An International Journal for Pastors and Students of Theological and Religious Studies
An International Journal for Pastors and Students of Theological and Religious Studies
1. Introduction
It was not too long ago that Kevin Vanhoozer answered the question Is There a Meaning in This Text? by relocating meaning in authorial intention,1 doing so even more robustly (not to mention, evangelically) than E. D. Hirsch had done.2 The difficulty, however, with any general hermeneutical theory, including speech-act, is that on the surface Scripture's dual authorship seems to fit uncomfortably within any set of interpretive rules, particularly since one of its authors is God.3 While the inherent complexity in and exceptionality of Scripture's authorship are well noted by evangelicals,4 hermeneutical rules are nevertheless still proposed and, quite often, even mandated. In fact, two particular rules are prescribed with some frequency. On the one hand, some evangelicals (as we shall see) suggest that inspiration demands that what one author intends the other must as well. To suggest, therefore, that God could intend more in a text than the human author runs the risk of being labeled hermeneutical Docetism, for such a proposal denies the full humanity of the text. Moreover, many of these same interpreters also suggest that interpretation demands that what one author intends so too must the other. Suggesting that God could intend more in this case runs the risk of being labeled hermeneutical nihilism, for one has removed the only means for interpretive control and stability. Despite the risks, other evangelicals (as we shall also see) are uncomfortable with this line of argumentation and suggest that these rules are ill-fitting, not least because the apostles themselves, they claim, do not seem to be preoccupied with following them.5 These evangelicals insist that our assumptions about general hermeneutics and dual authorship must be open to revision if Scripture and God's hermeneuticians consistently transgress our rules.6
The following essay will seek to enter this debate, freshly sketching the issues involved and seeking to justify these latter assertions, though not absolutely and not by directly exploring the apostles' use of the OT. Rather, the essay will proceed at a preliminary step to that discussion and will argue that (1) inspiration does not suggest that the divine and human authors must share intentions and (2) shared intentions are not the sole means of interpretive stability.
2. Inspiration and Authorial Intention
Two prefatory remarks are necessary. First, Paul introduces the idea of inspiration when he locates the origin of Scripture with God: "all Scripture is God-breathed" (2 Tim 3:16, niv). Peter further notes the method of this work: "Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (2 Pet 1:21, niv). Other texts could be noted; the point is that Scripture signals that its origin involves God and men in a dynamic relationship, so much so, that a passage can be equally said to be from God and the human agent (e.g., Heb 1:6). This relationship is routinely labeled concursive.7 Second, most evangelical interpreters, regardless of their views on shared/unshared intentions, are careful to insist upon the inherent perspicuity of Scripture.8 This insistence requires some basic relationship between the words of the text and the cognition of the human agent; otherwise identifying a text's meaning (not least its language9) would be quite difficult.10 In other words, no one completely denies at least some form of human agency.11 The disagreement centers, rather, on the precise level of this agency.
Returning to our inquiry, some evangelicals do suggest that inspiration implies a level of human agency in which God means no more than the human author means;12 in fact, some explicitly raise the charge of hermeneutical Docetism if the authors' intentions are separated.13 Others are not similarly persuaded, variously suggesting that this "idea of confluence in authorial intention is not a biblical one,"14 that B. B. Warfield cautioned against pressing the incarnational analogy too far, and that other theologians, both past and present, have allowed for divided intentions.15 Douglas Moo speaks for these when he asks, "Could God have intended a sense related to but more than that which the human author intended? I cannot see that the doctrine of inspiration demands that the answer to that question be negative."16 He goes so far as to suggest in another place, "[O]nly if the meaning of Old Testament texts must be confined to what we can prove their human authors intended does . . . a problem arise" for "inspiration and inerrancy."17
These latter interpreters argue their case by suggesting two lines of evidence that point slightly away from a complete equation of divine and human intentions: (1) there are some cases where we should not expect divine and human intentions to be coextensive, and (2) there are some cases where coextension of intentionalities is denied.
2.1 Shared Intentions not Expected
Raju Kunjummen says that because the human author was at times simply a reporter, there is no reason to think his intentions should match God's.18 He lists several instances and reflects particularly upon Moses' relaying of Gen 3:15, a text (now recognized to be) bursting with messianic implications.19 He says, "The meaning of God's words in Gen 3:15 was determined by God when they were spoken [to Adam and Eve]. . . . [Therefore, Moses'] 'authorial intention' is not what determines their truth-intention."20 Vern Poythress agrees, noting "cases of visionary material (Dan 7; 10; Zech 1–6; Rev 4:1–22:5)" and "historical records of divine speech (e.g., the Gospel records of Jesus' parables)." He asks, "Why should we have to say, in the face of Dan 7:16, Zech 4:4–5, Rev 7:14, and the like, that the prophets came to understand everything that there was to understand, by the time that they wrote their visions down?"21
Still, the argument rests upon a minor premise that is difficult to prove:
In fact, this is precisely where some urge caution. For instance, Paul Feinberg, reflecting on Walter Kaiser's warning, says, "[I]t is not unreasonable to think [that our] understanding would be more circumscribed than that of the biblical authors."22 Perhaps this is the tenor of texts such as John 8:56 and others. Nevertheless, there does seem to be something to this argument, particularly as it relates to the prophetic visions noted above, both because such visions speak of future realities (of which only God is fully aware) and because prophetic language is often highly symbolic.23
2.2 Shared Intentions Denied
Those arguing against fully shared intentions also adduce a handful of texts that they claim specifically predicate some level of ignorance of the human author. The most often cited are Dan 12:6–12 and 1 Pet 1:10–12, the latter occurring in nearly every discussion of this sort.24 The germane section of this text says,
Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow (niv).
