Content provided in partnership with

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

Trinity Journal, Fall 2000 by Vidu, Adonis

Kevin Vanhoozer. Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998. 496 pp. $29.99.

There have been plenty of contemporary attempts to write theology and hermeneutics which either take an overdose of postmodernism or display a blindly arrogant conservatism. Thankfully, this is not such a book. This is a text which seeks to listen to what others are saying. This attempt is all the more commendable since the dispute in which it engages is one of the hottest and most controversial debates in the field of hermeneutics, both general and particular: the question of textual meaning. Dr. Vanhoozer wants to argue for nothing less than a recovery of authorial intention, textual determinedness, and the virtues of literary reading.

More Articles of Interest: Is there a Meaning in this Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of...; Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of...; Word and Supplement: Speech Acts, Biblical Texts, and the Sufficiency of...; First Theology: God, Scripture & Hermeneutics; Meaning, intention, and application: Speech act theory in the hermeneutics of...

The first part of the book, "Undoing Interpretation: Authority, Allegory, Anarchy" charts the disintegration of three important figures in hermeneutics: the author, the text, and the reader. This long section (almost 200 pp.) can serve as an excellent guide to the postmodern challenge in interpretation. I will not dwell on this aspect of the book, except by recommending it as one of the most readable introductions available. Vanhoozer retells the story of the death of the author as first told by philosophers such as Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Fish, and others. The death of the author is quickly followed by the dissipation of the text which is no longer seen as forming a unity, or indeed having an identity. And if our texts are just as dead and de-centered as we are, then postmodern hermeneutics believes that all reading is ideological and anarchical and that there can be no apolitical reading as such.

One of Vanhoozer's central theses is that underlying this crisis of authorship, textuality, and selfhood is the death-of-God philosophies and theologies. This claim is of no small importance since the rest of the argument flows from it. If the present crisis of interpretation was caused by a perceived loss of the ground of transcendence, then what is needed for the "redoing of interpretation" is the recovery of its lost roots. If the contemporary malaise is theological, then we need theology to overcome it. But is such a task conceivable in the contemporary context? Some readers may indeed be appalled by the ease (some might say rudeness) with which some theologians think that the former queen of the sciences can still throw light around and on other disciplines. Ironically, however, if the present context with its crises is the target of Vanhoozer's attacks, it also provides him with the theoretical justification for just such a confessional argument. Deconstructive hermeneutics rests on an ontology of absence, the absence of transcendence and God who underwrites language and meaning. George Steiner, one of the sources behind the present book's argument, suggests that we should make the wager on transcendence. In a move similar to John Milbank's argument in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Vanhoozer observes that the nihilism of deconstruction is purely mythical, that it need not be accepted. Rather, as Christians, we must start from the Trinitarian God, whose transcendence forms the basis of our belief in meaning. In the present intellectual context, Vanhoozer need not feel that he must justify this position in purely rational terms. He must simply advance it as yet another mythology and ontology, yet an ontology of peace, of respect for the other, and responsibility towards the other's discourse and one's own words. The author, however, goes further than Milbank in saying that his own proposal, although impossible to "prove" is the only one that makes sense of what actually takes place within the act of reading and understanding.

What exactly is this proposal? Vanhoozer is staging his argument for a Christian Trinitarian hermeneutics in three steps, according to the three main issues: authorship, textuality, reader. To the imprisonment of the author within language and society, Vanhoozer has the vision of the author as the citizen of language. He is able to argue for this by arguing that the basic unit of meaning is not the word, but the sentence. Selves and sentences are what P. F. Strawson calls "basic particulars." That is, they cannot be reduced to anything more basic. Further, sentences are not only products of the linguistic code, but meaningful personal actions. Sentences can be seen as a species of action. At this juncture, speech-act theory is invoked as an important ally. The theory of speech-acts holds that speech cannot be so easily dissociated from the speaker. Speech-act theory is seen as providing the middle way between constructivist theories of meaning (meaning as generated by the linguistic conventions) and the view which holds that meaning is not bound to these conventions but is created by the author's intention. Speech-act theory considers sentences as a rule-governed form of activity. As with any action, one cannot elucidate the meaning of one sentence apart from its utterer. Speech-acts have three dimensions: the locution (content), the illocution (force), and the perlocution (effect). Meaning is not something that words have, but something that people do. It is not texts, or words, that mean, it is people who do. It is, after all, the author who activates the system of languages, who initiates the event of discourse. The illocutionary aspect of each speech-act, namely what we do in saying such and such, forces us to include in our description of the speechact the author as well. Therefore, if we can interpret actions, we can interpret texts. The text, therefore, is a communicative act of a communicative agent, fixed by writing. This last bit, "fixed by writing" is seen by some deconstructivists to pose a serious threat to authorial hermeneutics. Being fixed in writing, the text acquires a life of its own, is detached from the author, and distanced from him/her at the same time.

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

Trinity Journal, Fall 2000 by Vidu, Adonis

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Home & Garden

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference