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Is There A Meaning in This Text

Kevin Vanhoozer

Posted Friday, November 02, 2007 by Charlie Trimm
Categories: Hermeneutics  

Hermeneutics is a very important issue for us today in light of the rise of postmodernism. I got the feeling from the Christian attacks on modernism over the years that if modernism would just be shown to be false, then Christianity would be the victor. Instead, what we get is modernism dying and postmodernism rising to take its place, with Christianity still on the sidelines. How does the Christian respond to postmodernism? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it relevant? From what I hear, postmodernism is already passe in the French university system where it had its "point of birth". But I think that it is still alive and well here in the States and it has points to teach us. For the uninitiated, Vanhoozer's work is an excllent place to start. I've written a short review here, but clink the link to slog through a more detailed critique of the work.

 Vanhoozer divides the book into two: the first part is a study of modernism and postmodernism, while the second is a constructive study of how he thinks the author, the text and the reader should be viewed. If you want a helpful starting point for the thought of Derrida or the flaws of postmodern thinking, this is a good place to read. Here are just a few of the helpful thoughts from the book.

1. While Vanhoozer rejects postmodernism as a system, he accepts part of the postmodern critique, especially in the area of certainty. He says that Cartesian certainty is neither possible nor Christian. Hence, we should be more humble and tenative in our claims. But he says that while certainty is impossible, we can still be reasonably sure about claims to live by them.

2. He argues for a basic level of theological interpretation, in which one's theological beliefs affect one's reading of the text. The key point here is theism: whether one is a theist or not will dictate where you find meaning or if you think there is meaning at all. If you kill off God, you end up killing the human author of any work of literature and locate the meaning in the reader. He actually argues for a trinitarian reader, but I do not find myself as convinced of that, although that might just be due to my own inability of a reader of Vanhoozer's argument.

3. In contrast to the emphasis of Hirsch (and most of evangelicalism) on authorial intention, he places the focus on authorial action, a model that I think works better. This is built on the ideas of speech act theory. So we look not at what the author intended, trying to get behind the text and into the psychology of the author, but we look at the action of the author in what the author actually did.

Should you read this book? Well, it depends. It is the book about hermeneutics today. If you want to be a part of the discussion at all, you need to read it. Everyone quotes it and refers to it in some way when the topic is discussed. But, it is quite the book to get through. I only got through it on my second try and I had to read it for a class. It is dense writing and it is a big book. But it is so big because he takes his conversation partners so seriously.  

While I was initially intimidated to read this book, I highly enjoyed my journey through this wonderful work of hermeneutics. Vanhoozer started writing this book “with the aim of defending the Bible from its cultured hermeneutic despisers” (9), but the book brought him to other places than he intended. The book he ended up writing “is a systematic and trinitarian theology of interpretation that promotes the importance of Christian doctrine for the project of textual understanding” (9), in short, a book on theological hermeneutics. Hermeneutics cannot be done without first making theological decisions: hermeneutics is not a presuppositionless entity that can be tied up neatly in a box, as the Enlightenment claimed. Instead, the very nature of interpretation depends on one’s view of God.

The theme of the book is to argue against modern and postmodern views of interpretation textual meaning, focusing primarily upon the latter, since that view is becoming widespread in our world today. Besides arguing against those two views, Vanhoozer presents his own view about interpretation from a Trinitarian perspective. Vanhoozer argues against the postmodern view that “sees meaning as relative to the encounter of text and reader” (10) and instead argues for the view that “meaning is independent of our attempts to interpret it” (10). 

The book is divided into two broad sections, bracketed with an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction presents his main conclusions in brief and gives the overall roadmap for the book, while the conclusion helps to tie together the book by summarizing briefly the major arguments and applying it.  Each section consists of “three ages of criticism” (25): the age of the author, the age of the text, and the age of the reader. These three ages also correspond to metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, which means that the “book treats the metaphysics, methodology, and morals of meaning—twice” (25, italics in original). The reason they are covered twice is that each section covers the same ground, but from a different angle. The first section “represents my interpretation as a Christian theologian of the postmodern situation” (25), in a sense, the negative aspect of the book. The second (and longer) section presents Vanhoozer’s own understanding of the issues.