Kaiser, an advocate of the single-intention paradigm, suggests that the prophetic ignorance mentioned in this text relates only to the temporal implications of OT prophecies. He insists that the prophets' search "was not a search for the meaning of what they wrote; it was an inquiry into the temporal aspects of the subject, which went beyond what they wrote."25 To this Elliott Johnson responds, asking what happens when the temporal referent itself is the meaning of the prophecy as, for example, in Dan 9:24–27. He says, "It seems clear that Daniel was ignorant of the date of 'the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem,' even though he wrote about it. So it must be that Daniel wrote more than he understood."26
What makes this matter more complicated is that meaning is something of a catch-all for several components, namely sense, referent, significance, and implication.27 As such, some advocates for shared intentions will concede that the prophets did not, in fact, always know to whom their prophecies referred; still, these will also insist that the prophets shared with God the sense of what their prophecies said about the unknown referent.28 In other words, not all who argue for shared intentions require that all the components of meaning be shared. In fact, none requires the complete sharing of a text's significances29 and implications.30 The key disagreements turn on whether God ever intends (1) fuller (or more) referents and (2) a fuller sense (a sensus plenior).31
Making matters still more complex is that the distinction between sense and referent is somewhat artificial. That is, normally, as Kaiser notes, "the two are identical"32; therefore, it is difficult to speak simply of an expanded referent without simultaneously talking about an expanded sense, though certain cases of a merely expanded (or narrowed33) referent are nevertheless frequently suggested.34 While some do suggest that the fuller meaning later texts find in earlier texts singularly results from such expanded referents, this too is disputed. The most compelling counterexample is the NT's descriptions of Jesus using OT yhwh texts. For instance, in Rom 10:13, Paul uses Joel 2:32 to speak of the availability of salvation in Jesus: "Everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord [yhwh] will be saved" (niv; cf. vv. 9, 11). Paul does not appear simply to identify a referent of which the OT author was unaware.35 Rather, as Moo notes, "there is no evidence either from Joel or from 'antecedent theology,' that the prophet would have intended his words to refer to Christ . . . . The meaning of the word Yahweh . . . is being expanded and, implicitly, more precisely defined by Paul."36
In short, while inspiration denotes human and divine agency, the level of the former does appear to be occasionally variegated and this in a variety of ways (i.e., involving both expanded senses and referents). The question that remains is whether objective criteria exist for validating interpretation in such cases where the divine meaning is not coextensive with the human author's intentions.
3. Interpretation and Authorial Intention
Here a preliminary remark is again necessary. Most admit that completely severing the intentions of Scripture's authors introduces the potentiality of massive amounts of subjectivity, effectively undermining the grammatical-historical approach. In other words, not only is the human author necessary to underwrite Scripture's perspicuity, but he is similarly necessary to validate our interpretations. How can the interpreter identify, for instance, verbal definitions if not by an appeal to a semantic domain available to the text's human author? Moreover, what else may prevent arbitrary (not to mention anachronistic) readings if not the human author and his context?
This potential for subjective and/or arbitrary interpretations has indeed led some to suggest that positing unshared intentions necessarily affects interpretation adversely. Kaiser, for instance, says that a
work like the Bible can have one and only one correct interpretation and that meaning must be determined by the human author's truth-intention; otherwise all alleged meanings would be accorded the same degree of seriousness, plausibility, and correctness with no one meaning being more valid or true than others.37
Earl Radmacher claims that "hermeneutical nihilism" inevitably follows if we "separate the words of the text from the [intentions of] the author." In fact, doing so, he insists, will result "in multiple meanings and thus no 'meaning.'"38 Some disagree. Peter Enns suggests that a desire for control is actually what "incline[s] evangelicals to try to find some other way of explaining apostolic hermeneutics."39 Douglas Oss goes so far to say that problems arise "if we contend that the NT writers had a univocal view of meaning in texts and used only a narrow, so-called scientific, twentieth-century-style, historico-grammatical exegesis in determining what that single, one-dimensional meaning was."40
While Moo is surely right when he says that the "difficulties created by a theory are never sufficient to falsify that theory, if it is well-enough established on other grounds,"41 we must nevertheless explore whether the difficulty of interpretive validity without the assumption of shared-intentions is as great as those arguing for shared-intentions indicate. Here we will (1) explore the role of the canon as an alternative criterion for interpretive validity and (2) briefly illustrate how at least one phenomenon in the NT implies such a criterion.
