No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Is it possible to discover ‘the one’ intended meaning of the biblical authors?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2014
Abstract
A major pursuit of biblical studies, especially since the dawn of the Enlightenment, has been to discover the one, intended, objective meaning of the various biblical texts. Over the last several hundred years, a plethora of methodological paradigms, biblical language and reference tools, historical studies, sociological analyses, comparative linguistic investigations, and anthropological and cultural examinations have all been published through many outlets by a host of people for the purpose of finding THE meaning the biblical authors wished to convey to their respective audiences. Although the results of all these works have positively contributed to our knowledge of scripture in profound ways, the problem is this: none can claim that they have actually discovered this one objective meaning. This is not to say, however, that there are not better understandings of scripture which point more adequately to the originally intended meaning, but simply that the best anyone can do is interpret scripture. The consequence of interpretation, though, is the relativity of meaning. In other words, there are several interpretations of scripture which can validly point to the intended meaning of the biblical authors and texts. One purpose of this article, then, will be to explore why it is not possible to find the one intended meaning of scripture, by defining some key concepts (e.g. tradition and presupposition) in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who is one of the most influential names in the history of philosophical hermeneutics of the twentieth century, as interpreted by Merold Westphal.
Some scriptural interpreters, especially evangelicals, are frightened by the idea that biblical meaning is relative because such a pluralistic approach can lead quickly to the demise of biblical infallibility and authority. A second major purpose of this article will be to help ease such fear by offering a biblically grounded theological justification for the interpretative plurality of scripture by looking at the relativity of meaning through the lens of the doctrine of the Trinity. This justification will suggest that the more we rely upon the Holy Spirit and act out our faith in God through Jesus Christ in and outside of the church, the better our interpretation of scripture will become.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2014
References
1 In my opinion, one of the best and most broad definitions of ‘evangelicalism’ is historically based. According to Bebbington, David, a study of the history of evangelicalism in Britain points to the following four major beliefs which all evangelicals have in common: (1) scripture is authoritative for the life and faith of a Christian; (2) spreading the message of the gospel is an imperative; (3) the process of conversion is necessary for non-believers to become Christ-followers; (4) the atonement of Jesus Christ is vital in order for humanity to have a proper relationship with God. See his Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1992), pp. 3–17Google Scholar. In examining the history of evangelicalism in the United States, Collins, Kenneth found the same principles as Bebbington, and concluded that such principles are ‘integral to any assessment of the evangelical ethos’, being ‘broad enough to account for evangelical pluralism and yet particular enough to define evangelical self-understanding’. See his The Evangelical Moment: The Promise of an American Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), p. 21Google Scholar.
2 My arguing against our ability to find the objective intended meaning of the author does not mean that I believe we should abandon the search. On the contrary, I believe we show reverence for God, scripture and its authors by continually going back to the text to verify the validity of our various interpretations as to what the authors of the biblical text could have meant. Having said this, however, it is important to realise that no matter how hard one tries, scriptural interpreters are, in the end, stuck in an endless and unsolvable maze which can only offer various suggestions (some good, some bad) as to what was the author's original intended meaning.
3 By downplaying objectivity, I am by no means disregarding the fact that God reveals truth. I only want to suggest that God is the only one who knows what is true in an absolute fashion. Therefore, human interpretation of revealed truth is just that: an interpretation.
4 Fowl, Stephen E., ‘The Role of Authorial Intention in the Theological Interpretation of Scripture’, in Green, Joel B. and Turner, Max (eds), Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 71Google Scholar.
5 Thiselton, Anthony C., Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), p. 148Google Scholar. I am not completely comfortable with Thiselton's description of Schleiermacher here because the term ‘modern’, in the context of philosophical hermeneutics, usually refers to the ‘Enlightenment’. Therefore, to be accurate, Schleiermacher is the founder of philosophical hermeneutics and the father of liberal Protestant (e.g. mainline) theology.
6 Jeanrond, Werner, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (Norwich: SCM Press, 1994), p. 47Google Scholar. Objectivity can be defined as ‘the belief . . . that while interpretation can become subjective . . . it need not. Done rightly, interpretation can free itself from particular perspectives and presuppositions . . . and give us the meaning of the text.’ Westphal, Merold, Whose Community?Which Interpretation: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), p. 46 (emphasis original)Google Scholar.
7 Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics, p. 47. Indeed, one of the major reasons why most, if not all, evangelical seminaries require students to take courses in the biblical languages may be to know the biblical authors, their lives and, as result, the intended meaning of their texts.
8 Westphal, Whose Community, p. 69.
9 Ibid., p. 31.
10 Ibid. (emphasis original).
11 I am inclined to agree with Gadamer, here, in that there is no way objectively to define or describe the authorial intended meaning, but this does not mean we should not work, even with pluralistic results, at attempting to learn about the lives of the various biblical authors as well as the historical and cultural contexts in which they lived. We should do this in order to show reverence for the God who worked with and through humans by the power of the Holy Spirit to give Christians the canon of scripture. To end our search to understand the author would be to assume there is nothing we can possibly learn which can better illuminate the text itself, even if what we learn is not definitive and is, therefore, subject to further interpretation. I believe this suggestion may have been acceptable to Gadamer as long as I never claimed that I or anyone else had found ‘The’ one authorial intended meaning or description of the text.