One of the primary positive aspects to the book is that Vanhoozer clearly knows what he is talking about. He shows that he is not simply a passerby in the field of hermeneutics, but he is fully conversant with what others believe and can describe their views accurately. His footnotes and bibliography display a stunning (in my opinion, at least!) range of reading and comprehension. The first set of three chapters helped me to understand the postmodern thinkers as clearly as I would be able to understand them, short of actually reading large amounts of Derrida and Fish. The depth of the book gives it authority and demands the attention and respect of the reader, even if the reader does not eventually agree with Vanhoozer. This is the way that evangelical scholarship should act when they engaging views that are opposed to Christianity: the other views must be understood and not simply and quickly written off as different, and therefore, heresy.  

One of the main strength of the book is the tracing of the connection between the death of God and the death of the author, or to put it in his language, that interpretation is based upon theology. Vanhoozer looks at the effect of Nietzsche and shows how the killing of God eventually killed the author as well and removed the stable basis of meaning, not just for the Bible, but for meaning in general. This search for meaning then shifted to a focus on the text, which bore its weight for some time. The text could not bear the weight and so the focus changed again to concentrate on the reader, which resulted in the current postmodern viewpoint. The historical background of the postmodern viewpoint is shown clearly by Vanhoozer and demonstrates his point quite well: hermeneutics is theological.

A wonderful aspect to the book is that Vanhoozer does not simply write off postmodernism and advocate a move back to a world without postmodernism. Contrary to what some evangelicals are arguing, modernism is not “more Christian” than postmodernism. “Cartesian certainty, an absolute knowledge grounded in the knowing subject, is neither possible nor Christian” (207). Instead, he seeks to find what is good in postmodernism while at the same time not being so enamored with it that he is blinded to its flaws. The clearest lesson learned is the need to move away from absolute certainty of truth, such as has been associated with fundamentalists in the past. “The kind of literary knowledge that emerges at the end of this study, therefore, will be one that is chastened, not absolute” (25). More specifically, “the postmodern bite is most effective when directed at the prideful interpreter; the wound need not be mortal so long as one heeds its moral” (458).  This kind of warning is desperately needed in some sectors of evangelicalism today, as there are too many preachers who are overly confident of their own interpretations. What the interpreter needs to find to find is not the interpretation that “perfectly corresponds to the text (whatever that might mean), but rather an interpretation that adequately responds to it” (335, italics original). “In the light of human fallibility and fallenness, Derrida’s iconoclastic protest against totalizing interpretations, however one-sided, may nevertheless by pastorally apt” (335). Both pastors and lay people need to hear this message and tone down their rhetoric.

Vanhoozer puts this application into practice when he does not dogmatically present his view as the only possible solution to the issue at hand. “It may be that speech act philosophy is ultimately inadequate to the descriptive task” (326). He is confident that he has found the correct method to describe communication, but he is open to criticism that there might be a better idea.

Vanhoozer also does not make straw men or make sweeping generalizations. He understands the arguments of his opponents and does not change them to make them easier to fight. A good example is his description of the thought of Derrida, in contrast to some evangelicals who simply write him off.

Some find it easy to caricature Nietzsche, like Derrida, as a “silly relativist.” This would be a perfunctory reading indeed. It is important not to confuse non-realism with the implausible position that everything exists only in the human mind; even non-realists believe that there is a physical reality “out there.” (57)

But the end of the critique which occupies the first part of the book is not the end of the positive contributions: Vanhoozer not only can show the errors in other systems but he can also present a valid and comprehensive system of his own. Vanhoozer builds on the theory of speech act and views the human as a communicative agent. “For, with the notion of meaning as a form of action, the author returns, not in her or her Cartesian guise as an all-determining self-conscious subject, but as a communicative agent” (203, italics original). He agrees with Hirsch in many ways, but he places the locus of meaning in a different area than Hirsch. For Hirsch, the meaning is “an affair of the consciousness” (225). Vanhoozer notes that the problem with this is that it is never publicly accessible and does not account for an unskillful agent who does not translate their intention into words correctly (225). “I have argued that the author’s intention should be confused neither with what an author planned to writer nor with what the author unintentionally brings about” (259). In contrast to Hirsch, Vanhoozer places meaning in the communicative action, which is accessible and takes into account various types of context in a much better fashion than Hirsch’s model.

