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Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge
Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge
Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge
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Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge

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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.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherZondervan
Release dateAug 30, 2009
ISBN9780310831709
Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge
Author

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Kevin J. Vanhoozer (PhD, Cambridge University) is Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Before that he was Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including Is There a Meaning in this Text?, First Theology, The Drama of Doctrine, and Remythologizing Theology. He serves as theological mentor for the Augustine Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians, and is a member of the Lausanne theology working group on hermeneutics for Seoul 2024.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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    Vanhoozer's time is solid, critically sensible, and erudite. I take a point off only because his erudition tends at times toward the florid and repetitive in this work; the book is longer than it needs to be, in part because he says the same thing so often. That said, Vanhoozer's conceit - that hermeneutics is fundamentally theological and that the death of the author and the death of God are fundamentally linked and lead inexorably to philosophical chaos, on the one hand, and that the postmodern critique of fundamentalist readings are largely accurate and therefore ought to be chastening to the interpreter, on the other - is correct and argued as thoroughly as one could wish.

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Is There a Meaning in This Text? - Kevin J. Vanhoozer

ZONDERVAN

Is There a Meaning in This Text?

Copyright © 1998 by Kevin J. Vanhoozer

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

ePub Edition June 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-83170-9

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vanhoozer, Kevin J.

Is there a meaning in this text? : the Bible, the reader, and the morality of literary knowledge / Kevin J. Vanhoozer.

     p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN: 0–310–21156-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Bible—Hermeneutics. 2. Hermeneutics. I. Title.

BS 476.V34 1998

220.6’01—dc21                                                                                                   98–12627


All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

To Robert H. Gundry

scholar, teacher, mentor, friend

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

INTRODUCTION: Theology and Literary Theory

1. Faith Seeking Textual Understanding

Three parables on reading and reflection

Philosophy and literary theory: from Plato to postmodernity

Meaning and interpretation: the morality of literary knowledge

The three ages of criticism: the plan of the book

Augustinian hermeneutics

PART ONE: Undoing Interpretation: Authority, Allegory, Anarchy

2. Undoing the Author: Authority and Intentionality

Authorship and authority: the birth of the author

Undoing the author’s authority

Undoing the author’s intention

Has the Bible lost its voice?

3. Undoing the Book: Textuality and Indeterminacy

Demeaning meaning?

What is a text?

Meaning in Antioch and Alexandria

Textual indeterminacy: the rule of metaphor

Interpretive agnosticism?

4. Undoing the Reader: Contextuality and Ideology

The birth of the reader

The aims of reading: literary knowledge and human interests

Interpretive violence

Power reading and the politics of canon

Undoing biblical ideology

The ethics of undoing: the new morality of knowledge

PART TWO: Redoing Interpretation: Agency, Action, Affect

5. Resurrecting the Author: Meaning As Communicative Action

The physics of promising: from codes to communion

Dissenting voices: speech rehabilitation

The what of meaning: texts as communicative acts

The who of meaning: authors as communicative agents

Communicative action and the author’s intention

Meaning and significance redivivus

6. Redeeming the Text: The Rationality of Literary Acts

Belief in meaning as properly basic: the nature of literary knowledge

The conflict of interpretations: the problem of literary knowledge

How to describe communicative acts: the norm of literary knowledge

Genre and communicative rationality: the method of literary knowledge

7. Reforming the Reader: Interpretive Virtue, Spirituality, and Communicative Efficacy

The reader as user, critic, and follower

Is exegesis without ideology possible?

Reader response and reader responsibility

Understanding and overstanding

The Spirit of understanding: discerning and doing the Word

The vocation of the reader: interpretation as discipleship

CONCLUSION: A Hermeneutics of the Cross

8. A Hermeneutics of Humility and Conviction

Trinitarian hermeneutics

The verbal icon and the authorial face

Hermeneutic humility and literary knowledge

Bibliography

About the Publisher

Share Your Thoughts

PREFACE

This is not quite the book I set out to write. My interest in hermeneutics initially arose out of my attempt as a theologian to clarify the role of Scripture in theology. What does it mean to be biblical? As a systematic theologian with a number of forthright exegete friends, I have long been aware of how easy it is to use Scripture to prove this or that doctrine, or to justify this or that practice, only to be accused of distorting the text. Of course, one does not have to be a scholar to misread the Bible; it can happen during daily devotions as well as during deconstruction. However, recent trends in hermeneutics may themselves be inadvertently aiding and abetting such misreading by propounding theories of interpretation that, in my opinion, drain the biblical witness of authority. I thus began writing this book with the aim of defending the Bible from its cultured hermeneutic despisers. If theology is largely biblical interpretation, then it is important to work with sound hermeneutic principles.

In the course of writing the book, several things happened. First, I came to appreciate certain aspects of deconstruction in a way that I had not anticipated. Second, I came to see that I was dealing with questions whose reach extends far beyond the realm of biblical interpretation alone. Insofar as postmodernity is a culture of interpretation, I found myself dealing with issues at the very heart of the debate about the postmodern.¹ I have come to think that the way individuals and communities interpret the Bible is arguably the most important barometer of larger intellectual and cultural trends.² Third, and most important, I became increasingly convinced that many of the contentious issues at the heart of current debates about biblical interpretation, about interpretation in general, and about postmodern interpretation in particular, were really theological issues. I began to see meaning as a theological phenomenon, involving a kind of transcendence, and the theory of interpretation as a theological task. Instead of a book on biblical interpretation, therefore, I have written a theology of interpretation. To be precise, it is a systematic and trinitarian theology of interpretation that promotes the importance of Christian doctrine for the project of textual understanding. What started out as a work in hermeneutic theology has become a book on theological hermeneutics.

N. T. Wright, in his excellent work on interpreting the Gospels, is under no illusion about the scope of the task facing today’s student of the Bible, whether academic exegete or preacher. Fully to account for how to read the Gospels as historical, literary, and sacred texts demands much more than looking words up in a dictionary. The serious student of Scripture needs to develop an epistemology (theory of knowledge) and hermeneutic (theory of interpretation): Any philosophically minded literary critics looking for a worthwhile life’s work might like to consider this as a possible project.³ My own view of the project is even more ambitious than Wright’s, involving not only epistemology, but the metaphysics and ethics of meaning as well. Such is the task I here undertake—to respond, from an explicitly Christian theological point of view, to the modern and postmodern challenges to biblical interpretation by marshaling a host of interdisciplinary resources and bringing them all to bear on the problems of textual meaning: Is there a meaning? Can we know it? What should we do about it?

I am aware that contemporary debates concerning theories of interpretation can be as intimidating to the lay reader as discussions of non-Euclidean geometry or quantum mechanics can be to the nonscientist. Nevertheless, meaning and interpretation are too important to be left to the specialists. Indeed, it follows from the Protestant emphasis on the priesthood of all believers that every Christian wrestle for himself or herself with the complexity of biblical interpretation. Reading Scripture is both privilege and responsibility.

The present work challenges what amounts to an emerging consensus that sees meaning as relative to the encounter of text and reader. The interpretation of Scripture, on this view, owes as much to community tradition as to the canonical text itself. The view here defended—that meaning is independent of our attempts to interpret it—is a minority opposition view in the parliament of contemporary literary theory.

Several groups have, at different times and places, read or heard portions of the following arguments. Students at various institutions endured the gestation of many of its arguments. I am grateful to those who participated in the Biblical Interpretation seminar at New College, Edinburgh, to my erstwhile doctoral students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School who took part in my seminar on Meaning, Truth, and Scripture, and to Tim Ward, one of my current doctoral students, who read most of the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions. Thanks also to those comparative literature students in Edinburgh University’s Literary Theory course for allowing a theologian to pose awkward questions concerning the ethics of interpretation. A word of thanks is also due the Working Party on the Interpretation of Scripture of the Church of Scotland’s Panel on Doctrine for their ecumenical toleration of my attempt to draw a distinction between right and wrong interpretation. I especially appreciated their alerting me to the dangers of abstruseness inherent in my project of reinvigorating author-oriented interpretation through a creative retrieval of Reformed theology and speech-act philosophy.

I wish to express my gratitude to Verlyn Verbrugge of Zondervan Publishing House for attending, both cheerfully and carefully, to the editorial details, as well as to the meaning, of my text. I owe a special thanks to Moisés Silva for soliciting, reading, and commenting on (and now marketing!) my manuscript. I must also thank my daughters, Mary and Emma, for their willingness to tell me what they thought the many books we have read together meant and for enduring, if not the death of the author, at least long periods of the author’s absence. Special thanks go to my wife Sylvie for her shrewd reminders that there could be meaning in the text only if there were a text, and for her belief that this text would indeed one day appear.

I dedicate this book to Bob Gundry, who first suggested the topic to me and whose works illustrate the interpretive practice I attempt here to describe and theoretically defend. He has been all things—scholar, teacher, mentor, friend—to the author, and I offer this work as a partial repayment only of a great debt of gratitude for some thirty years of education and encouragement.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

New College, Edinburgh

Easter 1997

NOTES

1. The term interpretation appears in the present work with two very different senses. The more positive sense (call it realist) treats interpretation as a mode of knowledge. The more negative sense (call it nonrealist) views interpretation as an exercise in human ingenuity and invention and fails to carry the connotation of knowledge.

2. This is so especially, but not exclusively, in Western societies. Had time and space permitted, I would have liked to have dealt more with the way emerging African and Asian theologies interpret the Bible and to explore how their approaches also reflect broader social and intellectual trends.

3. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992), 61.

INTRODUCTION

Theology and Literary Theory

CHAPTER ONE

Faith Seeking Textual Understanding

And then the interpretations—30,000 different interpretations!

S. Kierkegaard

What might faith seeking understanding mean when used to describe the task not of theology but of hermeneutics? Is understanding texts a matter of faith, or reason, or perhaps both? Is faith a necessary condition for understanding the Bible? Søren Kierkegaard tells three parables about hermeneutics in order to provoke his readers to self-examination. Do they have the kind of faith that seeks understanding, the faith that understanding apparently requires?¹

THREE PARABLES ON READING AND REFLECTION

We begin with Kierkegaard’s reading of James 1:22–27. One who hears the Word of God and does it is like a person who looks at oneself in the mirror and remembers what one sees therein. What kind of looking at oneself in the mirror of God’s Word, he asks, is required in order to receive a true blessing? He replies that one benefits from looking at the Word only if one moves beyond inspecting the mirror to see oneself. James’ parable thus warns against the error of coming to inspect the mirror instead of to see oneself in the mirror.²

To see oneself in the mirror. Kierkegaard’s reading of this biblical image immediately presents us with a problem of and for interpretation. What does Kierkegaard mean by to see oneself? Is he suggesting that there is nothing in the text, so that a reader discovers only himself or herself in it, or is he saying that one sees oneself as one really is when one grasps the biblical meaning, say, about sin and salvation? To put it another way, do readers project themselves onto the text or discover themselves in the text? This mirror image raises what I believe to be the most important question for contemporary theories of interpretation, whether of the Bible or of any other book: Is there something in the text that reflects a reality independent of the reader’s interpretive activity, or does the text only reflect the reality of the reader?

Kierkegaard’s second parable, the lover’s letter, is about a man who receives a letter from his beloved written in a strange language. Desperate to read the letter, he takes a dictionary and begins to translate one word at a time. An acquaintance enters, interrupts his translating, and says: Aha, you’re reading a letter from your beloved. The lover replies: No, my friend, I sit here toiling and moiling with a dictionary…. If you call that reading, you mock me.³ Kierkegaard’s point is that linguistic and historical scholarship is not yet genuine reading. It is rather like examining and working on the mirror itself—looking at the mirror rather than in it. Such, he suggests, is the danger of modern biblical criticism.

In the parable of the king’s decree, Kierkegaard asks us to imagine a country in which a royal ordinance goes out. Instead of complying with the command, however, the king’s subjects begin to interpret. Each new day sees new interpretations of the ordinance; soon the populace can hardly keep track of the various offerings: Everything is interpretation—but no one reads the royal ordinance in such a way that he acts accordingly.

