IS THERE MEANING IN THE TEXT?

IS THERE MEANING IN THE TEXT?

By: Daniel McMillin

How do we locate the meaning of any given text in the Bible? Where does the meaning come from? What do we mean by “meaning”? Kevin Vanhoozer’s Is There a Meaning in this Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge comprehensively answers these questions. He addresses three dangerous (post-modern) approaches to interpretation that have hindered modern readers from locating the meaning of a text:

Undoing the Author: Authority and Intentionality

Undoing the Book: Textuality and Indeterminacy

Undoing the Reader: Contextuality and Ideology

Vanhoozer then offers three (pre-modern) principles that will help us redo interpretation for today:

Resurrecting the Author: Meaning as Communicative Action

Redeeming the Text: The Rationality of Literary Acts

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

The major pushback of this volume is to address the postmodern interpretive approaches that ignore biblical authority and place too much emphasis upon the reader and disregard the (divine) authorial intent. Much of this is due to the historical-critical or historical-grammatical interpretation of Scripture that scholars apply. In this way, the Bible is read just like any other document in antiquity. However, this ignores a major step

in the interpretive process. There is more to interpretation than the historical and grammatical levels. There is still the theological principle of the text that allows us to expand upon the meaning of the text within the broader scope of the Bible and our lives. It not only touches on the meaning on a human scale but also transcends to the heavens and allows us to reach the divine intent of God, the author. That is why we need to read the bible theologically.[1] But how can we accomplish this? There are three major questions that need to be answered: (1) Who determines the meaning? (2) What is the Bible? (3) How do I read the Bible?

Is it the reader or the author? The author’s intentions determine the meaning of the text, while the reader discovers the meaning. This is why the question, “What does this verse mean to me?” poses a real danger to biblical interpretation because it ignores how there is meaning in the text. “The belief that there is something ‘in’ the text, a presence not of the reader’s own making, is a belief in transcendence.”[2]

The way we answer this question will impact our interpretation massively. The Bible is God’s revelation of Himself. It is human and divine discourse. God the author, communicates to human readers through human authors (2 Tim. 3:16-17; 2 Pet. 1:20-21).[3] It is an authoritative text because it is “the triune God speaking in and through the Scriptures.”[4] The author has the authority to determine the meaning of the text that they have communicated to the reader.

You can’t just read the Bible the way you want. The Bible is written in such a way that it demands we read it the way it was intended to be read. The Bible is not written to you, but it is written for you. What do I need to do? Read the Bible in its context. There are gaps between the our context and the biblical context: (1) Time, (2) Language, (3) Literary, (4) Geographical, (5) Cultural, (6) Supernatural, and (7) Theological.[5] In order to bridge this chasm between the original audience and the modern reader, we must read the Bible the way God wants us to read it. “We should read the Bible like any other text, though due consideration must be given to those factors that set it apart (e.g., its divine-human authorship, its canonical shape, its function as Scripture.”[6] We need to ask questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

 Works Cited:

[1] Treier and Vanhoozer, Theology and the Mirror of Scripture;

[2] Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, 455.

[3] “The Bibel is human and divine authorial discourse…what is divine about the Bible is not the words, which are fully human—there is nothing heavenly about Hebrew and Greek—but the discourse. God speaks—and in speaking performs communicative acts—in and through the human discourse, without suppressing or manipulating the cognitive and communicative capacities of the human authors.” (Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics, 11)

[4] Vanhoozer, “Triune Discourse,” I:27.

[5] Fuhr and Köstenberger, Inductive Bible Study, 2-19.

[6] Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, 455.