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

Here we come to a very interesting feature of Vanhoozer's hermeneutics: the concept of genre. Genre is a communicative act of a higher order, existing on the level of greater organizational complexity. Genres facilitate interpersonal communication by offering relatively stable types of communicative forms, and they are best understood as literary practices. We remember that a text, which is a literary act, has a subject matter, illocutionary energy, perlocutionary trajectory, and a particular literary form. Genres are essential to Vanhoozer's hermeneutics because they provide the key to the illocutionary aspect of the literary act. One of Derrida's charges against determinate meaning is that each text becomes decontextualized by its being fixed in writing. The text therefore floats from one context to another, missing any anchor for its meaning. However, if Vanhoozer is right, genre creates a shared literary context, the context of a practice with its history and virtues. What writing pulls asunder, genre joins together. It is this concept which describes the illocutionary act at the level of the whole, placing it in an overall unity which serves a meaningful purpose. Therefore, form is not incidental to the literary act, but essential. This concept of the genre, together with the fact that the author's intention is determined by the conventions of language in force at a given time, suggest that there are stable indicators of the meaning of a given text.

Understanding means participating in a practice. The relative stability of such forms of communication entitles us both to understand something that is not unfamiliar to us and to discover the challenge to our own selves. For the reality of authorial intention makes sure that we do not gaze unto a text as into a mirror, discovering our own prejudgements and preconceptions. Nor do we simply find in the text the preexistent meaning given by the reading community (Fish). While the text, as a rule-governed form of behavior and action, fits given patterns, it bursts them at the same time by using them towards a purposive and unique aim. We should afford the luxury of being wrong with respect to the meaning of the texts we read. We should also recognize that fallibility exists at the level of the interpretive community as well.

Vanhoozer, however, is not a cultural relativist. He believes that traditions and communities can be changed, challenged by the texts they read. Why else are there books under interdiction? Is there any role for the interpretive community? The positive answer that Vanhoozer gives to this question is stated in a revised form of the hermeneutical circle: reading develops the interpretive virtues and the interpretive virtues in turn help us to be better readers. The interpretive community is that space in which the interpretive virtues can be developed and cultivated.

This development of interpretive virtues is the task of the third chapter of Part Two. What kinds of selves should we be in order to be better readers? The hermeneutics of Vanhoozer is theological because he is concerned with responding to a voice from the text which is not our own. In reading we encounter an other which calls us to respond. Postmodern images of the self leave it miserably disjointed, dissipated, and chaotic. At the same time the other is conceived of as that which addresses us, the face of which we must respect, and in some cases love. However, it is only the interpretive realist who can really respect the text as an other. If the self is non-unitary, then so are the texts he or she produces. The belief in meaning is a basic belief and it is the only belief that can account for interpersonal communication. Without this belief, the imperative of responsibility for the other turns into freedom from the other, for "an other that has no concrete form and content can make no determinate demands on the reader" (p. 394).