Now, God’s Word is both love letter and royal decree. Do we look at it or in it? Do we comply with or interpret it? Do we see ourselves in or project ourselves onto it? These parables should prompt readers to examine themselves to see if they are in the faith as they seek understanding. What was true in Kierkegaard’s day is, I believe, even truer in ours. We need to examine the theory and practice of contemporary interpretation to see if it is in the faith, for some readers contrive to deprive the Bible of its authority through interpretation. Kierkegaard laments: ‘My house is a house of prayer, but you have changed it into a den of thieves.’ And God’s Word—what is it according to its purpose, and into what have we changed it?

The moral of Kierkegaard’s parables is that readers have ceased to take the privilege and responsibility of interpretation seriously. The purpose of interpretation is no longer to recover and relate to a message from one who is other than ourselves, but precisely to evade such a confrontation. The business of interpretation is busyness: constantly to produce readings in order to avoid having to respond to the text. What is the purpose of such interpretation? Kierkegaard’s answer is cynical yet insightful: Look more closely, and you will see that it is to defend itself against God’s Word.⁶ In order to avoid seeing themselves in Scripture as they really are, some readers prefer either to look at the mirror or to project their own, more flattering, images.

PHILOSOPHY AND LITERARY THEORY: FROM PLATO TO POSTMODERNITY

We can sum up the so-called postmodern condition that is the context of contemporary discussions concerning the theory and practice of interpretation in a single phrase: incredulity toward meaning.⁷ Odd though it may sound, many interpreters today find it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to believe in meaning. Why has meaning become unbelievable? To answer this, we must ask the right preliminary question: What is meaning?

In their 1923 work The Meaning of Meaning, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards berated philosophers for their confusion about the meaning of meaning.⁸ They argued that much about language remains mysterious, most notably the relationships between words and what words refer to and between words and the way we think. They pleaded for an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to these fundamental questions. Twentieth-century philosophy has, by and large, responded to their call. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that language has become the preeminent problem of twentieth-century philosophy. Only recently, however, have philosophers begun to consider the problem of meaning in relation to literary texts as well as to language.

Plato, however, was there before (as usual): Philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato. Plato turned his attention to the question of language and meaning in one of his lesser known dialogues, the Cratylus. The three participants—Hermogenes, Cratylus, and Socrates—each represent different positions that anticipate, often in extraordinary fashion, modern and postmodern theories.

The main issue at stake in the Cratylus is whether or not we can speak truly. Do words give us knowledge of the world or not? Hermogenes, a disciple of the Sophists, argues that words have only conventional meanings; like the names of slaves, they may be given or changed at the master’s pleasure. Words are thus unreliable guides to the nature of things, for there is no necessary connection between a word and the thing it names. Hermogenes’s picture of language as a system of arbitrary conventions is a precursor of sorts to Saussure’s linguistics, a theory that has come to dominate a large part of the twentieth-century discussion.

Cratylus, the character after whom the dialogue takes its name, takes an all-or-nothing position. A name, he insists, is either the perfect expression of a thing or else it is a mere inarticulate sound, not a true name at all. Cratylus neatly encapsulates both the modern emphasis on meaning-as-reference and the postmodern emphasis on the indeterminacy of meaning. His thought is poised uneasily between two uncompromising metaphysical positions. On the one hand, he espouses, if only for the sake of argument, the belief that everything has a right name of its own, fixed (made determinate) by nature. This is the view we have come to associate with Plato: that the eternal Ideas are reflected by temporal things, and that words in turn are reflections of things. On the other hand, Cratylus does not really appear to believe what we might call the imitation theory of meaning. He follows Heraclitus’s notion that all is flux and concludes that one ought not to say anything but only point with one’s finger, since no true statement can be made about what is constantly changing. In other words, Cratylus ascribes the same transitoriness to things (the world) as to signs (words). Nothing true can be said, for both language and the world are in flux. Cratylus is a postmodernist before his time.

It is to counter Cratylus’s skepticism that Socrates enters the discussion. He develops a mediating position that holds language to be both conventional and natural. It is the second part of his position that is problematic. What does it mean to speak of things naturally? Plato is inclined to say that when we name things, we are also defining their natures. The business of a name is to describe a thing’s nature. One might cite 1 Samuel 25:25 as biblical support: as his name is, so is he; Nabal [Fool] is his name, and folly is with him (NRSV).

Plato devotes considerable space in his dialogue to exploring this imitation theory of meaning. But do words really imitate the world? Socrates appeals to etymologies or word origins. For example, the letter r naturally expresses (i.e., imitates) rapidity and motion, since the tongue was most agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation of this letter.⁹ The letter l expresses liquidity, because saying it requires the tongue to slip. So, in the English word roll we are to think of liquid motion or of rapid slipping (the o represents, of course, the circular nature of the rapid motion!). Socrates’ serious linguistic point, and it is a brilliant one, is that language is imitative sound. Words resemble things.

Imitation, of course, runs into difficulty as a general theory of meaning. In what sense does clown resemble real clowns? Etymologies may be interesting, but they do not explain everything. In particular, one is hard pressed to see how such a theory could account for literary meaning (or, more particularly, for the differences among the four Gospels). Socrates himself confesses to some doubt about 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 (e.g., the gods gave the first names) or to the veil of antiquity (i.e., we do not know how things got their names). Plato is unhappy with either alternative, for each would force him to acknowledge that he has no reason to believe that he can speak truly, that is, according to a thing’s nature.

The present work continues the dialogue begun in the Cratylus. My conversation partners will include literary theorists and theologians as well as linguists and philosophers. While I agree with many contemporary thinkers that meaning is more than a matter of naming, I continue to share Plato’s concern to defend the possibility of speaking truly. Whereas for Plato the divine origin of language was a hypothesis briefly considered and quickly disposed of, I will not be so hasty in dismissing the relevance of theology to the question of language and its interpretation.

