Exegesis and Meaning (NIDOTTE)
Exegesis and Meaning (NIDOTTE)
Exegesis and Meaning (NIDOTTE)
Abstract
How does the ancient text (the Bible) make an impact on our modern
theological mind-set? Is theology a separate discipline from biblical
interpretation? Many interpreters are highly skeptical of the truth claims of the
Bible as well as of its use in shaping the way in which we interact with “the
modern world.” Kevin Vanhoozer posits that since Jesus Christ is “the Word
incarnate,” words are God's means of sanctioning a truthful way of life, politics,
and values. Deconstruction and postmodernity notwithstanding, the student of
the ancient text must learn to let the text speak meaningfully to a new context.
The ancient text has inherent problems. The obstacles to understanding
are many. Some are textual. Others are cultural (historical, social situation,
language, and literature). Yet all the issues are in the words of the text.
However, instead of aiming at the interpretation of individual words, the
interpreter learns to look at the “discourse” as a basic level for interpretation and
for practice. Modern linguistics—especially semantics (theory of meaning, a
branch of linguistics)—is a corrective to the openness in interpretation of the
text, because it seeks to answer relevant questions, such as: What is the nature
of human language? How do we communicate and process the information we
receive? What are the proper ways of listening to the Bible? The Old Testament
also requires familiarity with its varied literary genres and encourages the
integration of language with literature and of literature with history.
These are the issues with which Vanhoozer deals in the essay below. His
engagement with the philosophy and history that shape one's interpretation,
though somewhat complex, is fascinating. In this essay you will discover how
difficult the art of interpretation is. Further, he will open up the vista of the
integration of language and literature with theology.
Vanhoozer concludes that the interpreter can have confidence in hearing
the truth claims of the Bible. After all, the text (sola scriptura) is sufficient for
salvation and for living to God's glory. This text is not only sufficient, it is the
totality of God's revelation in “written form” (tota Scriptura). However, more than
hearing these claims, the interpreter will come to know God. Here is the
theological dimension of the interpretive process. In the process of
interpretation, the readers undergo several shifts. They undergo changes in their
perception of the text, of themselves, of God, and, consequently, of the world.
1
This handout is an electronic version of Kevin Vanhoozer, “Language, Literature, Hermeneutics
and Biblical Theology,” in New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis,
edited by Willem VanGemeren, et al (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998). Copyrighted material
used with permission. Do not reproduce or distribute.
Introduction
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
(T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”)
The purpose of this article is to survey some leading ways in which language and
literature have been thought to serve either as an access or as an impediment to talking
about God. Is language the antechamber or prison-house of theology, its handmaid or
its warden? Can any language—prophetic, Pauline, pietistic or philosophical—ultimately
achieve transcendence to speak of something other than itself?
I begin with a survey of some important theories about words and their
meaning, from Plato to postmodernity, and of how they have proven influential in
biblical and theological studies. I then make good on my twofold claim that theology is
largely a matter of language and language largely a matter of theology. Next I trace the
fate of meaning by considering ever more complex levels of language: words,
sentences, and literary texts. I suggest that meaning and interpretation are most
properly located on the level of the sentence and the text, for meaning is less a matter
of words in the abstract than of words put to certain kinds of use. Hermeneutics, I shall
contend, seeks the meaning of communicative action, and for this we need to look at
language as discourse—as something said to someone about something. I then look, in
the following section, at the ways in which the Bible says something about God through
its many kinds of literature.
Finally, I examine how an integrated hermeneutics of the Bible's language and
literature can be theologically fruitful. While language and literature in general raise
implicitly theological questions, the language and literature of the Bible make explicit
theological claims—claims about God as well as claims on the reader. A dictionary of OT
terms and themes provides an important service in aiding contemporary interpreters in
achieving biblical literacy and canonical competence. The Christian theologian is one
who has learned the craft through an apprenticeship to biblical literature. In learning
what to say of God when, the biblical interpreter gains theological competence—not only
theoretical knowledge of God (episteme), but a practical wisdom (phronesis) that can be
applied to new situations as well.3 Dictionaries, far from being dull records of past
communicative action, thus serve a more dynamic purpose, namely, of informing
contemporary speech and thought about God. Biblical interpretation ultimately leads not
only to biblical theology, but to systematic and practical theology too.
Many of Plato's philosophical dialogues take the form of a search for definitions:
What is justice? What is knowledge? What is goodness? In one of his lesser known
dialogues, the Cratylus , Plato treats the nature of meaning and language. The three
participants in the dialogue—Hermogenes, Cratylus, and Socrates—each represent
different positions, positions that anticipate, often in extraordinary fashion, theories
about language that have been, and continue to be, influential in ancient, modern, and
postmodern times. For instance, Socrates' speculations about etymologies bears a
certain resemblance to how the Biblical Theology Movement of the 1940s and 1950s
interpreted biblical words. Similarly, the figure of Cratylus, after whom the dialogue
takes its name, is a precursor of sorts to certain postmodern themes.
The main issue at stake in the Cratylus is whether or not we can speak truly: Do
words give us knowledge of the world? Just what is the relation between philology (the
study of words) and philosophy (the study of reality)? Hermogenes (a disciple of the
Sophists) argues that names are conventional; like the names of slaves, they may be
given or changed at one's pleasure. As such, words are unreliable guides to the nature
of things, for there is no necessary connection between a word and the thing it names.
As we shall see, this position foreshadows Saussure's linguistics, a theory that has come
to dominate much twentieth-century thinking about words.
Once names have been analyzed into their constituent parts, however, the task
remains to analyze the parts, for otherwise one falls into an infinite regress. Socrates,
consistently enough, maintains that the parts of words—the consonants and vowels—are
themselves imitations of things. “R,” for example, expresses rapidity and motion, for
“the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation of this letter.” 8
And “l” expresses liquidity, because its pronunciation requires the tongue to slip. Thus,
in the English word “roll,” we are to think of liquid motion or of rapid slipping (the “o,” of
course, represents the circular nature of the rapid motion!). Socrates' serious philological
point, and it is a brilliant one, is that language is imitative sound. Resemblance of
sounds to things is the first principle of language.
Socrates confesses to no little doubt as to the correctness of his theory, but what
are the alternatives? If one rejects the imitation theory, the only alternatives are to
appeal to the “Deus ex machina” (i.e., the gods gave the first names) or to the “veil of
antiquity” (i.e., we don't know who gave things their names). Plato is clearly unhappy
with either alternative, for each requires him to acknowledge that he has no reason to
believe that we can speak truly (e.g., according to a thing's nature). At the same time,
Socrates is aware that names can be wrongly given; one might call a tomato a
vegetable rather than a fruit. There is a distinction, then, between a name and the thing
itself.
Here Socrates grants Hermogenes's point, that naming is, at least in part, a
matter of convention. After all, “tomato” does not really sound like a tomato, nor is
there anything in its etymology that requires it to be linked with a glossy red fruit that
grows on a vine. It is because there is unlikeness, as well as likeness, to things that
requires a combination of nature and convention in naming. This is particularly true of
numbers. The names of numbers do not resemble them. Socrates concedes this point
reluctantly; one gains the distinct impression that Plato would be happier if language
worked exclusively by imitation of nature, as this would fit in better with his theory of
the Forms, according to which things on earth imitate eternal Ideas. To his credit,
however, we find Plato at the end of the Cratylus suggesting that it is dangerous to try
to find philosophy in words (e.g., etymologies). One cannot argue from name to nature,
from philology to philosophy, from morphology to metaphysics: “He who follows names
in the search after things, and analyses their meaning, is in great danger of being
deceived.” 9 We can only trust names to reveal the nature of things if names are God-
given, but Socrates finds little way of making sense of this suggestion. On this account,
how could one account for the variety of languages and for the fact that the meanings
of words change over time? Better by far to view meaning as a joint product of natural
imitation and social convention.