3.1 Canon as Control42
Most of those who allow for fuller meaning suggest that such meaning is controlled (validated) by the canon's trajectory (i.e., progressive revelation),43 an approach that variously describes the relationship between the OT and NT as an acorn to an oak tree,44 a bud to a flower45 or a seed to an apple,46 among others.47 Darrell Bock puts it this way:
Progressive hermeneutics argues for stability of meaning while also honoring the dimensions that dual authorship brings to the gradual unfolding of promise. The literary-theological argument is that God reveals the outworking of His promise gradually as Scripture unfolds its meaning and introduces new promises and connections.48
He says later: "Often promises by their nature show their outworking by how God responds and directs as time passes. Intention becomes revealed through subsequent action and disclosure."49 Even those who advocate shared intentions, albeit expanded referents, suggest a canonical control. For instance, Paul Feinberg says, "Where a promise or prediction is expanded or amplified, the amplification is justified in the text itself or in antecedent theology or both. This grows out of the belief that God has a unified plan and that plan is known to him, even if he reveals it to his creatures progressively."50
The justification for this approach is that progressive revelation's fuller meaning depends on the occurrence of events—whether the historical identification of a known/unknown (or fuller) referent, the historical fulfillment of a previous promise or the historical filling up of a now-identified type or shadow.51 In other words, the obliqueness of old revelation is almost entirely due to the fact that new events were necessary before clearer revelation was possible. Moo concludes similarly, noting that in this approach
appeal is made not to a meaning of the divine author that somehow is deliberately concealed from the human author in the process of inspiration—a "sensus occultus"—but to the meaning of the text itself that takes on deeper significance as God's plan unfolds—a "sensus praegnans." To be sure, God knows, as He inspires the human authors to write, what the ultimate meaning of their words will be; but it is not as if he has deliberately created a double entendre or hidden a meaning in the words that can only be uncovered through a special revelation. The "added meaning" that the text takes on is the product of the ultimate canonical shape—though, to be sure, often clearly perceived only on a revelatory basis.52
3.2 Mystery and Canon
This dependence on further revelatory insight is implicit in Paul's understanding and use of the term mystery. As D. A. Carson notes in a recent essay, Paul's category of mystery suggests simultaneously that what he finds in the OT is really there, but also that what he finds was hidden until Christ's advent and consequent revelatory insight.53 Carson discusses several occurrences of mystery (1 Cor 2; Rom 11:25–27; 1 Cor 15:50–55; Rom 16:25–27; et al.), in each demonstrating that "the content of [the] mystery is a component, perhaps even an entailment, of the Christian gospel, and . . . the basic ingredients are grounded in Scripture itself,"54 while at the same time each is "something that has been hidden in times past, and now revealed."55 He refers to this paradoxical phenomenon quite appropriately as something "hidden in plain view"56 and observes that the hiddenness operates on two axes. First, the mystery "was hidden salvation-historically,"57 and second, it was (and is still) hidden "to the person without the Spirit (1 Cor 2:14)."58 Both, he suggests, demand revelation and in both there is "moral culpability" for incorrect perception.59 He then adds, "In the wise providence of God the first of these two forms of hiddenness, that which prevailed across history until the coming of Christ, so worked in and through and behind the culpable blindness that the passion and resurrection of the Messiah was brought about simultaneously by human sin and by the wise plan of God (compare Acts 2:27–28 with 1 Cor 2:7–8)."60 "This is why," he says,
Paul's handling of the Scriptures, as penetrating as it is, can never partake of scholarly one-upmanship. He is never saying to his Jewish peers, 'You silly twits! Can't you see that my exegesis is correct? I used to read the Bible as you still do, but I understand things better now. Can't you see I'm right?' Rather, while insisting that his exegesis of the old covenant Scriptures is true and plain and textually grounded, he marvels at God's wisdom in hiding so much in it, to bring about the unthinkable: a crucified Messiah, whose coming and mission shatters all human arrogance, including his own . . . . Unless one simultaneously preserves the mystery and fulfillment, then both the sheer Godhood of God and the despoiling of human pretensions are inexcusably diluted.61
The significance of these observations is simply that textual meaning went beyond the OT author's intentions, and necessarily so. If this is denied, we risk, as Carson notes "draw[ing] the lines of continuity . . . [too] tightly,"62 and potentially spoiling the mystery. Thus, while interpretation depends on the existence of overlap between the divine and human authors, its stability does not demand complete overlap.
4. Conclusion
We may therefore reaffirm that neither inspiration nor interpretive validity demands an unvarying degree of human agency in the production of Scripture. A few lines of evidence, namely, certain genres of revelation and a few specific texts, suggest that inspiration does not require that the divine and human intentions be absolutely coextensive. Moreover, shared intentions do not seem to be the only appropriate means for hermeneutical stability; the completed canon and the progressive revelation it comprises proves sufficient for the interpretive task when necessary. Still, the evidence adduced does point, by and large, to exceptional instances. Thus, the instincts behind the warnings of hermeneutical Docetism and nihilism are well-intentioned and nearly right, even while the charges themselves sketch boundaries Scripture itself admits are not quite precisely drawn.