Cratylus’s skeptical position on language and interpretation is alive and well. Many postmodern thinkers believe (perhaps inconsistently) that the first truth about language and reality is that they are both in flux. Indeed, Joseph Margolis identifies the master theme of philosophy by a single question: Does reality have an invariant structure or is it a flux?¹⁰ The issue is whether there is an abiding truth about things to which our interpretations might correspond. Margolis answers his question in the negative; neither the world nor human nature is invariant. Rather, everything is a human construct—an interpretation. What we take to be determinate reality, according to Margolis, is actually an effect of our linguistic practices. Something as basic as one’s country, for instance, is less a physical given than a political construction: the product of consensual practices concerning geographical borders and social orders. Marriage, too, is a product of wedding ceremonies, an arrangement that reflects social conventions, not some eternal order. Even God, viewed by a present-day Cratylus such as Don Cupitt, is an effect of human practices, in this case, the practice of religion.

Interpretation, for Margolis, is likewise an activity that produces …what? Not commentaries, but the texts themselves. Interpretation is not merely a matter of putting a subjective gloss on an objective reality. No, his proposal is more radical. Through the activity of reading, interpreters construct the text, or rather, its meaning. This is a new role for interpretation, which, until fairly recently, say the mid-nineteenth century, had played a more modest, recuperative role: recovering verbal messages. Margolis denies that his is an anything-goes relativism; there are criteria for interpretation, but they are relative to a set of community practices. Practices, of course, change; they too are in flux—hence the postmodern incredulity towards meaning.

The Literary Turn in Contemporary Philosophy

Priest, teacher, artist—the classic degeneration¹¹

Traditionally, hermeneutics—the reflection on the principles that undergird correct textual interpretation—was a matter for exegetes and philologists. More recently, however, hermeneutics has become the concern of philosophers, who wish to know not what such and such a text means, but what it means to understand. How is understanding possible? has become the theme of much European philosophy.¹² This is not yet what I mean by the literary turn in contemporary philosophy, however. For it is one thing to say that philosophy reflects on principles that undergird literary interpretation, and quite another to suggest that philosophy itself is only a kind of interpretation. We owe the latter insight to Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction and an important voice in the present work. Deconstruction explores the textuality at work in all forms of discourse, thereby blurring what were once hard and fast lines between philosophy and literature.

Philosophy’s literary turn has encouraged a spate of works in literary theory. The theorist of literature reflects on the principles and methods that govern interpretation and evaluation. The crucial task now is not the exegetical one of saying what a given text means, but the theoretical one of describing and explaining just what interpreters are after.¹³ It follows that the literary theorist must be conscious of the broader social and cultural context of the interpreter. From the perspective of literary theory, we may no longer limit interpretation to the practical task of getting meaning out of texts, but must include the political task of situating the interpreter.

Behind the various theories and practices of textual interpretation lurk larger philosophical issues. Indeed, implicit in the question of meaning are questions about the nature of reality, the possibility of knowledge, and the criteria for morality. It may not be at all obvious that one is taking a position on these issues when one picks up a book and begins to read, but I will argue that that is indeed the case. Whether there is something really there in the text is a question of the metaphysics of meaning. Similarly, reading implies some beliefs about whether it is possible to understand a text, and if so, how. Whether there is something to be known in texts is a question of the epistemology of meaning. Lastly, reading raises questions about what obligations, if any, impinge on the reader of Scripture or any other text. What readers do with what is in the text gives rise to questions concerning the ethics of meaning. Together, these three issues give rise to a related question, "What is it to be human, an agent of meaning?"

Hermeneutics has of late exercised a certain hegemony over other disciplines. We now look at hermeneutics not only as a discipline in its own right but especially as an aspect of all intellectual endeavors. The rise of hermeneutics parallels the fall of epistemology. Instead of making robust claims to absolute knowledge, even natural scientists now view their theories as interpretations.

It was not always so. Hermeneutics was once upon a time the Cinderella of the academy. Philosophers such as Aristotle might pause to write one or two books on the art and science of interpretation, but they did not usually make of hermeneutics a fulltime profession. This task fell to biblical scholars and theologians, whose livelihood and vocation depended on their being able to give an account of their exegesis. Cinderella was invited to the ball only in the nineteenth century, when hermeneutics branched out to become the study of human understanding per se. Wilhem Dilthey used the difference between explaining and understanding something as a means of distinguishing the natural from the human sciences. In the late twentieth century, hermeneutics grew even more ambitious, treating everything from Fords to fashions as texts. With the waxing of texts came the waning of facts. Hermeneutic philosophers no longer consider knowledge as the result of a disinterested subject observing facts, but rather as an interpretive effort whereby a subject rooted in a particular history and tradition seeks to understand the strange by means of the familiar. Instead of uninterpreted fact serving as grist for the mill of objective reason, both fact and reason alike are what they are because of their place in history and tradition. Hermeneutics is cousin to historical consciousness; the realization that we do not know things directly and immediately suggests that knowledge is the result of interpretation. Reality is a text to be interpreted, mediated by language, history, culture, and tradition.

The stroke of midnight, however, has now sounded. Hermeneutics no longer appears as attractive a philosophical method in the twilight of civilization that is deconstruction. The notion that some interpretations may be correct—that they may correspond to something in the text not of our own making—has fallen into disrepute among the new breed of literary philosophers. The more radical antagonists of interpretation accuse philosophy itself of being only a work of literature, and philosophical justification only another piece of fiction. Behind the suggestion that philosophy is only a species of rhetoric lies more than a rhetorical point, namely, that neither philosophy nor hermeneutics enjoys a privileged perspective on the way things (e.g., reality, meaning) are. Hermeneutics is both disenchanted and disenfranchised by the suggestion that there are no principles for right and wrong interpretation, only preferences.

Jacques Derrida is the most prominent of the new literary philosophers. Though he teaches philosophy in the French university system, he is hard to categorize. From one perspective his work appears to be a literary criticism of certain crucial philosophical texts, but from another it seems to represent a philosophical investigation of certain literary texts. The May 1992 decision to award him an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University met with unprecedented controversy, with the philosophers tending to oppose and the literary critics tending to support the move. Why are they saying such terrible things about Derrida and about deconstruction, the shorthand term that has come to represent his thought?