Augustine, the most important biblical interpreter in the early church, held a view
of language that owed much to Plato. In his Confessions , Augustine recalls how his
parents taught him to speak. “When they named some object, and accordingly moved
towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they
uttered. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various
sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified.”10 This is a
classic exposition of the “meaning as reference” theory. On this view, the meaning of a
word is the object for which it stands. “All doctrine concerns either things or signs, but
things are learned by signs.”11 Some things, however, signify other things. This accords
with Plato, for whom earthly things are but pale imitations of eternal Ideas. Things are
nevertheless learned by signs, and this includes things spoken of in Scripture. However,
the relation between sign and thing may be obscured because some signs are
ambiguous.
Augustine contrasts literal signs, which designate the things to which they refer directly,
with figurative signs, which occur “when the thing which we designate by a literal sign is
used to signify something else.”12 The literal meaning is often the least interesting, the
least edifying, and the least theologically significant meaning. Literalistic interpretation
often leads to poor results:
In other words, interpretation is carnal when one fails to see that the thing
signified by a sign is itself a sign of something higher. To read spiritually is to recognize
that the things referred to by the literal sense themselves refer to something higher,
namely, the things of God. Ambrose had freed Augustine from his difficulties with the
OT by showing that many of its stories, while distinctly unedifying on the literal level,
carried a higher, spiritual meaning.
In an allegory, one thing is said but another meant. The early Christians applied
this method of interpretation to the OT; on this level, the Law and the Prophets refer to
Christ. Augustine's rule for deciding when to take a passage literally and when
figuratively was brilliant in its simplicity: “Whatever appears in the divine Word that does
not literally pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be
figurative.”14 If a literal reading fosters neither the love of God nor the love of neighbor,
then one must choose the spiritual interpretation that does. Multiple readings are not
dangerous so long as none of them contradicts the rule of faith, hope, and love.
Augustine later came to interpret 2 Cor 3:6, “the letter kills, the spirit gives life,”
differently: The law kills the soul unless the Spirit regenerates and enables it to love
God. However, Augustine gives to this principle of the priority of grace a hermeneutic
application as well: Words will convey their true meaning only as God himself illumines
the heart and mind. In contemporary times this has become the insight that one can
only read the Bible aright if one reads as an active participant in the Christian
community (i.e., in the life of the church, and only then in the life of God).
In a famous article entitled “On Sense and Reference,” Goob Frege distinguished
“sense,” what someone says, from “reference,” that about which one says something. 16
The sense is the ideal object, the idea one has in mind; the referent is the real object in
the world that the sense or idea represents. The logic of interpretation is clear: One has
first to determine the sense of a word or sentence before then going on to determine
whether it refers to something real (i.e., whether it is true or false). The same referent
may have a number of senses or connotations, but a sentence should refer to only one
object.
(i) “Sense” and “reference.” Frege's distinction highlights the two directions in
which modern philosophy of language has tended to go. What Frege called “sense” calls
attention to the intentionality of the speaker or author and to what he or she had in
mind. “Reference,” by contrast, calls attention to the external objects in the world
towards which one's mind may be directed. Accordingly, language was thought to
express thoughts and events—the meaning of a word is the state of affairs that it
represents. Samuel Johnson speaks for modernity when he says that words are the
signs of ideas (e.g., mental representations). The language of the Bible is now used as
(1) direct evidence for reconstructing the mentality of the authors and (2) as indirect
evidence for reconstructing what actually happened in history. As Hans Frei has
observed, however, meaning in both instances is still associated with reference:
reference to what the writers had in mind or reference to what happened “behind” the
text. Language is still a matter of naming and representation, only now what is
“imitated” in words are internal thoughts and external (earthly) states of affairs.
Language thus performs an essentially informative function.
Kant's turn to the subject has produced mixed results in modern biblical
scholarship. On the one hand, as we have seen, modern biblical critics have redirected
their attention to the mentality of the human authors and to “what it meant.” Meaning is
still reference, though now the reference to the world is always indirect, that is, through
the mind of the author. For other modern scholars, however, the turn to the subject
constitutes a dangerous turn towards subjectivity. Modernity is a victim of its own
position: To conceive of the language-world relation with the categories of objectivity
and subjectivity is to be doomed always to be veering between the one pole and the
other. Does language represent the self's thought (subjectivity) or the world itself
(objectivity)? James Barr is typical of much modern biblical criticism in his insistence that
one only reaches the objective (what actually happened) through the subjective (what it
meant). Not all biblical critics, or philosophers for that matter, however, have been as
sanguine about making the mind and its thought-forms the source of the world's
determinations.
Wittgenstein wrote his Tractatus in Austria during World War I. Soon after, a
group of philosophers in Vienna seized upon Wittgenstein's work and used it as a basis
for a whole philosophy—Logical Positivism. According to this philosophy, the nature of
language itself rendered metaphysics—the study of ultimate reality—logically impossible.
As Wittgenstein had shown, language referred only to states of affairs in the world.
Metaphysics attempts to go beyond experience. But if language cannot speak of that
which exceeds experience, then metaphysics, strictly speaking, has literally nothing to
say. Accordingly, the Vienna Circle formulated the “Verifiability Criterion of Meaning.”
Reference now becomes a criterion for meaning: Unless we can show how and to what
we refer, what we say is meaningless. For a sentence to be meaningful, it must be
possible, at least in principle, to verify it—to check it against experience. The world is
limited to what we can sense (empiricism), and language is rendered clearer by means
of logic—hence the name Logical Positivism. Meaning is swallowed up by empirical
reference. We are still working with a picture theory of language, only now what
language imitates can never be heavenly realities, as Plato thought, but only what can
be verified and falsified by science. 26 As we shall see, Wittgenstein later came to be his
own harshest critic, rejecting his attempt to clarify ordinary language and coming to see
instead that ordinary language has its own kind of logic.
(ii) Interpretation and biblical positivism? At first blush, it may seem odd to pair
Old Princeton—the thought of such theologians as Benjamin Warfield and Charles
Hodge—with Old Vienna and logical positivism. However, both James Barr and David
Kelsey have accused the Princetonians (and implicitly, several generations of
conservative biblical scholars as well) of succumbing to a kind of “biblical atomism” or
“biblical positivism.”27 Barr and Kelsey suggest that the Princetonians unwittingly held to
a distinctly modern philosophy of language, namely, one that privileges meaning as
reference, and this despite their high view of biblical authority and their antimodernist
polemic.
With the advent of postmodernity we have perhaps to speak of the turn away
from the subject and of the turn towards language. For according to a number of
postmodern thinkers, what gives rise to definitions and determinate reality is not the
world itself, nor the subject who assigns names, but rather language itself. It is
language that shapes both the world and our thought about the world. Language is less
a mirror than a screen that pictures reality, not in the sense of representing it but rather
of inventing it.
