May 28, 2008
If you care about the author’s intention, you have to follow his rules, not yours.
Opponents of postmodernism often judge texts according to what they would’ve meant, not realizing this is the self-creation of meaning they deplore.
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Abraham,
I agree that we cannot read into the text what we want to see. But aren’t postmoderns more likely to do that? Aren’t they more likely to ignore the rules of exegesis that enable us to restrain our own biases as we interpret literature.
Steve
Is this something that you run into often? Or were you just musing?
Great point.
Steve,
Perhaps people happy in their postmodernism read into a text more often, but they admit to it. That makes it much more palatable to me than doing it and claiming we’re not.
Rebby,
I run into it almost every time I read an anti-postmodernist’s review of anything he disagrees with.
For example, every negative review I’ve ever seen of Rob Bell or Donald Miller, interprets their words to mean what the reviewer would have meant if he’d written them.
And, of course, since the reviewer would never in a million years write anything like Velvet Elvis or Blue Like Jazz, then they must be full of heresy.
Yes, but if the author’s intentions are not clear to the reader, that is the author’s and not the readers fault. My experience is that the “rules” of most postmodern authors are moving targets. Clarity and thoroughness is the responsibility of the writer to his readers.
Now where did I put that soapbox…..?
Abraham,
Have you read Why We’re Not Emergent? I am currently reading it (on Chapter 3) and feel that they strive to understand the PoMo’s and to be fair.
Steve
We do have to have some place for the fact that words mean things, and some words may mean things that are bad, even if the author doesn’t mean everything we might think he means.
(Maybe worn-out) example: Bell says he believes in the Trinity, and I believe him. But in Velvet Elvis he basically argues that the Trinity isn’t a necessary doctrine– “it stretches,” or something like that. (Never mind that he bases that on a Dan Brown-esque understanding of the development of the doctrine.)
He doesn’t seem to intend to, but if words mean anything, Bell says that the Trinity isn’t necessary to how we think of God. Of course he’s not trying to be theologically precise, so we shouldn’t judge him as though he were writing a systematics text, but still: it seems to me that the plain meaning of his words leaves no other interpretive option.
HI Abraham,
I’m trying (and failing) to follow you here!
When you say:
“Opponents of postmodernism often judge texts according to what they would’ve meant, not realizing this is the self-creation of meaning they deplore” I have difficulty in understanding what you mean by THEY.
When you write “they would’ve meant” do you mean to signify “what the texts would have meant” or “what the opponents of postmodernism would have meant”.
Also, when you say “they deplore” who is doing the deploring?
As to the general title – I agree with the proposition, that you have to engage with the writer on his own terms, as otherwise you end up with projections à la Humpty Dumpty…
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
http://www.sundials.org/about/humpty.htm
–
SINCERE IGNORANCE AND CONSCIENTIOUS STUPIDITY
http://blog.myspace.com/CAUGHTNOTTAUGHT
Ed,
The antecedent of both theys is “opponents of postmodernism.”
And if the author’s intention is to be our guiding light in interpretation, then actually Humpty Dumpty is right.
If Humpty Dumpty is the author and his intention is what we’re looking for, then how he uses his words is all that matters.
Part of the allure of writers like Bell and Miller is that they remain ambiguous enough to stay ‘cool’ and ‘non-fundamental’, yet they try to affirm what they safely can in order to remain Christian. Because their strength is in their ambiguity, they will always be misunderstood.
To read every word and every definition and exposition as they write them would result in fully agreeing with them. We cannot evaluate an author’s work as they intend when our basic presuppositions are different. If we admit this, then aren’t we being intellectually honest as well?
[...] Abraham Piper weighs in on some of the shortcomings of Christian modernity… in 22 words: Opponents of postmodernism often judge texts according to what they would’ve meant, not realizing this is the self-creation of meaning they deplore. [...]
Mickey,
You’re saying, if I understand correctly, that the author’s intention can’t always the best guide in interpreting a text.
I agree with that.
My concern here is when we disregard the author’s intention and then continue maintaining that his intention is what matters to us most in our interpretation.
I’d agree that the intellectually honest thing to do is to just say directly, “I’m not mainly concerned with what the author meant here.”
Interesting post.
A couple thoughts:
1. I’ve always seen the value of the “post-modern” outlook as foregrounding our biases and helping us be self-consciously aware of it in the midst of the interpretive task.
The sad reality is that “exegesis” is governed by a set of rules that are established PRIOR to the interpretive task.
