different views about how the text came to be and about its history, these approaches agree that recovery of original meaning alone makes for authentic interpretation. For if the author is the point of origin, then “original meaning” is identical with “author’s meaning.” The original meaning alone is the authentic meaning, the author’s actual, authoritative meaning. Author, authority, authentic—all notions that, when bound together, reinforce the idea (or idol) of the sign’s reliability.

There is a similar tendency towards origins among theorists and performers of early music. Several new classical groups stake their claim to fame on their use of “original instruments” or on the “authenticity” of their sound. The original intention of one composer after another is being recovered as conductors seek to replicate the conditions of the composer’s time. Perhaps the outstanding example of the quest for authenticity is Gilbert Kaplan’s recordings of Gustav Mahler.

Kaplan has pursued authenticity with a passion. A millionaire and self-taught conductor, Kaplan hired an orchestra in order to perform his own interpretation of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony. The concert was such a success that Kaplan was subsequently invited to conduct the symphony all over the world. He bought Mahler’s autograph manuscript for $300,000 and, after careful study, reinstated a wrongsounding F note that other conductors had emended to E-flat for the sake of greater harmony. Kaplan is explicit about his aims: “My goal was to come as close as possible to what Mahler had in mind.”¹¹ Kaplan came to believe that Mahler’s famous Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony (used as a theme for the film Death in Venice) was being misinterpreted. Instead of a dirge, Kaplan saw the piece as an expression of love. Where other conductors took twelve or thirteen minutes, Kaplan took just eight. He faulted other conductors for not making the requisite effort to achieve an authentic interpretation: “All I’m saying is that this piece has to be played in a way that is consistent with the composer’s intention. It’s not enough just to read the score.”¹²

Many interpreters, lay readers and professional exegetes alike, pursue the original meaning of Scripture with a similar degree of passion and diligence. After all, the authentic interpretation of Mahler, while important, is not as religiously significant as that of Malachi, Matthew, or Mark. The performance of these latter texts is constitutive of one’s identity not only as a critic but also as a Christian. Authentic Christianity thus depends on one’s ability to recover the author’s intention—say, the minds of Malachi, Matthew, or Mark—and perhaps through them, the mind of God.

The Father-Author and the Stable Home of Meaning

The author, as the one who originates and guarantees authenticity, also commands and controls meaning. Authorship implies ownership. The rise of authorship and the rise of capitalism in the modern world is no coincidence, for both are based on the concept of private property.¹³

The parallel between God and the author is again instructive. “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it” (Ps. 24:1). God is the Author of being, of the book of nature. The meaning of the world has been inscribed by the hand of the Creator. It is God who originates the world, who upholds it, and who preserves the distinctions that give it meaning. God is the Author of authors, the Authority behind all authorities. Moreover, God’s will is not an indefinite force but something definite. The author’s will, similarly, though to a lesser extent, imposes itself on language and literature. Precisely because they have authors, texts don’t mean just anything. The author’s will acts as a control on interpretation. Thanks to an author’s willing this rather than that, we can say that there is a definite meaning in texts prior to reading and interpretation. As God’s will structures the universe, so the author’s will structures the universe of discourse. The author is thus the ground of the “being” of meaning. E. D. Hirsch Jr., an outspoken advocate of the authority of the author, argues that without the author as an anchor of meaning, there would be no adequate principle for ...