12 Lawn, Chris, Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 30–43Google Scholar.
13 Grenz, Stanley J. and Franke, John R., Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), p. 31Google Scholar.
14 In actuality, there were two Enlightenment methodologies. The first was rationalism, which was the method Descartes used in his philosophy. Rationalism referred to knowledge gained through using the mind's ability to reason about the world. Consequently, rationalists believed that understanding was gained only through mental processing and, therefore, what humans actually experienced contributed very little to how true knowledge of the world was achieved. The other method was called empiricism. Philosopher David Hume (1711–76) supported using this approach to understand the world. Empiricism is defined as knowledge gained through the sense experience, which refers to what can be learned through seeing, tasting, touching, hearing and smelling. White, James Emery, Serious Times: How to Make Your Life Matter in an Urgent Day (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), p. 26Google Scholar.
15 Christianity suffered tremendously at the hands of the Enlightenment, and became such a social outcast in Europe that, by the time the eighteenth century was over, ‘the church had been marginalized, theology dethroned as the queen of the sciences and the Christian worldview reduced to a fading memory among the intelligentsia’. Ibid., p. 27. Indeed, it is fair to say that the Enlightenment actually replaced Christianity as the dominant religion of the West through ‘its . . . deification of the natural sciences as the controlling model for all human knowledge’. Thiselton, Hermeneutics, p. 7.
16 Westphal, Whose Community, p. 70.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., pp. 70–1.
19 Ibid., p. 73.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., p. 71.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., pp. 45–6.
27 Ibid., p. 47 (emphasis original).
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid. (emphasis original).
31 Ibid. (emphasis original).
32 Ibid., p. 48. In fairness to Hirsch, Westphal points out that Hirsch was not seeking absolute certainty, as he readily admitted that ‘[w]e sometimes get it [the interpretation] wrong, and even when we get it right we can't be absolutely certain that we have done so’. Consequently, [t]he most we can claim is that this or that is probably the best interpretation [based on] . . . a consensus in which all interpreters arrive at an identical meaning’. Ibid., p. 47.
33 Ibid., p. 38.
34 Ibid., p. 41.
35 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflection on the Claim that God Speaks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 Vanhoozer, Kevin J., ‘A Response to William J. Webb, in Meadors, Gary T. (ed.), Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), p. 264 (emphasis original)Google Scholar.
37 Treier, Daniel J., Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Recovering a Christian Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), p. 144Google Scholar.
38 Brett, Mark, ‘Motives and Intentions in Genesis 1’, Journal of Theological Studies 42 (1991), p. 5 (emphasis original)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Vanhoozer, Kevin J., ‘Imprisoned or Free? Text, Status, and Theological Interpretation in the Master/Slave Discourse of Philemon’ in Reading Scripture with the Church: Toward a Hermeneutic for Theological Interpretation, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), p. 59 (emphasis original)Google Scholar.
40 Fowl, ‘The Role’, p. 74.
41 Ibid., p. 78.
42 Vanhoozer, ‘Imprisoned’, pp. 59–60, n. 21.
43 Fowl, ‘The Role’, p. 78.
44 Ibid., pp. 78–9.
45 Ibid., pp. 79–80.
46 Ibid., p. 80.
47 Silencing other perspectives is one of the significant dangers of objectivity. According to Franke, John, the search and fight for objective biblical and theological interpretation has led to major tensions between black and white Christians. See his Manifold Witness: The Plurality of Truth (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2009), pp. 91–101Google Scholar.
48 Ibid., p. 44.
49 Ibid., p. 43.
50 Ibid., p. 44.
51 Ibid., p. 12. Indeed, Westphal says he has never found anyone who has ever held to complete relativity stating: ‘Not even Nietzsche, one the most radical philosophical perspectivists, thinks that Christianity and Platonism, are just as good as his own philosophy of the will to power’, Westphal, Whose Community?, p. 15.
52 Franke, Manifold Witness, p. 14.
53 Ibid., p. 15.
54 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
55 Ibid., pp. 7–8.
56 Ibid., p. 17.
57 The Athanasian creed explicitly states Franke's ‘plural-unity, unity plural’ principle as well as confesses that God is one in three distinct persons. For specifics on this creed, see Dennis Bratcher (ed.), ‘Ecumenical Christian Creeds’, http://www.crivoice.org/creedsearly.html.