As we have seen, for both the Platonists and propositionalists, truth is a matter
of correspondence to the real. Language is true when it faithfully represents the
real—either the Idea (for Plato) or the empirical (for the positivist). The Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure worked out a very different account of language. He saw a word
as a sign that means what it means not because it represents an object, but because it
differs from other signs. For example: “hot” means what it means because it differs from
“lot,” “cot,” or “dot,” as well as from “cold,” “lukewarm,” and “tepid.” Unlike Plato, who
saw sounds imitating things, Saussure suggested that what makes a sign determinate is
its place in a system of signs. A word does not resemble anything else but another
word. The few, mostly minor, exceptions prove the rule. Words acquire meaning not by
representing things but by differing from other words. Meaning is thus a matter of
absences rather than presences, of arbitrary conventions rather than natural imitations.
And, most important, what a person can say (parole ) is limited, perhaps even
determined by, the possibilities of the language system (langue ) in which one works.
The way to study language, according to Saussure, is to examine the structure of the
language system. The actual use of language in the world (parole ) is eclipsed by the
world of language alone (langue). Language here swallows up both mind and world.
The postmodernist does not believe in a “super-language” that gives us the true
story. Indeed, Franç ois Lyotard defines the postmodern condition in terms of an
“incredulity towards metanarratives.”35 That is, the postmodern thinker no longer
believes that we can attain a perspective outside of and above language from which we
can then check to see if our language really does correspond to the way things are or
not. Reality is merely “the sum of all that our language makes generally accessible and
discussable.”36
For Cupitt, the way forward for theology is to accept that its language is
essentially aesthetic and creative. Instead of trying to speak truly, we should be more
concerned with speaking creatively, in ways that make human experience meaningful.
Theology's task is to develop symbols and metaphors that will enable us to dwell
meaningfully in the world. Cupitt neatly reverses Hodge: Theories invent facts and
impose forms upon them. We have no access to the world as it is apart from some
language or other. To inhabit a language is to abandon all attempts to attain a God's-
eye point of view. Again, it is not that words imitate the world, but that the world
imitates words. Socrates' notion that sounds imitate things, which Cupitt dubs the “bow-
wow theory” of language, got it backwards: “Words shape the way we see the world,
we fancy that the world has shaped our words. In reality, language determines
perception.” 37
Ought language represent reality? Can it? Questions about language and
meaning are inextricably tied up with larger philosophical and theological issues. What
dictionaries were thought to be and do has changed over time. In the ancient world, the
dictionary gave insight not only into language but ultimately into things themselves, not
only spoken and written words but the real world. For both Plato and Augustine,
language is true when it imitates the world. In more modern times, words give us
insight into what people are feeling and thinking, into an individual's mind.38 Henceforth,
philosophers would guard against mistaking the linguistic description for the thing itself.
With postmodernity's turn towards language, the gap between language and world
becomes an unbridgeable “ugly ditch” : The dictionary tells us not how language
represents the world or human thought, but rather how language shapes and
determines human thinking, and thus what we take to be the world.39 Language is less a
window onto the world or a mirror of the soul than it is a system that shapes both the
world and subjectivity. The disappearance of the third-person-masculine singular
pronoun as a term for humanity in general is not only a lexical but a political event. Our
brief survey confirms the thesis that the various methods of biblical interpretation are
compelling for those who practice them because of the underlying worldview that they
presuppose.40 One's understanding of the relation between language and reality
ultimately involves theological assumptions. This brings us back to my initial twofold
claim that theology has to do with language and that language has to do with theology.
Language and Theology: The Analogy of Being and the Analogy of Faith
When we say “God is good,” does “good” mean the same as it means when
applied to creatures (in which case God loses his transcendence and is reduced to an
earthly object), or does it mean something entirely different (in which case we do not
know what it means)? Thomas Aquinas evades this either-or and suggests that some
words may be used analogically of God. 46 If a thing can be a sign for God, there must
be some similarity between the thing and God. If there were not, then how could, say,
fatherhood or kingship be meaningful terms to ascribe to God? Language about things
may be applied analogously to God insofar as the created things share certain qualities
(e.g., perfections such as goodness, justice, beauty, etc.) with their Creator, though only
to a lesser degree.
Aquinas's view of language thus relies on a picture of how God is related to the
world. God is present in the world as the source of Being.47 Aquinas claims, reasonably
enough, that we can only speak of God as we know him, but then he goes on to say
that “we know him from creatures.”48 God is the ground of being, the source of all that
is. God is the reference point for all that is. He is the transcendent Presence and
perfection that creaturely things analogically (and thus imperfectly) represent. Aquinas
states: “When we say God is good or wise we do not simply mean that he causes
wisdom or goodness, but that he possesses these perfections transcendently.”49 The
confidence that language may refer analogically to God is based on the analogy of being
that posits a similarity between creaturely reality and the Creator. What creatures and
Creator share is Being, though God is the highest Being, endowed with all the
perfections of Being, and has Being in and of himself.50 “Good” has the meaning it has
only because there is an extralinguistic reference point (viz., the goodness of God) that
fixes language (viz., the term “good”). The analogy of being thus accords with a natural
theology that maintains that we can say true things about God on the basis of our
experience of and reflection about nature.51
Karl Barth conceives of the presence of God very differently from Aquinas and
thus provides another instructive example of how one's view of God and one's view of
language each have a bearing on the other. Barth rejects the analogia entis as a
massive theological error. Natural theology implies that God is in fundamental continuity
with the world and so denies the “wholly otherness” of God. Barth's dialectical theology,
on the other hand, affirms an “infinitive qualitative difference” between God in heaven
and eternity on the one hand and humanity on earth and in time on the other. But if
God is wholly other than the world, how then can human language speak of God truly?
Barth's short answer is: It cannot. Left to its own devices, human language can speak
only of the world. Dialectical theology prevents any illegitimate or premature synthesis
of God and humanity from the human side. However, there is nothing to stop human
language from revealing God from God's side. Barth's dialectical theology therefore
recognizes an analogia fidei (analogy of faith)—an analogy “from above,” initiated by
divine grace. Only in this way can God remain God (e.g., the wholly other) as well as the
referent of human words.52
The goal of biblical interpretation for Barth is to discern the Word in the words.
“Without revelation there can only be semantic agnosticism—for all acts of signification
make arbitrary connection between words and what is.”54 God's language, on the other
hand, is wholly adequate to its object. Without divine activity, however, the process of
interpreting the Scriptures is short-circuited. “That human language can become a
bearer of divine revelation is a divine possibility, not a human possibility.”55 Exegetical
labor alone cannot catch the sacred fish. Successful reference—the disclosure of the
Word by the words—is ultimately God's own achievement in the interpreter. If there is
revelation—successful reference to the Word—it is not a function of the Bible's language
so much as an event of divine grace.
Barth's view of God gives rise to a particular view of language and interpretation:
the analogia fidei. The theological motive behind Barth's refusal of the analogy of being
is his concern to forestall any kind of linguistic natural theology. God would not be God if
he could be the referent of human discourse or if he could simply be read off of the
biblical texts. As wholly other, God is hidden in his revealedness; only in this way can
God be Lord of the process of revelation. The unresolved question for Barth concerns
the status of the economy of signification (viz., language): Is it a God-given gift, or a
sinful postlapsarian product that has nothing to do with God? Is language human or
divine in origin? Barth seems to be saying both: Language is socially constructed and
divinely elected, both arbitrary and adequate in relation to the reality of God. Behind
Barth's view of language lies his view of God as dialectially present: hidden to reason,
revealed to faith. Both Barth and Aquinas seek a view of language that does justice to
divine immanence (presence) and transcendence (absence) alike. For Aquinas, God's
presence is the stable ground of Creation, whereas for Barth, God's presence is more
dynamically conceived, a revealing presence only to an active faith.56
Deconstruction, it has been said, is the death of God put into hermeneutics.57 For
Derrida, presence—the presence of meaning, an author, God—is always illusory, an
effect or projection of writing. Without an Author, the world has no fixed meaning;
without the author, the text has no fixed meaning. God's death in the nineteenth
century precipitated the author's death in the twentieth century—a similarly theological
event. “Both deaths attest to a departure of belief in authority, presence, intention,
omniscience and creativity.”58 Derrida and other deconstructionists celebrate the death
of the author as a counter-theological event which frees the reader for creative play.59
To declare the author dead is to abandon the search for a stable home for
linguistic meaning. For Barthes and Foucault, the death of the author means that there
is nothing outside the play of writing that guarantees determinate sense or that our
words refer to the world. The turn to language involves a turn away from the subject:
The author's consciousness is no longer thought to be able to control the sense and
reference of his words. Consequently, the author has lost all “authority”—the ability to
say of x that it is y, the power of say-so.