Deconstruction, as its name implies, is a strategy for taking apart or undoing. It is about dismantling certain distinctions and oppositions that have traditionally guaranteed to philosophy its superior place among the humanities. It is, above all, a strategy for putting philosophy in its place. It also represents a sustained attempt to discern the limits of philosophy. Derrida claims that philosophers are never able, either by reflection or by self-reflection, to rise above their limited points of view to see the world, or even themselves, as God might. The mind may be a mirror of nature, but what it reflects is ultimately not nature but its own capacities. Every attempt to see oneself thinking objectively is doomed to failure, for we are both part of the scene and outside it at once. Is philosophy only a hall of mirrors then? Some of Derrida’s followers, and most of his detractors, interpret him in this way. Others suggest that Derrida’s purpose is more subtle: he is trying not to crack the mirror but to point out the tain or back of the mirror, that is, the unreflected and unthought conditions for the very possibility of philosophical reflection.¹⁴ In short, Derrida polices the limits of philosophy and arrests those foolish enough to transgress them. Philosophers typically distinguish their own talk about the world from other kinds: for instance, philosophy works with logic and seeks literal truth in the light of clear and distinct ideas, while literature plays with metaphors and other cloudy figures of speech under dark rhetorical skies. Derrida will have none of it. He believes that the history of Western philosophy is an elaborate bluff, that philosophers have no more access to truth than those who have not been initiated into its guild, and that the discourse of philosophy owes as much to rhetoric as other forms of speech.

To be sure, these ideas are not new. Nietzsche said something similar one hundred years ago. He was perhaps the first thinker seriously to imagine how philosophy might proceed after the death of God. If there is no absolute God’s-eye-point-of-view, do life and history have meaning? And what is truth? Nietzsche held that, in the absence of a Creator, it was up to human beings to impose meaning and order on the world: Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them.¹⁵ Truth is no longer the deliverance of the priest who handles revelation, nor of the teacher who has mastered reason; truth is rather the creation of the artist. The world is a picnic to which the interpreter brings the meaning. Language is the means humans use creatively to colonize a meaningless world. Words do not refer to the world so much as remake it, masking the absurdity of life with the rouge of rhetoric. What we call truth is really an illusion that we have come to believe. Accordingly, for Nietzsche, he speaks most truthfully who recognizes the illusory nature of his speech. In other words, we are closest to the truth when we acknowledge our words, concepts, and theories as fictions. Whereas the philosopher creates without admitting it, the artist enhances life without forgetting that art is the result of his or her own creativity. Hence, art frees us from the illusion that there is one fixed and correct interpretation of the world.¹⁶ The artist is, for Nietzsche, the best and most honest philosopher: a creative interpreter.

What art is to Nietzsche, literature is to Derrida. By reading the works of the philosophers in a literary fashion and exposing the rhetorical and literary strategies on which they rely for their effects, Derrida portrays philosophy as a species of human creativity. Philosophy, says Derrida, has long persuaded people of its authority by pretending to rely on logic and reason, but in fact the appeal to reason is really only a rhetorical ploy. Philosophy maintains its illusion of disciplinary grandeur only by systematically repressing the rhetorical and metaphorical aspects of its own discourse.

Authority and Ideology

The motive behind Derrida’s strategy of undoing stems from his alarm over illegitimate appeals to authority and exercises of power. The belief that one has reached the single correct Meaning (or God, or Truth) provides a wonderful excuse for damning those with whom one disagrees as either fools or heretics. Derrida challenges the pretension of the philosopher and the exegete to have arrived at a fixed or correct view of things. This holds true whether the thing in question is a text, an event, or the world as a whole. Neither Priests, who supposedly speak for God, nor Philosophers, who supposedly speak for Reason, should be trusted; this logocentric claim to speak from a privileged perspective (e.g., Reason, the Word of God) is a bluff that must be called, or better, deconstructed.

More is at stake in this debate than mere disciplinary one-upmanship. The question about authority in the humanities—how to interpret history and literature—relates to questions about humanity itself. Traditionally, one studied the humanities so that one’s own humanity might flourish. The arts and letters cultivate properly human virtues. Yet who, asks Derrida, is in a position to know what humanity means or which human qualities should be cultivated? Why watch Shakespeare rather than TV sitcoms, or read Milton rather than Marvel comics? Why poetry rather than pornography? Why, indeed? Does it not have something to do with our ideas about the culture that we believe will best cultivate those humane and humanitarian virtues we most cherish? To this Derrida would doubtless reply: Who are we? Can we speak for others? Is it possible that the values that undergird the humanities are the values, ultimately arbitrary, of the socially, sexually, and intellectually prejudiced social power brokers?

Given the current crisis in the humanities and the related blurring of the lines between philosophy and literary criticism, it is both relevant and imperative that we approach the question of philosophy and literary criticism together. In light of these challenges, we must not abandon hermeneutical reflection but seek to do it better. Is there a meaning in this text is no idle query, especially if text now covers everything from written works to our individual histories to reality itself. Is there a meaning to life, or do we each have to invent one? Decisions about meaning, about how to interpret a text, are inextricable from questions about what it is to be human. The fate of hermeneutics and humanity alike stand or fall together. As the authors of The Meaning of Meaning put it, language is the most important of all the instruments of civilization.¹⁷ If there is nothing in what we say to one another, however, we lose the primary means for cultivating humanity. We are only now beginning to perceive the implications of this loss.

MEANING AND INTERPRETATION: THE MORALITY OF LITERARY KNOWLEDGE

Can we read in such a way as to avoid seeing ourselves—that is, those images that we project—in the mirror of the text? Can we by reading find out God? What exactly is reading? What is the point of this optical exercise of moving one’s eyes from left to right down one page after another? How is it that black marks on white paper can inform us (e.g., make us more knowledgeable) and move us (e.g., to laugh, to cry, or to go and sell all our goods and give the proceeds to the poor)? Why is there something rather than nothing in texts? Is there a wrong way to read a book? Queries such as these give rise to hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is relevant not only to the interpretation of the Bible, but to all of life, insofar as everything from a Brahms symphony to a baby’s cry is a text, that is, an expression of human life that calls for interpretation.