Thus, said exegesis is really the formalized biases of the particular community that has developed their particular interpretive rules. (i.e. histo-grammatical, etc. etc.)
yes! i quite agree. particularly applied to Don Miller books and the like. i’ve read quite a few reviews and left thinking, “i know he SAID that, but i do not think it means what you think it means” (inigo montoya style). i also agree that sometimes authors’ ambiguities or diction choices hurt the reader, but that that is a separate issue from our task, which is not to read
Abraham,
I think that (and in the spirit of postmodernism, I’ll say that I could be wrong:) there is a difference between finding the obvious meaning behind what someone is cleverly & sneakily saying AND employing the deconstructionism that opponents of postmodernism “deplore.”
I think in the case of Rob Bell, if I read 9 statements that he writes that are clearly unorthodox, and then on the 10th statement, he says “Hey, I’m orthodox,” am I then guilty of judging the text according to what I would’ve meant, if I conclude that what he actually means is, “I swear I’m not a heretic despite that other stuff I said”?
It could be discernment and not deconstructionism.
I agree with what Abraham said in the first place.
I think we have to be careful that we receive what he said there when he said “according to what they would’ve meant” as “according to what they intended to communicate” rather than “according to what they intend by way of good will” or some other hokey view of authorial animus.
I am sure (as the example above sort of works around) Rob Bell means well when he says that the virgin birth or some other doctrine is not necessary to have a solid Christian faith — honestly, many sound theological thinkers would say the same thing by saying, “you can be saved even if your theology isn’t perfect because theology doesn’t save: Jesus does.” There’s no question he means to encourage people.
The problem is that deconstructing the truth value of essential doctrines of the faith does not encourage people to something which will benefit them. It encourages them to a bad end whether one believes that or not.
And at the same time, if we say that Scripture is inerrant, but we do not treat is as sufficient, thereby reading it to suit ourselves rather than to be fitted by it, by means of what it intended to communicate, we are not better than Rob Bell. We are, in fact, worse.
If Scripture (truth) cannot be understood transculturally then it can be read and interpreted within any historical and cultural context one chooses. One can say this verse means this (within medieval contexts) and another says no, it means this (early father’s context) and finally one says every interpretation before post modernism has now outlived its usefulness, those interpretations are now extinct historical lessons.
So truth morphs and vacillates with the passing of time and the emerging of every new culture. Truth is no longer the pillar on which everything else is tethered eternally, truth is now moored to the culture and historical context. And if we accept that then we must also accept that the truth we are teaching today will be unacceptable 100 years from today.
In essence, we are not teaching truth at all, we are teaching revelations spawned by our culture and accented by religious terms. But it sure is agreeable to the post modern palate, and after all, isn’t that what we are after? Truth then becomes our servant rather than our eternal landmark with which to sharpen our lives in a desire to please Him who IS truth..
For the record I really liked Blue Like Jazz (which I thought was a fresh approach to Christianity) but I did not like Velvet Elvis which I thought was poorly thought out in regards to truth and doctrine.
I think Rob Bell for instance (who I have a high regard for in regards to teaching ability and living out faith, if not doctrinal precision) is quite clear in regards to trampoline Christianity over what he calls “brickianity.” I just think he’s wrong.
Thanks for this post, Abraham. I would say “preach it,” but that’s not what you’re doing and I like what you’re doing better. Opening up space for some to find offense and some to find words of solace. A little like someone else I know, though not as well as I hope to some day.
Chris: “Yes, but if the author’s intentions are not clear to the reader, that is the author’s and not the readers fault.”
Chris, would you apply this standard to Jesus’s teaching in the context of first century Judaism? Him who has ears to hear, let HIM hear. The gospel can’t always come out straight and propositional.
Jake: “He doesn’t seem to intend to, but if words mean anything, Bell says that the Trinity isn’t necessary to how we think of God. Of course he’s not trying to be theologically precise, so we shouldn’t judge him as though he were writing a systematics text, but still: it seems to me that the plain meaning of his words leaves no other interpretive option.”
Jake, you can REALLY believe in the reality of the Trinity and yet ALSO believe that, in the end, because the doctrine of the Trinity had to be formulated over 300+ years, put into the context of the Hellenistic world, and expressed in precise, extra-biblical language in order to put to rest a really pernicious account of Christ, there are elements of the Nicene formulation that are … strictly speaking .. unnecessary outside the context of raging Arianism.
Person. Essence. homoousia.
Extra biblical … therefore … Non essential? But I thank God for those old bishop warriors gathered in Nicea to defend the faith against Arius and his followers, “There was a time when the son was not.”