With the death of the author comes the birth of the reader. Readers benefit from
the power vacuum that follows from the author's absence. It is the reader's will-to-
power that bestows meaning on texts. Derrida agrees with Nietzsche: If God (stable
meaning) does not exist, it would be necessary to invent him (it). This is precisely the
role of the reader: to create meaning out of a sea of indeterminate signs. Atheism thus
leads to nonrealism in literary theory and philosophy alike. In much literary theory, God,
self, and world are all alike reduced to modes of textuality.60 In Derrida's words: “There
is nothing outside the text.”61
Derrida, to his credit, acknowledges the tie between hermeneutics and theology.
“The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth. The age of the sign is
essentially theological.”62 The sign is theological insofar as it is taken to represent
presence, that is, insofar as it is a sign of an extralinguistic reality that transcends it.
Meaning, and hermeneutics in general, is theological insofar as it refers to the belief that
there is something in what we say, that is, if it refers to the belief that our God-talk is
not merely talk about talk but talk about God. Derrida, however, pits grammatology over
against hermeneutics. Grammatology is the “science of writing,” that is, the study of
signs in their material and differential relation to one another rather than of the relation
between signs and things or thoughts. It is the dream of hermeneutics that meaning
(the transcendental signified) will somehow be made present through the process of
deciphering signs. Grammatology is to language as atheism is to religion; it reminds us
that there is only writing, only absence, only signs referring to other signs—never voice,
presence, or the fullness of being.
“For me, the distinction between semantics and semiotics is the key to the whole
problem of language.” 67 I am inclined to agree with Ricoeur. While semiotics (the
science of signs or semeia ) focuses on linguistic rules and conventions, semantics
examines linguistic performance and intentions. For semiotics, meaning is a matter of
the relations between signs with the system of langue.
(b) Parole/sentences/semantics.
As the function of words in premodernity and modernity has been to (a) name
things or (b) stand for or label thoughts, so the sentence has been thought to function
as a pictorial representation of a state of affairs. A picture of language as composed of
signs rather than sentences has held us captive. To focus on the semantics of
sentences, however, is to create a new picture of language as “discourse”—as
something someone says to someone about something. To conceive of language and
literature as discourse is to view speech and text as the communicative acts of
communicative agents. 70 John Fiske defines language as a means of communication, of
“social interaction through messages.” 71
Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the first philosophers to free himself from the
picture of language as a means of referring to objects in the world. Wittgenstein saw
that language can be used for many different purposes and that there are a variety of
different “fits” between word and world. J. L. Austin similarly believed the task of the
philosopher was not to improve upon ordinary language by showing how it
corresponded to the world so much as to understand how it performed many other
tasks as well.72 Austin discovered the situation in which language was used was every
bit as important as the words themselves.
Discourse has to do with the actual use of words, with words in action. For the
sake of analysis, we may distinguish four levels of communicative action. (i) Locutionary.
While language systems are merely virtual, discourse pertains to an actual use of words.
The locutionary act refers to the act of saying something. 73 (ii) Illocutionary. Sentences,
besides saying something (e.g., identifying and predicating), also do something (e.g.,
warn, assert, promise, etc.). The illocutionary act refers to what we do when we say
something. 74 It is the illocutionary aspect of discourse that semiotics overlooks, to
damaging effect. For it is the illocution that makes a set of words into a particular type
of communicative action (e.g., an assertion, a question, a warning, a command, etc.).
The words “It's hot,” alone, are indeterminate; it is not clear what illocutionary act is
being performed, be it assertion, or warning, or promise. The words alone cannot render
the meaning determinate; the interpreter needs contextual clues before deciding what it
means. (iii) Perlocutionary. This dimension of communicative action refers to what a
speaker brings about by saying something. For instance, by asserting something, a
speaker may also persuade. (iv) Interlocutionary. Discourse is always addressed to
someone. Every illocutionary act is a kind of invitation to which the reader or listener is
invited to respond (e.g., by assent, by action, by further discourse, etc.). Thanks to
discourse, we are able to communicate meaning to one another. The interlocutionary
aspect of discourse reminds us that language is ultimately a medium for interpersonal
interaction.
It follows from the nature of discourse that language is both a means for relating
to other persons and a means for relating to one's world. To speak is to incur certain
privileges as well as responsibilities vis-à-vis one's hearers and the world. To view
language as discourse is to see it as a medium for personal interaction. Speech or
parole, unlike langue, cannot be dissociated from its speaker. Take, for example, a
promise. Here the speaker explicitly implicates herself in what she says. As J. L. Austin
puts it: “Our word is our bond.” 75 There is, I believe, a similarly “covenantal” aspect in
all discourse. As agents of communicative action, authors are tied to their texts and
responsible for what they say. Words are instruments of communicative interaction.
Some communicative interactions concern the way the world is or the way the speaker
feels. Others pertain to the speaker's wishes or requests. Still others have to do with the
actions and promises of God. In all cases, our word is our bond: an intersubjective bond
between speakers and an objective bond between language and reality.
Dilthey himself believed that the aim of the human sciences was to recover the
mind of the author, his or her psychic life. But this is to search for some meaning behind
the discourse. A better goal for interpretation is to seek the meaning of, not the motive
behind, the discourse. Understanding a discourse means grasping the meaning of the
whole considered as a communicative act. To understand a discourse is to apprehend
both its propositional content (e.g., the matter) as well as its illocutionary force (e.g.,
the energy). The illocutionary act is the touchstone, the aspect that breathes semantic
life into what otherwise would be a lifeless chain of signifiers. It is the illocutionary level
that distinguishes discourse from signs and language systems. Understanding is
essentially the recognition of one's illocutionary act. To understand discourse is to grasp
the nature and content of a communicative act, and this can only be done when the
illocutionary intent is recognized. Understanding discourse is, I suggest, the proper aim
of interpretation, for only on this level do we achieve understanding of the discourse as
a whole as opposed to knowledge of its elementary parts.
What effect does the newer picture of language as discourse have on the role of
a dictionary? If language is discourse, then dictionaries are best viewed as descriptions
of discourse, that is, as records of linguistic usage. A good dictionary usually lists several
entries for well-known words and is a good source of information for how words are,
and have been, habitually used. Dictionaries cannot, of course, anticipate how words will
be used in the future.
(iii) Divine speech acts. If, as I have claimed, theology informs views of language
and hermeneutics, what theology informs the present discussion of language as
communicative interaction (e.g., discourse)? This is a perfectly appropriate question.
The short answer is “evangelical” theology, where evangelical stands for theology
oriented to “good news”—news of divine action on behalf of the world. The gospel
concerns the communication of what has happened in the event of Jesus Christ.
