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

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Zondervan Academic, Aug 30, 2009 - Religion - 512 pages

Is there a meaning in the Bible, or is meaning rather a matter of who is reading or of how one reads? Does Christian doctrine have anything to contribute to debates about interpretation, literary theory, and post modernity? These are questions of crucial importance for contemporary biblical studies and theology alike. Kevin Vanhoozer contends that the postmodern crisis in hermeneutics—”incredulity towards meaning,” a deep–set skepticism concerning the possibility of correct interpretation—is fundamentally a crisis in theology provoked by an inadequate view of God and by the announcement of God’s “death.” Part 1 examines the ways in which deconstruction and radical reader–response criticism “undo” the traditional concepts of author, text, and reading. Dr. Vanhoozer engages critically with the work of Derrida, Rorty, and Fish, among others, and demonstrates the detrimental influence of the postmodern “suspicion of hermeneutics” on biblical studies. In Part 2, Dr. Vanhoozer defends the concept of the author and the possibility of literary knowledge by drawing on the resources of Christian doctrine and by viewing meaning in terms of communicative action. He argues that there is a meaning in the text, that it can be known with relative adequacy, and that readers have a responsibility to do so by cultivating “interpretive virtues.” Successive chapters build on Trinitarian theology and speech act philosophy in order to treat the metaphysics, methodology, and morals of interpretation. From a Christian perspective, meaning and interpretation are ultimately grounded in God’s own communicative action in creation, in the canon, and preeminently in Christ. Prominent features in Part 2 include a new account of the author’s intention and of the literal sense, the reclaiming of the distinction between meaning and significance in terms of Word and Spirit, and the image of the reader as a disciple–martyr, whose vocation is to witness to something other than oneself. Is There a Meaning in This Text? guides the student toward greater confidence in the authority, clarity, and relevance of Scripture, and a well–reasoned expectation to understand accurately the message of the Bible. Is There a Meaning in This Text? is a comprehensive and creative analysis of current debates over biblical hermeneutics that draws on interdisciplinary resources, all coordinated by Christian theology. It makes a significant contribution to biblical interpretation that will be of interest to readers in a number of fields. The intention of the book is to revitalize and enlarge the concept of author–oriented interpretation and to restore confidence that readers of the Bible can reach understanding. The result is a major challenge to the central assumptions of postmodern biblical scholarship and a constructive alternative proposal—an Augustinian hermeneutic—that reinvigorates the notion of biblical authority and finds a new exegetical practice that recognizes the importance of both the reader’s situation and the literal sense.

From inside the book

Contents

Faith Seeking Textual Understanding
15
Undoing Interpretation
37
Authority and Intentionality
43
Textuality and Indeterminacy
99
Contextuality and Ideology
148
Redoing Interpretation Agency Action Affect
197
The Rationality of Literary Acts
281
the norm of literary knowledge
303
Interpretive Virtue Spirituality and Communicative
367
A Hermeneutics of the Cross
453
Hermeneutic humility and literary knowledge
462
BiMiographv
469
Name Index
487
Copyright

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Popular passages

Page 197 - I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth ; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. " And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. "Who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God's image ; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself; kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.
Page 69 - We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.
Page 197 - For Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are...
Page 64 - I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.
Page 156 - You then whose judgment the right course would steer, Know well each Ancient's proper character: His fable, subject, scope in every page; Religion, country, genius of his age: Without all these at once before your eyes, Cavil you may, but never criticise.
Page 43 - The authority of the holy scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God, (who is truth itself,) the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the word of God.
Page 72 - The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective— ie, contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being.
Page 136 - Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.
Page 64 - OATS [a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people], — Croker.
Page 409 - Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

About the author (2009)

Kevin J. Vanhoozer (PhD, Cambridge University) is Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Before that he was Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including Is There a Meaning in this Text?, First Theology, The Drama of Doctrine, and Remythologizing Theology. He serves as theological mentor for the Augustine Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians, and is a member of the Lausanne theology working group on hermeneutics for Seoul 2024.

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