58 Franke, Manifold Witness, p. 85.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid., p. 44.
61 Ibid., p. 29.
62 McGrath, Alister, A Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), pp. 58–9 (emphasis added)Google Scholar.
63 In fairness, McGrath does acknowledge that ‘[t]he evangelical is no more free of presuppositions than the liberal, rationalist, or secularist’. He even readily admits that some ‘evangelicals did, as a matter of fact, allow their secular context to affect their thinking’. But, still McGrath insists that ‘the fundamental evangelical conviction has been that it is imperative . . . to allow no idea or values from outside Christianity to exercise a normative role within its thought or life’. In critique, I shout ‘Amen!’ to McGrath's acknowledgment of the fact that presuppositions affect evangelicals, but am disappointed that he does not seem to recognise his own presupposition throughout his book, namely objectivity. Ibid., pp. 101, 241 (emphasis added).
64 The reason why some scholars in evangelical academia struggle with how continually to interpret scripture faithfully in our current cultural and historical context is because they recognise the impossibility of presuppositions not affecting the way contemporary Christians read and interpret the Bible. For examples of this struggle, see Johnston, Robert K., The Use of the Bible in Theology: Evangelical Options (Atlanta, GA: John Knox, 1985)Google Scholar; Meadows, Gary T. (ed.), Four Views on Moving Beyond the Bible to Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009)Google Scholar; and Marshall, I. Howard et al., Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004)Google Scholar.
65 Olson, Roger E., The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999), pp. 131–5Google Scholar. Specifically, Olson suggests that the process of canonisation began at the Council of Jamnia in 90 and was finalised at a synod meeting at Carthage in 397.
66 McGrath, Alister, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), p. 29Google Scholar. Webster, John agrees stating that ‘the process of canonization is properly understood, not as an act in which the church creates an authority for itself by determining a set of normative texts, but as an act of acknowledging antecedent authority imposed upon the church from without’. See his ‘Authority of Scripture’, in Vanhoozer, Kevin J.et al. (eds), Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), p. 726Google Scholar.
67 Olson, Story, p. 134.
68 Ibid., p. 133.
69 Ibid., p. 134.
70 Webster, ‘Authority’, p. 726, emphasis added. The idea that the authority of scripture cannot be separated from Christian use and submission to the text may be one of the reasons why Barth, Karl believed the Bible, according to Wayne Grudem's interpretation, ‘becomes the words of God to us as we encounter them’. Curiously, Grudem rejects Barth here, but earlier says that the only way people will ultimately be convinced that scripture is true is through the work of the Holy Spirit, which suggests his understanding of scriptural authority is ultimately not that different from Barth's. Grudem, Bible Doctrine: Essential Teachings of the Christian Faith, ed. Purswell, Jeff (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan 1999), p. 37 (emphasis original), p. 36Google Scholar. In the end, although using a very different methodology from Wolterstorff and Vanhoozer, it seems Grudem is simply reaffirming the same thing they do, namely that scripture is an objective authority which in some way stands apart from human interpretation. As this article has suggested, however, the realistic possibility that human interpretation affects everything we perceive transforms the concept of objectivity into an ideological theory rather than a useful and practical basis for reading and interpreting scripture.
71 Webster, ‘Authority’, p. 727.
72 Ibid., pp. 726–27. In emphasising the importance of piety and Christian practice over methodology I am not suggesting that methodology does not have a place in biblical and theological interpretation as using various methods is necessary as a starting point for our understanding of scripture. I am simply suggesting that methodology is not ‘The Only’ determining factor for proper interpretation of the Bible, for two reasons. First, there is no single objective method for interpreting scripture. Second, the use of methods does not help biblical interpreters to develop humility, which is vitally important for one adequately to interpret scripture.
73 Billings, J. Todd, The Word of God for the People of God: An Entryway to the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2010), p. 216Google Scholar.
74 Ibid., p. 217.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., pp. 217–18.
78 Ibid., p. 221.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., pp. 222–3.
81 The way I have described tradition here is taken from Lawn, whose full definition of tradition is worthy of note. He states: ‘The word tradition comes from the Latin traditio deriving from the verb tradere, which literally means to hand something over. So a tradition is literally what is handed over – from generation to generation. Tradition can be intellectual or practical. Concerning the former we might speak of “the Western intellectual tradition” . . . Of the latter, one might speak of the traditional method of making baskets, for example. In the case of both the intellectual and the practical – and some philosophers would have a problem of teasing the one from the other – there is a handing down through the generations’. Lawn, Gadamer, pp. 152–3.
82 It is important to note that, although some evangelicals suggest that orthodox Christian tradition is universal, which gives the impression that tradition has always been unified and, subsequently, has agreed on all issues related to scripture and theology, Franke shows this notion to be incorrect. See Manifold Witness, pp. 21–37.
83 For a good overview of this trend, see Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation, pp. 39–70. Billings notes that it was only in the eighteenth century that Christians began to ignore the wisdom and faith of the past. See The Word, pp. 154–5.
84 Reading and interpreting scripture through the Trinity is one of the major focuses of Billings. So he states: ‘I want to introduce readers to the practice of interpreting scripture in the context of the triune activity of God, the God who uses scripture to reshape the church into Christ's image by the Spirit's power’. Ibid., p. xiii.
85 Ibid., p. 155.
86 Hebrews 11.