Accordingly, the theology behind my view of language and interpretation is a theology of
communicative interaction. God's Word is something that God says, something that God
does, and something that God is. The God of the Christian Scriptures and Christian faith
is the kind of God that can enter into relation with human beings through Incarnation
and through verbal communicative action. 78 Moreover, the God portrayed in the
Scriptures has given to humans the dignity of communicative agency and communicative
responsibility. Consequently, meaning is first and foremost something persons do.
What, for instance, is Paul doing in his letter to Ephesians? Several possible
answers come to mind: putting words together, dictating a letter, addressing the
Ephesians, sending greetings, reflecting on the significance of the event of Jesus Christ.
A historical approach that examines the situation behind the text could do justice to
some aspects of the communicative action but not others. A semiological approach could
do justice to others. If used exclusively, however, a semiotic study of Ephesians would
not merely explain but explain away, as all reductionistic theories always tend to do.
Much to be preferred is a description that incorporates the semiotic but then go on to do
justice to the semantic. For one cannot describe an action simply by describing its
components parts. It is one thing to describe an action as moving one's finger or
producing sounds, and another to describe the moving of one's fingers as performing a
Beethoven piano sonata. One cannot correctly understand a person's bodily movements
(or words) without reference to an agent's intentions. What we are ultimately trying to
understand as biblical interpreters, I would contend, is the intention enacted in the
text—the sense and significance of a communicative act. 80
Interpreting Scripture:
The Semantics of Biblical Literature
To say that language and literature are forms of discourse does not solve all
interpretive problems. What, for instance, of the problem of indeterminacy of meaning?
It is one thing to say that meaning is communicative action, quite another to determine
what kind of communicative act has been performed. As with langue, so with parole:
The general principle is that context disambiguates. We know what sense to make of
“he's hot” once we are clear about the context: Is he lying on a bed in a hospital, in the
midst of a family argument, or playing a great game of tennis? The situation of a
discourse provides important interpretive clues.
But if the meaning of texts depends on their contexts, have we not simply
pushed the problem of semantic indeterminacy back one step, for who determines the
relevant context, and how? Derrida and other deconstructionist critics argue for a
pluralism of meanings precisely because texts have as many contexts as they have
readers. 82 The search for determinate textual meaning thus appears to founder on the
question of context. Which contexts makes texts determinate? How large a context must
we establish in order to interpret a text correctly? In reply to these questions, I contend
that the most important context for understanding biblical discourse is its literary (e.g.,
generic) and canonical context.
(i) The literary context. The immediate literary context of a biblical text has the
advantage of being both available and fixed. One does not have to search for the
literary context behind the text, as it were. The text itself is its own best context for
interpretation. Indeed, could it be that a text might only yield its meaning—its sense and
its reference—on its own terms? The biblical text itself is probably the best evidence
even for reconstructing the situation behind the text. The literary context is not only
necessary but often sufficient for the purposes of interpretation if it enables one to
answer the question, “What is the author doing here?” In other words, the contexts
relevant for the purposes of interpretation are those that enable the interpreter to
describe the nature of the communicative action under consideration (e.g., “ he's
prophesying;” “he's telling a story;” “he's composing a love song,” etc.). Conversely, the
most spectacular errors in interpretation are those that miss the prime communicative
function. For instance, those who read Gulliver's Travels as a children's story miss the
(primary) aspect of political satire. Similarly, those that read the book of Jonah as a
story about a great fish miss the (primary?) aspect of prophetic satire. 89
(ii) The narrative context. Hans Frei argues that the biblical narratives make
sense on their own terms. That is, they provide all the information and clues that the
interpreter needs in order to follow the story. For Frei, the meaning of the biblical story
is the story itself, not some history behind the story. Furthermore, we cannot gain the
message of the story apart from the story's form; the medium is the message. That is,
the meaning of the story is held within the story world, the sum total of characters and
events that figure in the story. There is no gap between the story and its meaning.
Following the biblical narratives is more than a matter of appreciating the story on its
own terms, however. It involves reading one's own world (or story) in light of the story
world of the biblical text. Frei calls this interpretive approach “intratextual” :
“Intratextual theology redescribes reality within the scriptural framework rather than
translating Scripture into extrascriptural categories. It is the text, so to speak, which
absorbs the world, rather than the world the text.” 90 Meir Sternberg argues similarly
that the OT narratives are interpretive frameworks that draw the reader and the reader's
world into the world of the text. 91
(iii) The canonical context. “Scripture interprets Scripture.” How large is a literary
context? On the one hand, there are sixty-six books, or literary wholes, in the Bible. On
the other hand, the scope of the biblical story reaches back to the beginning of time and
stretches forward to its conclusion. In the Gospels, the story of Jesus is a kind of
retelling of the story of Israel. 92 The rest of the NT examines the story of Jesus as the
story of the church, and of the whole cosmos. Because of its peculiar subject matter, the
acts of the one Creator-Covenant God, the biblical narratives take on the status of a
unified metanarrative. That means that the individual biblical stories have to be
interpreted in light of the set of stories taken together. The literary whole I now have in
mind is, of course, the Christian canon. 93 Childs argues that the canon provides the
appropriate context for biblical interpretation. Indeed, in his commentary on Exodus he
devotes a section to analyzing the material in light of its NT context. 94
“Every piece of writing is a kind of something.” 95 It may be that the best way to
do justice to the principle that “Scripture interprets Scripture” is to focus not simply on
the literary context of Scripture but in particular on the distinctive way in which the
Bible's message is mediated by its literary forms. 96
(i) Form and meaning: following conventional rules. First, genres use words to
create larger verbal forms. E. D. Hirsch compares literary genres to games: “Coming to
understand the meaning of an utterance is like learning the rules of a game.” 100 This is
also the metaphor that Wittgenstein chose when he revised his earlier position on
language and interpretation. Each genre has its own rules for making sense. A reader
will achieve understanding only if he grasps the kind of game the text is playing. It is
not enough to know the meaning of individual words; one must have some sense of the
illocutionary point of the whole discourse. If the reader is not playing the same game, if,
say, history is read as if it were myth, then the result is misunderstanding. A generically
correct reading is one that follows the formal rules or conventions that make a
communicative act one kind of thing rather than another. Genre thus acts as a bridge
between the author's interpretive framework and that of the reader. For communication
to be successful, for meaning to be disambiguated, the generic context must be shared.
(ii) Form and function: following conversations. Second, genres create literary
form in order to facilitate social interaction. Language, as we have seen, is an
instrument for interpersonal interaction. Speech and writing are the chief means of
interpersonal interaction known to humanity. 101 In his Philosophical Investigations,
Wittgenstein denies that any one “language game” (e.g., referring) represents the
essence of language. On the contrary, there are as many ways of using language as
there are human activities, and many of these activities have developed their own rules
for using language, not to mention their own distinct vocabulary. Wittgenstein compared
words to tools: “Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a
screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws. The function of words are as diverse
as the function of these objects.” 102 If words are like tools, then genres may be thought
of as the projects on which these tools are put to work. “Picturing reality” is only one
such project among many others.