Traditionally, interpretation referred to the procedure of getting meaning out of texts. However, several literary critics and philosophers have recently called for a moratorium on the term meaning.¹⁸ There are many things that readers do with texts, and to dignify only one of these by calling it the meaning is to choose arbitrarily to make one interpretive approach more important than the others. To define meaning too quickly is to launch a preemptive strike on reading strategies that may not be motivated by the same aims or interests. It is no longer self-evident, however, that all readers must read with the same aim in mind.

What, then, makes an interpretation count as more than mere opinion? Can we avoid reducing statements about meaning (The meaning of x is y) to statements about personal preferences (I like reading x as y)? As my title indicates, I have decided to employ the term meaning in order to stake the claim that literary knowledge—knowledge not only about the text but of what the text is about—is indeed possible.¹⁹ At the same time, I sympathize with those who call for a moratorium on meaning. A greater self-restraint with regard to that term would force all of us to clarify what we are really after as interpreters. Readers should be much more explicit as to their interpretive aims and objects, and they should be prepared to give a defense of them as well. If there is indeed a high moral ground of reading—a supreme interpretive good—it is best to stake it out carefully. Only after examining what readers actually do with texts will I suggest what meaning is and what ought to be done with it.

Back to the title. Perceptive readers will perhaps have noted allusions to two other books that, taken together, map out the territory that the present work seeks to traverse. The first allusion, in the subtitle, is to Van Harvey’s The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief.²⁰ Harvey’s concern—the relation of faith and history in Christian theology—is, at first glance, unrelated to mine. What does historical knowledge have to do with hermeneutics? Harvey’s work is relevant for the questions it raises concerning the stance of the historian, a stance that reflects a certain morality of knowledge. He observes an apparent tension between the ethics of critical judgment (viz., knowledge) on the one hand, and the dynamics of belief (viz., faith) on the other. He thinks that belief has a distorting effect on historical inquiry. It is immoral for a historian to believe except on the basis of sufficient evidence. Moral historians are, methodologically speaking, from Missouri; they withhold belief until sufficient evidence enables them to see.

The values that undergird Harvey’s morality of knowledge stem from the Enlightenment. The moral historian (read: literary critic) is autonomous, whereas the believer is submissive; a moral belief must undergo a process of rational assessment and justification; critically interpreted present experience is the norm for evaluating claims about the past. In the morality of knowledge, doubt is a virtue; credulity, a vice. To appeal to faith is to shatter the possibility of rational assessment. Harvey concludes that doubt is an intellectual virtue, more moral than belief. The present work takes up Harvey’s challenge but applies it to the realm of hermeneutics: Can literary knowledge be both moral and faithful, critical and Christian?

The title also alludes to Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class?²¹ Fish is an influential literary critic whose career mirrors some of the decisive turns in contemporary hermeneutics. His 1967 Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost explores the possibility of a Satanic reading of Milton’s epic poem.²² Fish discovered that the reader, like Adam, makes the mistake of seeing Satan as the hero and so experiences the Fall in the reading. The meaning of Milton’s work, Fish argues, is the reading experience. This theme later came to dominate Fish’s work.²³

According to Fish, there is no such thing as a meaning in the text outside the reader. Meaning is not prior to, but a product of, the reader’s activity. Fish illustrates this point with an anecdote about a student who, on the first day of a new semester, enters a course on English literature and asks the professor, Is there a text in this class? The professor replies, "Yes, the Norton Anthology of Literature, but the student retorts: No, I mean in this class do we believe in texts, or is it all the reader?" For Fish, this misunderstanding shows that there is no such thing as literal meaning.

Do we believe in texts? The morality of belief and the stance of the believer are issues not only for Harvey and Fish, but for anyone interested in biblical interpretation. With regard to biblical studies, exegetes now fight on at least two fronts. The paradigm shift from historical to literary studies (i.e., from Harvey to Fish) means that biblical scholars must now master two disciplines or risk not understanding what their colleagues say. It also creates a need to evaluate the morality of literary as well as historical knowledge claims. The phrase literary knowledge is ambiguous: it can refer both to knowledge about a text and to knowledge gained from a text. The urgent question is whether either kind of knowledge is even possible, much less moral.

Harvey’s enthusiasm for Lord Acton’s claim that the beginning of wisdom in history is doubt²⁴ finds its parallel in literary theories that encourage the reader’s stance of suspicion and critique. Where modern historians treat the Bible’s factual claims with skepticism, today’s literary skeptics argue that the text has no stable or decidable meaning, or that what meaning is there is biased and ideologically distorted. The result is that the Bible is either not recognized as making claims or, if it is, that these claims are treated as ideologically suspect. Harvey’s problem concerning the morality of knowledge has thus been transposed from history to literature: Can the responsible critic (in this case the reader) also be a believer?

Fish’s approach to hermeneutics effectively removes authority from the Bible or, for that matter, from any text. Interpretation ultimately takes its cue not from the text, but from the reader’s identity. It is not the canon but the community that governs the reader’s interpretive experience. The contemporary literary critic increasingly tends not simply to describe the reader’s response, but to prescribe it. The text, again, becomes only a mirror or an echo chamber in which we see ourselves and hear our own voices.

Taken together, Harvey and Fish define the project for the present work: to articulate and defend the possibility, in the vale of the shadow of Derrida, that readers can legitimately and responsibly attain literary knowledge of the Bible. The present work sets out to affirm that there is a meaning in the text, that it can be known, and that readers should strive to do so. Postmodern appearances to the contrary, we can continue to defend, and to promote, the possibility of understanding. I will, however, construct my case for meaning in dialogue with those who are its prosecutors. For I concede that reading is never straightforward and that naive understanding is never adequate. The kind of literary knowledge that emerges at the end of this study, therefore, will be one that is chastened, not absolute.