Another positive contribution is Vanhoozer’s idea of institutional facts. The idea of an institutional fact is that a given society ascribes meaning to a certain idea or thing. The meaning is fixed, but only within that society.

The stainless steel object that weighs five grams may be a fork. That it is a fork is an institutional fact—that is, a fact that depends on corporate intention. For it is not just my subjective opinion that it is a fork; it really is a fork. Yet it really is a fork only in relation to a community that designates it as such. There may be primitive societies that use fork-like objects as weapons. (244)

The reason that this idea is helpful is that it clarifies the communicative action. The action is done within the context of certain rules (to use the previous example, small pronged metal and plastic items are called forks and used to eat food). In order to understand the communicative action, the rules of the context must be understood. But these rules are not necessarily the same for all people, and so the futile search for the ultimate Rule which is equally relevant for all people is avoided.

The cohesion of genre is an important foundation for Vanhoozer. The genre of the speech act gives the rules by which it is to be understood. These understood rules then allow the reader to know which game, in a sense, the speaker or author is playing. “I hope to show that what writing pulls asunder—author, context, text, reader—genre joins together” (339). This concept of genre as giving the rules for understanding is becoming common among evangelicals, but is still a helpful idea, especially as Vanhoozer uses it in his metanarrative. However, I am not convinced that Derrida and friends would find it very helpful, for genre has plenty of ambiguity of its own. How can it be known which genre is being used? What are the rules associated with each genre? How can one know the rules? How can it be known that the author was not modifying the rules for his specific purpose?

Vanhoozer constructively shows how resorting to an interpretive community to defend a non-realist from relativism does not work. While it is important to realize the effect of the interpretive community, there are several problems (378-379). First, it is possible that not only the interpreter but also the community could be wrong. In this case, an appeal to the community will not correct the wrong interpretation. A further problem is deciding which community to follow. Do I follow the community here or the one down the road? How does one decide which community to follow?

A minor positive aspect to the book is the excellent use of italics by Vanhoozer. I quickly learned that when he put a phrase or a sentence in italics, it was either important or helped to easily summarize a previous discussion. The skillful use of italics made the book easier to read, especially in the areas where I was beginning to get lost.

Vanhoozer is a good writer technically and can turn a phrase. While the book is quite dense, he does make it relatively fun to read. An example is that “there is more than one way to skin a text” (111).

While it is also a strength, one of the main drawbacks of the book is its sheer length and depth. The writing style is quite dense, and so it took some time to work through the argument of the book, and I felt like giving up at a few points when it seemed he was never going to get to his point. I actually read about a third of this book at one point prior to this reading but gave up at that time because of the amount of time it was taking to get through it. The book could have had a wider influence and greater appeal if it was more compact. It is almost seems as if Vanhoozer went too far to show that he understood the views he is writing against. Vanhoozer has a powerful argument in this book, but it is only fully effective if someone actually reaches his point at the end of the book.

A similar problem was that I had difficulties tracking his argument in the small picture. The metanarrative was clear, with its two balanced groups of three’s, but where exactly he was going in each individual chapter and how he was going to arrive at that specific destination was repeatedly obscure. I would often read a section and wonder either how it fit into the immediate context or how it contributed anything he had not already said elsewhere. Part of the problem lies with my lack of mastery of his argument, but more help from the author would have been appreciated to show the exact contours of his specific arguments as he repeatedly helped the reader with the direction of the metanarrative.  

In the same category, I encountered a parallel problem with the headings throughout the chapters. While the headings were designed to be helpful in tracing the flow of the argument (at least, I assume that was their purpose), there were so many different levels of headings and sub-headings that they actually caused me to become lost as I tried to discern whether this new section was subsidiary to the previous section or parallel or if it was a new section altogether. Either fewer headings or a clearer method of distinguishing the levels would have been helpful.

While Vanhoozer’s work is helpful for giving a foundation for thinking theologically while doing hermeneutics, there are also many unanswered questions for the interpreter. Vanhoozer claims that we need to believe in the Trinity, but does that need stop there? Are there are other doctrines that are needed to be followed as well? What does theological interpretation include? 

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