Is There a Meaning in This Blog Post?

When I set off down the not-exactly-career-path towards a theology MA in 2020 I was determined to get to grips with the complex, high-stakes and unavoidable task of biblical interpretation – too often underacknowledged or even (in some circles) denounced in defence of a dangerously supposed “plain reading” (aka unexamined interpretation). And so Hermeneutics was the very first module I took, and I passed it just fine but I don’t think I’ll ever get past it. Which is to say: complex? high stakes? and some. This poem was written near the start of that still-going journey and is especially dear to my heart as it made it into the Anglican Theological Review (whoop) and because I’m real pleased with “tabernacular”...

Though I can hardly pretend to have "arrived," one book that has especially helped me along the way is Kevin Vanhoozer’s Is There a Meaning in this Text? It’s about the relationship between meaning and written language (including but not only the Bible) – or whatever of this can be thought to have survived the radically destabilising onslaughts of deconstruction and reader-response criticism. By the time I picked it off the reading list, I’d grown wearily familiar with the medley of scorn and/or fear and/or ignorance towards “postmodern nonsense” that prevails in certain Christian circles. So I was glad to discover an evangelical scholar willing and able to engage with those provocations adeptly and receptively – and to offer persuasive ways forward from the perspective of his faith commitments. (Commitments ultimately more “conservative” than mine, though the breadth of his dialogical openness helped keep me on board).

Deconstruction has to do with the highly relatable human problem of not EVER being able to say exactly what it is we mean. In gist: language is a fluid play of “difference” that can only endlessly “defer” what it signifies; texts “undo” themselves and produce an excess of meaning that evades definitive determination; the author has no control over this interplay and excess so that it is inadequate to appeal to the author’s “intention” as the ultimate decider. At the same-ish time that Jacques Derrida was imparting these dauntingly disruptive insights to western culture, post-structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes was advocating (on related-ish grounds) for a reader-centric approach to interpretation that usurps the “tyranny” of the author, whose identity is anyway destroyed by the act of writing. [1] The upshot of these (and other) converging streams in the mid 20th century was a lingering mood of profound hermeneutical skepticism.

WORDS ARE SLIPPERY. THE AUTHOR IS DEAD. IT’S ALL ON YOU NOW, READER. Whether you like it or not.

And among the people who most typically do NOT like this are those who hold to the divine authorship and authority of one text in particular – namely, the Bible. But while Vanhoozer is certainly one such person, he doesn’t rush to the defensive. In fact, in the first instance he actively commends the “iconoclastic tendencies” of deconstruction (p393) – identifying it as a valuable check on our propensity to confuse the text itself with our own traditioned way of reading it such that interpretation becomes “idolatrous.” Deconstruction dispels interpretive pride and claims of certainty, and calls us back to humility. But Vanhoozer is not content to give deconstruction the final word; total resignation to the inaccessibility of meaning leads, in his view, to the opposite error of interpretive sloth – the neglect of our responsibility to try to know what can be known (p462).

In a (persuasive, IMO) effort to restore authorial intent as a/the meaningful goal of interpretation, Vanhoozer turns to Speech Act Theory (SAT), a branch of language philosophy that understands “meaning” in terms of what words are used to “do.” From a SAT perspective, authors and readers are communicative agents; texts (written as well as spoken) are communicative acts. Though language is sometimes used for the simple conveyance of information – statements that evaluate as either “true” or “false” – it is far from limited to such a function. Other routine use-cases include promising, requesting, inviting, welcoming, predicting, warning, apologising – all having in common that they are relational. Language is a social tool to facilitate mutual understanding and coordinated action. Such are the criteria by which a text (as any speech act) “succeeds” or “fails”; a “successful” communicative act is precisely one in which intent is conveyed from one to another. Recognising this doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to establish intent (the slipperiness spotlighted by deconstruction does not go away), but it does reinstate it as a worthy thing to aim for.

The application of SAT to the Bible is particularly helpful when it comes to reasoning about divine intent. Another SAT-favouring theologian, Nicholas Wolterstorff, describes Scripture as “double agent” speech, whereby the human-authored speech acts are appropriated (or sometimes, in special cases such as prophecy, deputised) by God, for God's own communicative purposes. [2] Vanhoozer takes a similar approach and goes on to suggest that inspiration is therefore best understood as an “emergent” property of the entire canon. The Bible is one single communicative act, diverse and immensely complex, but structured and unified by divine intent – by implication, readers must take the whole into account as the “intentional context” for interpreting the parts (p265). Now, for all that I find this articulation of inspiration profoundly compelling, once again it can hardly be said to make the interpretive task any easier!

When it comes down to it, a “speech act” construal of text and meaning in general, and of the biblical texts and divine meaning in particular, doesn’t provide a fail-safe method for getting at the “right” answer. What it does do – by shifting focus onto the interpersonal features of language – is reveal the task of interpretation to be an ethical rather than a purely technical one. Understanding is a relational act; it involves communicative agents, between whom are certain ethical responsibilities. We cannot just "use" the words of another for our own purposes – which is to say, of course, we can quite successfully and readily do that (see for example the many competing causes that the words of Martin Luther King are invoked to serve, or Bonhoeffer, or Mother Theresa). But it's not kind to them; it's not respectful; it's not loving them as our neighbour. In Kantian terms it is treating them as a "means" rather than an "end" in themselves. How much more so when we believe that the particular text we are dealing with mediates divine self-communication. We can make it mean all sorts of things, using technically sophisticated methods or denying that we are using any methods at all. And it's not that those methods are all "equally" good or bad, but what matters before and above such considerations is our stance towards the text and its authoring agent (which precedes our choice of methods and governs our use of them). Responsible interpretation, as Vanhoozer puts it, entails the cultivation of “interpretive virtues” –  faith, hope, love, honesty, openness, attention, obedience (p377). I’d want to add something here about how the addressee of the divine communicative act is a community of agents, with ethical responsibilities towards one another in the task of attending together. [3] But unpacking that will have to wait for another blog-post.

It struck me over Christmas, reflecting despondently on the various “biblical” socio-political agendas competing (sometimes violently) for primacy in the world today, that there’s something poignantly startling in the thought that God opts to self-reveal through the (un-fix-able, endlessly appropriate-able) medium of text. For me, it calls to mind the Incarnation. The “Word made flesh” was born as a baby, initially utterly dependent on the nurture and protection of his parents; he lived and ministered in mutual interdependent relationship with a close community of friends and disciples, frequently receiving their hospitality and financial support; he attracted hostility and declined to wield divine or human might to spare himself from a violent and unjust death at the hands of those whose imperial "ends" reduced him to an expediently removable obstacle. So likewise, it seems to me, the “inscripturated Word" (as Cheryl Bridges Johns calls it [4]) circulates among humankind in divinely-willed vulnerability, exposed to the very worst of our self-protecting, ambitious, fearful, greedy, desperate, violent, insecure, grasping, zero-sum-gaming tendencies. It takes more than method to restrain our will to subjugate the text and others with it; it takes a miraculous work of transformative grace. [5]

---

[1] Roland Barthes (1967), The Death of the Author.

[2] Nicholas Wolterstorff (1995), Divine Discourse, chapter 3. 

[3] Re. church as the communal addressee, see e.g. Richard Hays (1996), The Moral Vision of the New Testament, p196. 

[4] Cheryl Bridges Johns (2023), Re-enchanting the Text, p124.

[5] As John Webster (2003) puts it, reading requires “hermeneutical conversion” which is ultimately the work of the Spirit. (Holy Scripture, p88-9). 

[Thumbnail image by Raygar He on Unsplash.]