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

Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, The Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge, by Kevin J. Vanhoozer. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998. Pp. 496. $29.99. Is there a meaning in this text? The answer is yes, but this simple answer belies the complicated trail that Vanhoozer follows to get there. This rich book generally falls into two parts. Part 1 deals with the major issues from literary criticism and philosophy-- especially Derridean deconstruction and neo-pragmatism (R. Rorty and S. Fish)-that challenge the traditional claim that meaning is "in" the text. Part 2 presents Vanhoozer's hermeneutical proposal for the postmodern challenges that are elucidated in Part 1. He defends "the possibility, in the vale of the shadow of Derrida, that readers can legitimately and responsibly attain literary knowledge of the Bible... that there is a meaning in the text, that it can be known, and that readers should strive to do so" (p. 24). Vanhoozer defines the current hermeneutical situation as a "crisis" that, at bottom, is theological. The postmodern emphasis upon the "death of the Author" is actually the death of authorial intentionality in the text, and it entails the impossibility of ever arriving at a discernible meaning. What does this have to do with theology? Just this: postmodern "literary atheism" and "hermeneutic agnosticism," especially deconstruction, is, as Derrida himself says, "the death of God put into writing." The death of the Author and the loss of belief in finding any kind of authorial meaning are theological issues because they cast doubt on any possibility of understanding the presence of God's meaning in a sacred text. These ideas encourage a critic's refusal to recognize the distinction between Creator and creature, text and commentary, author and reader. Against this, Vanhoozer argues that one can arrive at "presence," at meaning, in a biblical text. He bills his project, therefore, as a theological hermeneutics that unabashedly takes the Augustinian approach of "I believe in order to understand." If theology is the heart of the issue about meaning, then the kind of theology one holds when interpreting the Bible becomes a key issue. Vanhoozer argues for a hermeneutic based upon "interpretive Trinitarianism," that is, a God who has communicated its being to humans in a trinitarian fashion. It is particularly in the Incarnation that Christians regard God as "the self-interpreting God" who communicates with the Other (humans). God's primary communicative act, in turn, "grounds the possibility of human communication by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to enter into the life of another so as to achieve understanding" (p. 161). Thus, Augustine's critical fideism opens the literary-critical door for understanding the biblical text as an intentional communicative act of an author that can be understood by readers. Interpretation of the Bible is ultimately a matter of interpersonal communication rather than of conflict and irretrievable meaning (differance). In place of deconstruction and neo-pragmatism, then, Vanhoozer places critical fideism and neo-Reformed theological hermeneutics (A. Plantings, A. Thiselton, N. Wolstertorff), and he shows how the literary-critical bridge to neo-Reformed hermeneutics is a speech-act theory (J. L. Austin and J. …