“What It Means To Me”

Two incidents have placed themselves as point and counter-point this past week. First, to my great delight I was asked to teach Hermeneutics (biblical interpretation) at A W. Tozer Theological Seminary next year. For the first several years I taught in seminary I taught this subject—this was back when I was one of only two full-time faculty members at Western Seminary’s San Jose Campus. I had to give the class up when our faculty expanded to a third member whose major field of study was Bible. It was with a sense of loss that I no longer taught Hermeneutics because (1) I enjoyed the topic immensely and (2) it is a great introduction to the field of theological studies, both systematic and historical—my areas of expertise. The second incident was a call from my youngest son who is a music major at UC Davis. Although a music major, he is taking a class in Irish Literature. In that class he had to write a critique of a play written by an early 20^th century Irish author that challenged the conservative societal mores, and whose views, as communicated through the play caused a riot at its first public performance.

I was delighted and my hermeneutics training kicked in. We looked at the historical background of the author and the play, made the language flow and carefully constructed an argument. The piece looked good. Several days later I got a call from my son. His professor wanted him to redo the paper focusing, not on setting the play in its own day and understanding what the author wanted to say to his audience, but by focusing on what the play meant today, to my son. How did he interpret it? Literally he wanted my son to “read into the play” his own meaning. In classical Biblical interpretation this is called eisegesis (a “reading into the text” what the reader wants to see there, apart from what the original author intended to communicate) as opposed to proper interpretative procedure—exegesis, a “leading out” or making explicit the meaning that the author of the text was communicating.

My old friend Walt Russell, Professor of Bible at Talbot School of Theology tells of a similar experience he had while teaching seminar in How to Interpret the Bible at a local church.

As she worked her way toward the front of the room, I could tell the young woman was really angry at me. Her eyes were blazing and her jaw was set. This was surprising because the setting was fairly benign: speaking to a large evangelical church’s singles group on “How to Interpret the Bible.” At the beginning of my two times with them, however, I was already offending the troops! I braced myself.

Twenty-four year-old “Janet” (not her real name) was angry at my emphasis on seeking to discover authors’ intentions when we read their texts. She was an evangelical Christian and a second grade teacher in a public school. She prided herself in helping her 20 students learn to love literature. She would read them a story as they gathered around her, and then ask each child, “What does the story mean to you?” She prodded them to come up with their own unique meanings. With such strong encouragement, the class of 20 would eventually have 20 different meanings for the one story. Janet sensed that I was a naysayer about such “love of literature.” Pouring a little emotional gasoline on the fire, I said, “Janet, you’re certainly doing your part to insure that these 7 year-olds will never recover from a radically relativistic view of meaning!” Now I had her full attention.

Actually, Janet’s and my little story about where a text’s meaning resides is really part of a larger, more tangled story that’s over a hundred years old. It started with some American literary critics early in the 20th century who shifted the focus from the author to the text. This literary perspective, later called “New Criticism,” banished the author and focused instead on a “close reading” or “explication” of the text. When created, a text supposedly becomes an artifact with autonomy and a life of its own. The autonomous text’s meaning is discovered by studying its organic unity. New Criticism triumphed in the United States from about 1930 to 1960. As the text moved into the spotlight, authors were shuffled to the periphery.

But to understand Janet’s and my little discussion we need to know the story from 1960 to the present. This is because the movement away from authors did not stop at the text. Rather, it continued its movement all the way to us as readers. In the last 40 years, reading and interpreting has been redefined from seeking the intentions of authors through reading their texts to continually recreating the text through the presuppositions of readers. Since the 1960s the emphasis has shifted to the astonishing assumption that readers not only create the meaning, but also in some sense create the text itself through the contouring of their presuppositions! With this view none of us can really share the same text!

The classical view of meaning is that a text is a window into an author’s intentions. For example, we peer through the window of the biblical text to interpret what the Divine and human authors intend to say. By contrast, the Postmodern sense is that a text is a mirror by which readers generate meaning. Janet was holding up a mirror to her second graders and encouraging them to generate their own meanings in light of their own images. The irony is that this does not teach a “love of literature,” but rather fosters a narcissistic fascination with one’s own thoughts! If this is how Christians interpret the meaning of the Bible, then we are trapped within our own mirrors — our own set of presuppositions. We are not hearing God’s voice, only our own. We are trapped inside our own heads.

http://www.boundless.org/features/a0000825.html

I would heartily recommend Walt’s article and the three follow-up articles.

Within the Christian community we might look at how we view and understand the text. Do we look first at “what it means” (i.e. what was the author trying to say) before looking at “what it means to me” (i.e. application), or do we open the text and look for a message that is unrelated to the historical and contextual meaning.

I have studied interpretation for decades, and have kept abreast of the postmodern turn in culture. Now my son’s experience in his literature class is a living example of the problem. A University English Professor self-consciously separating a text from its author and its historical situatedness. The text was totally independent of the author and meant whatever the reader wanted it to mean. The current technical term for this is “reader-response;” but by whatever term, the text as a medium of the communication of cognitive content, using this method of interpretation, is dead. Employing a “reader response” hermeneutical philosophy there can never be any self-transcendent understanding. We as readers construct meaning out of whole cloth rather than learning from or even understanding that an author had something s/he wanted to tell us. We are, to use Walt’s words, “trapped in our own heads” unable to hear the message of an author, and if we are reading the Bible, unable to hear the voice of God in His Word.