(iii) Rationality and reference: following routes to the real. Lastly, literary genres
are adapted not only to serve particular social functions but also to engage with and
think certain aspects of reality more than others. Literary genres are not only
communicative but cognitive strategies. Each genre constitutes a distinct mode of
cognition, a unique form for thinking about (and experiencing) the world in ways that,
without it, would not be possible. This insight exposes the shortcomings of the proof-
texting method; biblical texts yield not only propositional information, but ways of seeing
and processing information. Literary genres are verbal maps, each with its own “key”
and “scale.” The “key” tells you what a piece of discourse is about. Just as there are
different kinds of maps—of roads, of geological characteristics, of historical incidents, of
the stars—so different literary genres select and attend to various features of reality
more than others. 103 Similarly, every literary genre has its own “scale” or manner of
fitting words to the world. The aim of history, for instance, is to make our words fit or
correspond to the world, viz., the past; the aim of utopias is to make the world fit or
correspond to our words. The point is that words do not naturally refer to reality in
uniform fashion. Rather, every genre has its own conventions and strategies for relating
to the real.
(b) The centrality of narrative.
Among the various genres in Scripture, none illustrates the significance of literary
form better than narrative. Narrative is an indispensable cognitive instrument for
learning about the world, the identity of Jesus Christ, and our own identity as Christians.
(i) With regard to the world, what we know, by and large, is not a set of discrete
propositions or items of knowledge, but particulars that form part of a larger story. This
is as true of science as of theology. Our theories are not abstract views from nowhere,
but concrete views from where we are in our particular histories and traditions. Theories
are stories that cultures believe in. According to N. T. Wright, knowledge occurs “when
people find things that fit with the particular story or (more likely) stories to which they
are accustomed to give allegiance.” 104 Stories, in other words, provide an indispensable
interpretive framework through which we view the world, ourselves, and God. When a
story claims to make sense of all others stories and the whole of reality, it becomes a
“metanarrative.”
(ii) According to Frei, the Gospels are neither straightforward histories or myths
but rather “realistic narratives” whose intent is to render the identity of Jesus by relating
what he did and what happened to him. The meaning of a realistic narrative is “in large
part a function of the interaction of character and circumstances.” 105 Who Jesus is
inseparable from his actions and his passion. In other words, without the narrative we
would not be able to identify Jesus. The meaning is inextricably tied up with the story
form itself: “not illustrated (as though it were an intellectually presubsisting or
preconceived archetype or ideal essence) but constituted through the mutual, specific
determination of agents, speech, social context, and circumstances that form the
indispensable narrative web.” 106 Only the Gospel narratives can render Jesus' specific
uniqueness as a person, for personal identity, enacted over time, bears the shape of a
narrative.
(iii) Narrative has to do with interpretation, lastly, insofar as the biblical story can
clash with and subsequently transform those stories that readers may prefer to tell
about themselves. Biblical interpretation is ultimately a dangerous enterprise, to the
extent that readers risk having their own identities challenged by what they read. This
critique of one's old understanding is the condition for a new understanding of God, the
world, and oneself. For the Christian interpreter is the one who reads the story of Israel,
and especially the story of Jesus, as his or her own story, that is, as constitutive of his or
her own identity. The apostle Paul understood himself in the light of the story of Jesus:
“I have been crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:20). The Bible calls, similarly, not only for
understanding but for personal appropriation on the part of interpreters. In other words,
Scripture calls for intratextual interpretation, where the interpreter's world is itself
interpreted in terms of the biblical text, as part of the biblical story. What is ultimately at
stake in biblical interpretation is not simply the meaning of the text, but the identity of
the interpreter.
Sacra Littera, Sacra Pagina, and Sacra Doctrina:
From Dictionary to Theology
The trajectory of interpretation, and of this essay, is from the letter through
literature to doctrine (and life). But what precisely is the relation between philology, the
study of words, and theology, the study of God? Just what is the connection between
the sacred letter, the sacred page, and sacred doctrine?
Throughout this essay I have assumed that biblical interpreters should strive for
literacy rather than letterism. What is interesting theologically happens on the level not
of the letter, nor of the word, but rather of the whole text. In other words, it is not the
word or the concept alone, but the word/concept as used in the context of the literary
whole that is the object of understanding. The general thrust of most contemporary
linguistics has been to demythologize etymologies. The letter has lost its sacred aura. 107
If theology cannot be squeezed out of sacred letters, what about the “sacred
page” ? In medieval theology, to be a theologian was to be a master of the sacred page.
Thomas Aquinas, for instance, affirmed the content of the Bible as the place where
sacred teaching was to be found. He could thus speak of sacra scriptura and sacra
doctrina interchangeably. 108 According to modern biblical scholars, however, theology
may not simply be “read off” of the Bible, as though one could simply take over biblical
words today and be saying the same thing: “Theology is no longer simply biblical
interpretation.” 109 What then is the role of the sacred page?
The sacred page should not be confused with a reference book or a compendium
of theology, that is, with a collection of theological propositions. Nor should sacred
doctrine be confused with the attempt to substitute clearly formulated propositions for
the metaphors, stories, and other literary forms in Scripture. This would be to confuse
the Bible's meaning with its (ideal or historical) reference. The sacred page is not a
blank space on which inerrant propositions are arbitrarily parked, nor is it merely grist
for the propositional mill. The page, far from being a place on which to paste proof texts
or deduce propositions, is rather the context in which a group of sentences make sense
as a whole. It is important to bear in mind that the propositional function of language
(e.g., to make statements) is only one of many uses to which language can be put. 110
One of the functions of genre is to provide a clue as to what illocutionary force a given
proposition bears (e.g., is it part of a story, a parable, a warning, a question, etc.). Only
when one first determines the sense of a sentence can one then go on to inquire after
its truth. The sacred page may or may not be a page of information; that depends on
the kind of book of which the page is a part. According to Bernard Ramm: “Much harm
has been done to Scripture by those within and without the Church by assuming that all
statements in the Bible are on the same logical level, on which level they are either true
or false.” 111
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching ... and training in
righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16). I do not wish to deny that the sacred page contains sacred
teaching, that is, true information about God and God's actions in history. I do,
however, wish to call attention to the significance of other uses of biblical language and
literature. For to equate the sacred page with propositional information is to subscribe to
a picture theory of meaning that ultimately reduces the many ways in which Scripture is
profitable to one. Whereas the “meaning as reference” approach focuses on the
teaching or propositional aspect of Scripture, I believe that “meaning as communicative
action” better shows how the Bible can also be profitable for “training in righteousness.”
(i) Technology and the sacred page: savoir . Words are instruments of
communicative action. To focus on the nature of the instruments rather than what they
are being used for, however, is to lose the forest for the trees. Interpretation is neither
a matter of mere technical information about the text (e.g., textual criticism) nor even of
the propositional information a text conveys. Interpretation is about following texts, and
this involves practical know-how too. How do we learn to follow or understand
communicative action? It is just here that the notion of genre as a communicative
practice is significant. One masters a practice by learning its implicit rules, and one
learns the rules by participating in the practice (e.g., by engaging in a certain kind of
language or literature game).
(ii) Sanctification and the sacred page: connaître. “I would far rather feel
remorse than know how to define it.” 112 Biblical interpretation is a matter of
participating in the canon's communicative practices to the point of grasping not only
the conventions, but the point of the text. To take biblical narrative as an example: It is
not enough simply to know about the conventions that narrative employs.
Understanding biblical narrative means being able to dwell in what Ricoeur calls “the
world of the text,” and to read one's own life in terms of the biblical story. A text is not
understood until its discourse is appropriated. 113 The understanding reader must expose
himself or herself to the effects of the text. To use C. S. Lewis's well-known distinction:
The reader must not only “see” but “taste” the meaning of the text. 114 Understanding is
short-circuited when the interpreter achieves only seeing or apprehension (i.e., savoir,
or “objective knowledge about”) rather than tasting and appropriation (i.e., connaître, or
“knowledge by personal acquaintance”).