THE THREE AGES OF CRITICISM: THE PLAN OF THE BOOK

The history of literary criticism is one of successive preoccupation with author, text, and reader, respectively. I adopt this threefold pattern of organization, corresponding to what has been called the three ages of criticism, within both parts of the present work.²⁵ This threefold division parallels, in a certain fashion, the division in philosophy between metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. I treat these problematics together, bringing philosophical questions to bear on the three ages of criticism. This book treats the metaphysics, methodology, and morals of meaning—twice. Part 1 sets out the major challenges to contemporary hermeneutics. As such, it represents my interpretation as a Christian theologian of the postmodern situation. Part 2 presents, at greater length, my own alternative constructive proposals for interpretation. I argue that literary theory relies not only on philosophical assumptions but on assumptions that are implicitly theological as well. Accordingly, I approach the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of meaning from an explicitly Christian perspective, that of trinitarian theology.

Part 1 is necessary for three reasons. First, because the challenges to traditional forms of exegesis and hermeneutics must be clearly understood and squarely faced. Second, to demonstrate my thesis that the crisis in contemporary interpretation theory is actually a theological crisis. Third, to ensure that I practice what I preach. It would be ironic indeed if a book about responsible interpretation mistreated the texts with which it disagreed. Good interpretation is hard work, and I will no doubt struggle at times with my own biases as I present and critique alternative positions. Yet charity must precede critique, even when the texts in question are those that argue for hermeneutic relativism and the instability of meaning.

The Age of the Author: Hermeneutic Realism and Non-realism

The first age of criticism, initiated with respect to biblical interpretation by the Reformers, is characterized by an interest in the author’s (human or divine) intention. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) gave what many believe to be the classic account of such author-oriented hermeneutics. However, Schleiermacher tends to equate meaning with psychology, a confusion that eventually brought author-centered interpretation into considerable disrepute. For Schleiermacher, a text is understood when we recover the author’s consciousness. Language and literature express thought; grammar gives us access to psychology. The goal of interpretation is to understand the text as well as or better than its author.²⁶

Such an author-oriented view of interpretation carries with it philosophical implications and assumptions. The first, and most basic problem, concerns what I call the metaphysics of meaning. Metaphysical questions treat the nature of reality. For example, What is an author? is a metaphysical question. A surprising number of contemporary literary theorists find the concept of the author problematic, and a few deny the author’s existence altogether. The intention of the author is an even more disputed concept: What is an intention? Are intentions in the head? Can an author’s intentions be recovered? Why should a text’s meaning be defined in terms of an author’s intention?

The underlying issue concerns the objectivity of meaning and interpretation. Is meaning fixed by the author or by the text, or is it free-floating, varying from reader to reader (or does it arise from some combination of the above)? Those who invoke authorial intentions usually do so in order to provide a base for a stable, determinate, and decidable textual meaning. The hermeneutic realist holds that there is something prior to interpretation, something there in the text, which can be known and to which the interpreter is accountable.²⁷ By contrast, the hermeneutic nonrealist (e.g., Derrida, Fish) denies that meaning precedes interpretive activity; the truth of an interpretation depends on the response of the reader. The hermeneutic debate over meaning thus parallels its counterpart in metaphysics; the metaphysical nonrealist denies that there is a mind-independent reality to which our true descriptions must correspond. The nonrealist maintains that the world (or the meaning of a text) is a construct of the mind.

Chapter 2 presents the postmodern case against the author and against hermeneutic realism, focusing particularly on Derrida’s poststructuralism and Fish’s neo-pragmatism. Chapter 5, its constructive counterpart, makes the case for a realism of meaning by rethinking the role of the author. I employ a number of philosophical resources in this project, including the common-sense realism of Thomas Reid and the speech-act philosophy of J. L. Austin and John Searle, and offer a revised understanding of authorial intention based on the notion of the author as a communicative agent. Meaning, I will argue, is a form of doing. I also show how the concept of authorship is ultimately theological: both the death and the resurrection of the author depend on our ability to conceive of God as a communicative agent. The metaphysics of authorship is related, I submit, to the doctrine of creation and the imago Dei. Human authorship, that is, is grounded in God’s ability to communicate himself through the acts of Incarnation and revelation.

The Age of the Text: Hermeneutic Rationality and Relativism

The second age of criticism raised the question of knowledge and the epistemology of meaning. What is the nature and method of literary knowledge? The so-called New Criticism of the 1940s lost interest in the author and instead focused on the text’s formal features (i.e., the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text). In the 1960s critics turned their attention to certain deep structures that were thought to lay behind all forms of human life and thought. Structuralist critics study the integrity of the text’s linguistic and literary conventions rather than the intentions of the historical author or the text’s historical context. Text-oriented methods of interpretation aim at describing the immanent sense of the text. The goal here is to explain the text’s form and structure (e.g., knowledge about the text) rather than to understand its reference (e.g., knowledge of what the text is about).

The critical focus shifts in the age of the text to the nature of interpretive rationality. What methods enable us to gain knowledge of the text? Is hermeneutics an art or science? Are those interpretations that survive the test of time objectively the fittest, or are there also subjective factors at work? Are there criteria we can employ to eliminate false interpretations and to judge between better and worse interpretations, or is meaning relative to the individual or community that interprets it?

Hermeneutic relativism shadows the epistemological discussion like a parasite that lives off its host. Are there rational methods that we can use to arbitrate the conflict of interpretations about texts, or are all interpretations only arbitrary? Is there an alternative to hermeneutic anarchy, where everyone does what is right in his or her own eyes, and hermeneutic totalitarianism, where the individual’s beliefs are governed by institutional powers? Can we make judgments about the probable meaning of a text, or is meaning strictly undecidable?