What is theologically normative in Scripture are not the words, nor even isolated
proof texts, but the various rules for conceiving and speaking about God embedded in
biblical genres. Each of the biblical genres engages with and leads us to divine reality,
albeit in different ways. The task of biblical theology is to make clear how the various
literary forms in the Bible are ways of seeing, and tasting, the reality of God. The Bible,
as a collection of books, functions as a pedagogue that teaches us not only what to say
about God, but when and where to say it, and under what conditions. Knowing how to
use ordinary words so that they say something true about God is to be “wise in speech.”
Christian thinkers today achieve theological wisdom when they have been trained in the
school of Scriptures and when they learn the grammar of faith—what is appropriate to
say about God in various literary and historical situations. Theological concepts are
learned by participating in the Bible's diverse communicative practices. We learn to think
about the end of history, for example, thanks to biblical apocalyptic. For the Christian,
Scripture is the school in which we learn to use terms like God, sin, and justification
correctly. To the extent that we participate in this use, the Bible effectively educates our
thoughts and feelings about God. It is not only narrative, but ultimately all the biblical
genres that come to absorb us. The sense of the sacred page, if followed, should lead to
the sanctification of the reader. 115
(i) To God. Though I have argued that meaning is not simply a matter of
reference, it does not follow that language cannot refer to God truly. However, what is
primarily true of God are not isolated words or concepts as representations of things or
thoughts, but rather sentences and discourses that serve as larger-scale models for
interpreting reality. 116 A theological concept is not a word or thought that pictures God,
but rather a mental skill that makes explicit what is implicit in the way God is
represented in a particular literary genre. A theological concept, in other words, is a way
of thinking that is learned through an apprenticeship to biblical literature. To take a
simple example: We learn the meaning of “the right arm of God” not by analyzing the
etymology of the words but by becoming sensitive to the metaphorical force of the
phrase and to the generic contexts in which it is used. When theological concepts are
abstracted from the canonical forms of discourse that generate them, they tend to lose
the specificity of their biblical meaning. It follows that our systems of theology must
remain tied to the biblical texts.
To be tied to the text need not imply that “there is nothing outside of the text.”
To say that reference to God is always through some metaphor or genre is not to deny
that such language really refers to God. If the sacred page is indeed the location of the
sacred teaching, we must affirm the language of the Bible to be true. The theological
view of language for which I have argued holds that language is a God-given instrument
that enables interpersonal interaction and engages with reality. I contend, with George
Steiner, that God ultimately underwrites language's ability to transcend itself, to speak
of what is more than language. At the same time, we must acknowledge that what we
find on the sacred page is often metaphors and other kinds of nonpropositional
discourse (as well as a good number of propositions). Both metaphors and literary
genres are cognitive instruments that help us to discover the real. Every genre refers
and predicates, but not in the same way. Metaphors and genres are nevertheless reality-
depicting. 117 The many forms of language and literature are the condition for helping us
to see aspects of reality that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The biblical text is the primary location of truth for Christians; the sacred page is
the sacred teaching. But what doctrines there are in Scripture do not always take
propositional form—in some case, the story is the doctrine, and the task of the
theologian is to render conceptually explicit the understanding that is implicit in the
narrative form. There is no unmediated access to the activity of God in ancient Israel or
to the activity of God in Jesus Christ. In order to have meaning and reference, we
cannot go around the text, only through it. I therefore agree with Francis Watson, who
argues for an “intratextual realism,” which, in his words, “would understand the biblical
text as referring beyond itself to extra-textual theological reality, while at the same time
regarding that reality as accessible to us only in textual form.” 118
(ii) To us. There is another kind of reference that should not be overlooked.
What we discover in interpreting Scripture is that the interpreter is included in the Bible's
claims and references in two ways. On the one hand, the world of which the Bible
speaks is our world. We, like Paul, are living “between the times,” in the eschatologically
charged interval between the first and second comings of Christ. On the other hand, the
claims that the Bible makes are often claims that impinge upon ourselves as readers.
That is, the Bible is a text that demands considerable reader response: The interpreter
must not only respect the author's intentions and literary conventions, but respond to
the issue of the text as well. What is being interpreted in the process of biblical
interpretation is not only the text (by the reader) but also the reader (by the text).
ENDNOTES
2 L. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, in The Philosopher's Alice, ed. Peter Heath,
1974, 193.
4 Cratylus represents the situation after modernity: The postmodern person accepts
modernity's high requirements for what counts as knowledge—namely, Cartesian
certainty or foundationalism—then denies that such foundations exist.
9 Ibid., 383.
10 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.8. Wittgenstein cites this passage in the opening
pages of his Philosophical Investigations and comments that Augustine gives us a
particular picture of the essence of human language. On Wittgenstein's own position,
see below.
12 Ibid., 2.10.15.
13 Ibid., 3.5.9.
14 Ibid., 3.10.14.
15 James Barr notes the corresponding trend in biblical studies to focus on the mind of
the writers, on the authorial intentions. This eventually led to critics distinguishing
between the mental representation of a series of events—the biblical accounts—on the
one hand, and the results of historical reconstruction of what actually happened, on the
other. See Barr, The Bible in the Modern World, 1973, 91-3.
16 Goob Frege's “On Sense and Reference,” tr. Max Black, in Translation from the
Philosophical Writings of Goob Frege, 1970, 56-78.
17 Cf. Barr: “We today in general do not move directly from biblical texts to external
referents, but from biblical texts to the theological intentions of the writers and only
from there indirectly to external referents,” The Bible in the Modern World, 175.
18 David Kelsey calls this “biblical concept theology,” in his The Uses of Scripture in
Recent Theology, 1975, 24. See esp. ch. 1, “Doctrine and Concept.”
19 Etymologies are given even in the Bible to make certain theological points, e.g., Matt
1:21 (lit.), “'and his name shall be called Emmanuel' (which means, God with us).”
23 Ibid., 2.21.
27 Kelsey, in his study of Warfield's use of Scripture, comments that what Warfield calls
“biblical theology” is instead a kind of “biblical positivism” (Uses of Scripture, 23).
28 Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1873, 1:10. For a fuller and perhaps more
subtle account of the Princetonians, see David Wells, ed., Reformed Theology in
America, 1985, chs. 2-3.
31 Don Cupitt (see below) associates the view that the world has a determinate
extralinguistic structure that can be formulated in language with Calvinism and labels it
“Protestant commonsense realism” (The Long-Legged Fly, 1987, 163).
33 For a recent example of this trend, see The Postmodern Bible, The Bible and Culture
Collective, 1995.
34 I owe this particular example to Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 1980, 44.
38 The British empiricists, such as John Locke and David Hume, thought of ideas as
representations or impressions of experience. Words on this view represent thought or
experience rather than things, as in Plato and premodernity.
39 This position is particularly associated with Michel Foucault, who argues that
language, a social force, is the power of determinacy that creates the categories with
which we interpret the world and human experience.
40 For another demonstration of this thesis, see Edgar V. McKnight, Post-Modern Use of
the Bible: The Emergence of Reader-Oriented Criticism, 1988.
42 Ibid., 44.
43 See L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (German edition, 1841), tr. George
Eliot, 1989.
47 Aristotle's study of the various uses of the verb “to be” (undertaken as part of his
analysis of the concept “substance” in his Metaphysics ) laid the groundwork for the
medieval notion of the “analogy of being” (analogia entis). See Aristotle, Metaphysics
1016b6-10.
51 Aquinas was well aware of the discontinuities between God and his creatures as well.
Some of the things we say about God we say by way of negation: for instance, God is
not finite (infinite), not changeable (immutable). The idea that God cannot be
understood in human categories led some patristic and medieval thinkers to do negative
or apophatic theology. Pseudo-Dionysius, an anonymous writer probably dating from the
sixth century, argued that God's names are only provisional: God is beyond all human
names and categories.
52 For a fuller treatment of Barth's dialectical view of revelation as both a “veiling” and
an “unveiling” of God by God, see Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth's Critically Realistic
Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936, 1995, 269-73.
53 According to G. Ward, Barth here offers a restatement of the “meaning as divine
use” idea that we first saw adumbrated, and rejected, in Cratylus. In Barth's case, of
course, revelation is a trinitarian act, involving the Son as content and the Spirit as the
“Lord of the hearing” of revelation.
60 D. Dawson, Literary Theory , 1995, 11. Dawson helpfully discusses how both
Christian theology and literary theory develop the themes of spirit, body, and text.
61 Or, there is “no outside-text” (il n'y a pas de hors-texte); Derrida, Of Grammatology
(tr. G. Spivak), 1976, 158.
62 Ibid., 14.
68 Ibid., 7.
69 Ibid., 7.
70 For a helpful study of signs and sentences in the context of communication studies,
see J. Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, 2d ed. 1990. A communicative
action is action oriented to achieving understanding.
71 Ibid., 2.
73 The locutionary aspect of meaning corresponds to langue , that is, to the range of
possible sense a term could have at a given point in the history of a language.
74 Whereas Austin and Wittgenstein believed there were countless ways of using
language, John Searle proposes a comprehensive fivefold typology of the basic things
we do with language: “We tell people how things are, we try to get them to do things,
we commit ourselves to doing things, we express our feelings and attitudes and we
bring about changes through our utterances” (Expression and Meaning: Studies in the
Theory of Speech Acts, CUP, 1979, 29). See also J. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language, 1969.
76 Ben F. Meyer agrees that the object of interpretation is the intended sense of the
text. Meyer, however, is more careful than E. D. Hirsch to distinguish the purpose the
author may have had in writing (which lies behind the text) and the intention of the
author intrinsic to or enacted in the text. See Meyer, Critical Realism and the New
Testament, 1989, ch. 2, esp. 36-41.
78 For a fuller treatment of this theology and how it funds both a doctrine of Scripture
and theological anthropology, see my “God's Mighty Speech Acts: The Doctrine of
Scripture Today” (in A Pathway into the Holy Scripture 1994, 143-97), and “Stories of
the Self: Human Being, Individual and Social” (in The Cambridge Companion to Christian
Doctrine, forthcoming).
81 W. Jeanrond coins the phrase “text linguistics” to argue that the text should be the
“basic linguistic unit.” See his Text and Interpretation as Categories of Theological
Thinking, 1988, 75.
82 For Derrida, a text is never a totality (e.g., a closed and complete whole), but is
rather constitutionally open (e.g., indeterminate). An interpretation is, therefore, not so
much the exposition of a system as it is an indispensable supplement to a text. On the
key notion of supplement in Derrida, see his Of Grammatology, 141-64.
85 Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Century Hermeneutics, 1974.
86 Frei is clear that these interpretive moves were not made in a theological vacuum.
On the contrary, biblical criticism flourished in the context either of Deism or
naturalism—anything but a supernaturalism that affirmed divine action in history.
88 In my Is There a Meaning in This Text, ch. 7, I explore the role of the Holy Spirit in
giving interpreters ears to hear the text's voice rather than their own.
89 Several OT commentators have noted the high degree of irony and humor in the
book of Jonah (see, for instance, J. C. Holbert, “'Deliverance Belongs to Yahweh!': Satire
in the Book of Jonah” , JSOT 21, 1981, 59-81). What is being ridiculed is Jonah's
egocentric (read “ethnocentric”) attitude with regard to the love of God. Jonah
mistakenly thinks that God's love is primarily for the Jews. To his chagrin, Jonah is the
only character that turns out not to have repented by the end of the book.
90 This wording is George Lindbeck's, a colleague of Frei's, but it well captures the spirit
of Frei's proposal (Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 1984, 118).
91 Neither Frei nor Sternberg deny the historical intent of much biblical narrative, only
that the Bible's historical reference should be understood in the context of modern,
rather than biblical, historiography. See M. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative:
Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading, 1987.
92 Matthew highlights the parallels between Jesus' story and that of Moses (e.g., the
flight into Egypt, the Law on the mountain). The other Evangelists show that Jesus is
the Servant of the Lord who takes up the unfinished task of Israel and fulfills the three
offices—prophet, priest, and king—that constituted Israel as the people of God.
93 B. Childs argues that the literal sense of a text is the sense it has in its canonical
context (B. S. Childs, “The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: An Ancient and Modern
Problem,” in Beiträge zur alttestamentlichen Theologie, 1977, 80-93.
94 See B. S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: A Critical Theological Commentary, OTL, 1974.
Childs believes that the biblical texts display a peculiar “canonical intentionality,” by
which he means they were intentionally shaped in such a way so as to function as
normative Scripture for later generations (Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New
Testaments, 1992, 70-79).
97 See J. L. Bailey, “Genre Analysis,” in Hearing the New Testament, 1995, 197-221.
101 See M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres &
Other Late Essays, tr. V. W. McGee, 1986.
103 The biblical narrative maps out divine action in history; biblical law maps out God's
will for human behavior; biblical prophecy maps out the privileges and responsibilities of
God's covenant people; biblical wisdom maps out how persons are to fit into God's
created order, etc.
104 N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 1992, 37.
105 Frei, Eclipse, 280. See also Frei's The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical
Bases of Dogmatic Theology, 1975.
107 Even metaphors, according to Ricoeur, are a matter not of “deviant naming” but
rather of a semantic tension within sentences. For his criticism of the “names theory” of
metaphor, see Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 1978.
110 I elsewhere speak of the tendency to overlook literary form in one's zeal to obtain
the teaching as the “propositional heresy” (“Semantics of Biblical Literature,” 72).
111 B. Ramm, Special Revelation and the Word of God, 1968, 68.
115 In French, sens means both “meaning” and “direction.” Ricoeur can thus speak of a
“semantic itinerary” and call for readers to continue a text's trajectory of meaning.
116 I have elsewhere discussed the way language refers to the reality of God in terms
of “rendering.” See my “From Canon to Concept: 'Same' and 'Other' in the Relation
Between Biblical and Systematic Theology,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 12,
1994, 96-124, esp. 123.
119 Again, this kind of knowledge is personal—a knowledge won by acquaintance and
appropriation (connaître). It is also practical, like Aristotle's phronesis—a knowledge of
what to do and how to act in a particular (literary, in this case) situation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language, 1961, 246; B. S. Childs, Biblical Theology of
the Old and New Testament, 1991; H. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics, 1974; J. Green, ed., Hearing the New
Testament: Strategies for Interpretation, 1995; W. Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation as
Categories of Theological Thinking, 1988; G. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A
Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 1991; P. Ricoeur, Interpretation
Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, 1976; M. Sternberg, The Poetics of
Biblical Narrative, 1987; A. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics, 1991; K. J.
Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of
Literary Knowledge , forthcoming; G. Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of
Theology , 1995, 29; F. Watson, Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in
Theological Perspective, 1994; N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God,
1992, 37.
Kevin Vanhoozer