Chapter 3 examines arguments for hermeneutic relativism. For the sake of clarity, I prefer to describe positions that deny the possibility of interpretive knowledge as hermetic rather than hermeneutical. Hermes was the messenger of the gods, hermeneutics the study of interpreting messages. The hermetic writings of antiquity, on the other hand, derive from a confusion of Hermes with Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom whom the Greeks knew as Hermes Trismegistus (thrice-great Hermes). Thoth, however, far from being a trinitarian messenger god, was rather the fabled author of a number of mystical, philosophical, and alchemistic writings. Hermetic, therefore, now refers to writings that are characterized by occultism and obscurity—features that are typical of certain contemporary literary theories as well. Deconstruction, insofar as it represents an alternative to hermeneutics, stands within the hermetic tradition.²⁸

Chapter 6 responds constructively to Chapter 3 and offers a revised understanding of interpretation and literary knowledge, based on the notions of communicative rationality and of the text as a communicative act. The major philosophical resources that I employ in this project are the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas and the new Reformed epistemology of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The major theological resource is Christology, which I relate to a new defense of the literal sense as the norm for interpretation (though I vigorously dispute the identification of literal interpretation with its literalistic counterpart). I argue that the process of interpretation is governed by certain rational procedures, though these must be modified to take account of the variety of literary genres. Finally, I claim that meaning can be adequately known through a process of thick description that views the text as a complex literary act and respects its various levels, including the canonical.

The Age of the Reader: Hermeneutic Responsibility or Freeplay?

Third, we face the problem of the reader and the ethics of meaning. In the 1970s and 1980s many critics rejected textual positivism (where the text is the object of scientific study) and instead began to examine the role of the reader. Indeed, some have even spoken of the Reader’s Liberation Movement, the Reader’s Revolt, and the Revenge of the Reader. This view of meaning as a function of reader response was a reaction to the structuralist idea that the text was an object independent of both author and reader. Reader response criticism stresses the incompleteness of the text until it is constructed (or deconstructed) by the reader. Conservative reader response critics note the way the text itself invites the reader to participate in the construal of its meaning; the text leaves blanks or indeterminacies for the reader to fill in, so that reading becomes a kind of dot-to-dot exercise. They also observe that we always read from within a tradition, that is, from within a clearly circumscribed set of social and cultural prejudices. Readers cannot help but read from this perspective or horizon. On this view, meaning is the product of the interaction between text and reader (e.g., the two horizons).²⁹Radical reader response critics, on the other hand, tend to give the reader the initiative in putting questions to the text or simply in using the texts for their own aims and purposes; the text is simply an opportunity for the reader to pursue his or her own agenda. On this view, the text is inactive and the reader is the producer of meaning. What distinguishes the two schools of reader response criticism is that the radicals (usually hermeneutical nonrealists) deny that interpretations are constrained by the text.

How should one read? Though reading, like observation in the natural sciences, may be theory-laden, must we conclude that reading is hopelessly subjective (viz., arbitrary)? How, for instance, can we arbitrate the conflict of interpretations about biblical texts? If there is no science of the text, how are we to judge between interpretations? Fish speaks for the pragmatists when he suggests that we simply stop worrying about interpreting texts and just use them. For Fish, there is no such thing as the single correct interpretation, only different ways of using texts. Chapter 4 relates the ethics of interpretations to questions concerning human freedom and responsibility and to issues of politics and ideology.

Fish’s pragmatism and Derrida’s deconstruction agree this far: that there is no such thing as disinterested, that is, innocent or objective, reading. All reading is ideological and guided by certain interests, for example, in the history of the text, in the way the text achieves its effects, in the attitude towards women exemplified in the text, in the conditions of the text’s production, in the author’s motive for writing, or in the way it has been received by different reading communities. Meaning becomes the correlate of a certain kind of inquiry, the product of a certain readerly activity. The text, with no aims nor interests of its own, is at the mercy of its reader. With only slight exaggeration, Mark Taylor characterizes interpretation as "a hostile act in which interpreter victimizes text."³⁰

If readers are indeed active, what are their interpretive obligations? What should be the stance of the model—of the moral—reader? One’s ethics have epistemological implications: the relation between the knower and the known …tends to become the relation of the living person to the world itself.³¹ One’s stance towards the text, in other words, is indicative of one’s style of being; one’s morality dictates one’s interpretation. Are there any constraints on the ways readers should be towards texts? Are there any limits on interpretive freedom? Fish says that a reading community’s interest acts as a check on individual readers, but how do we decide which interpretive interests to adopt, which community to join? Are there any rational, or ethical, criteria to guide the wondering reader? Is there a morality of literary knowledge?

In response to the undoing of the reader in Chapter 4, Chapter 7 sets forth a theory of hermeneutic responsibility. To what interpretive ideals should the competent reader of Scripture, or of any other text, be committed in order to be a moral critic and a responsible person? I offer a revised version of reader response criticism based on the notions of communicative ethics and communicative efficacy. I argue that an interest in communication is both constitutive and regulative of the very activity of understanding. Again, I utilize a number of philosophical resources, but, in providing what is finally a sketch of what it is to be an understanding person, I move from philosophy to theology proper. What lies behind one’s choice of interpretive principles is ultimately an understanding of oneself and, at least implicitly, an understanding of God. Moreover, the morality of literary knowledge is insufficient apart from the virtues of the interpreter. My thesis is that ethical interpretation is a spiritual exercise and that the spirit of understanding is not a spirit of power, nor of play, but the Holy Spirit. The theological doctrines that contribute to a discussion of the ethics of meaning, then, are pneumatology and sanctification.

Is there a meaning in this text? If I have here marshaled an interdisciplinary coalition, as well as the resources of systematic theology, to answer a simple question, it is because only such a cumulative force can respond effectively to the crisis in the humanities—a crisis that is slowly draining Western culture of its very humanity.

AUGUSTINIAN HERMENEUTICS

The present work thus tries to answer a single question: Is there a meaning in this text? The reader may be forgiven for thinking that the size of the answer is all out of proportion to the question. Nevertheless, philosophers, literary critics, and biblical exegetes are today finding it increasingly difficult to answer this question with a simple affirmative. For behind this hermeneutical question lurks philosophical and theological issues that are all too often overlooked. Why is meaning a theological question, and why should a theologian bother with it? My response is twofold: because theology has an interpretive dimension and because interpretation has a theological dimension. Is there a meaning in this text? is, as we will see, a thoroughly theological question.

The Interpretive Dimension of Theology

The first part of my response is the easier to demonstrate. Theology has been called

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