Rick Freuh:
Rick, what you seem to leave out is the ever presence of Christ in his body and the Holy Spirit our comforter and guide. Yes, our formulations, our “truths” will change with time, with language, with categories, with intellectual revolutions. They have to. But Christ remains. The person of Christ abides. The Holy Spirit is with us to the end of the age. Our propositional truths are as fragile as our language is indadequate and changeable.
Our God is not.
Myrddin – everything you know about Christ has been shared with you through the conduits of truth – words and specifically the Words of Scripture. The cults would suggest the same comforting principle as do you.
There is such a thing as being self righteous, caustic, and mean in defense of truth. There is also such a thing as being benignly complicit.
Thanks for the reply Abraham. I’m not sure that simply saying a word means something when any fule kno it means something else is a just or ingenuous way of proceeding…
Sometimes there is a meaning inherent in the words which is beyond the author’s conscious attention or intention. Thus, a STOP sign never means GO, even if the immigrant putting it up doesn’t speak any English and believes it means just that…
As a critic, I should suggest -
that postmodern reading of texts is wrong to the precise extent that it involves the projection of meaning onto texts – projection being an article of postmodernist dogma -
and that
the critique of postmodernism does not argue that we take the author’s intention to be our guiding light in interpretation, but rather our reasonable judgement about the author’s intention, inferred imperfectly from the clues he has given us.
In other words, an author who writes “black” to mean “white” and “up” to mean “down” is not conveying white and down, but black and up. Word meanings do not often change on an individual or capricious basis. Not if they are to be considered as “words”.
I suspect that this may not be a trivial point, because the essence of a “word” is a communication. To my mind, it becomes less trivial when the bible is under consideration, because Christ himself is called the WORD. He is the ultimate communication from God, a fact which only has significance (and excuse me pointing out the obvious) if it is significant. Humpty Dumpty was written as a satire on that point of view which dissociates meaning from communication.
SINCERE IGNORANCE AND CONSCIENTIOUS STUPIDITY
http://blog.myspace.com/CAUGHTNOTTAUGHT
Christ the Word is infinitely more than a communication. He was/is YHWH Himself. Our lot is to receive the divine condescention in communicative form and through that spiritual illumination both believe on Christ as Savior and follow Him as Lord.
Childlike simplicity as well as fathomless depth. Glorious.
Rick –
It is certainly true that a good portion of what I ‘know’ of Christ has come through propositional conduits, but not all of it … or at least not sufficiently.
With Calvin I affirm:
“Hence without the illumination of the Spirit the word has no effect; and hence also it is obvious that faith is something higher than human understanding. Nor were it sufficient for the mind to be illumined by the Spirit of God unless the heart also were strengthened and supported by his power.”
And I do hold to the words of scripture — most of which are not theologically precise and require considerable narrative contextualization. It is the extrabiblical truth propositions that I am speaking of changing and necessarily. It was necessary that justification by faith take on a new, heightened meaning in the Reformation era. Now it may be necessary that justification by faith take on a slightly different meaning, one that strips away some of the baggage and extraneous extrabiblical emphases that have (quite necessarily) glommed on over centuries of refinement and nuance. We need either a new nuance or a new simplicity to some of these doctrines. Fresh eyes. Fresh ears. Fresh hearts for the Biblical language and the biblical content.
“We need either a new nuance or a new simplicity to some of these doctrines.”
Yes, new hearts of devotion to Christ and His truth. Not new doctrines that downplay and even minimize the doctrine of eternal punishment, not teachings that expand salvation to include sinners that die without Christ, and not new doctrines that brings into question the accuracy and sufficiency of God’s written revelation.
The challenge has always been to take God’s truth, communicate it through post modern conduits, and have it remain unchanged and glorious. Much of the church has not only failed in this, they no longer strive to achieve that goal.
Sophistication, relevant, intellectual, affirmation, and emerging are now the touch words. Historic Christianity continues to be sysytematically dismantled, all of it happening while the church is distracted by the resurgance of humanitarian efforts and the stagnation of the historic remnant.
New is now truth.
Quoting Abraham: “For example, every negative review I’ve ever seen of Rob Bell or Donald Miller, interprets their words to mean what the reviewer would have meant if he’d written them.
And, of course, since the reviewer would never in a million years write anything like Velvet Elvis or Blue Like Jazz, then they must be full of heresy.”
I have only read a few negative reviews of these authors, so I won’t comment on that. But I have talked to some pastors using their material, and when I’ve talked to them about some of the problems I have with certain things they said, the pastor would say, “Well, that’s not what he meant. He didn’t mean that. He meant this.” And I proposed to the pastor that the reason he is taking those statements to mean something biblical is because he is a Bible believing pastor who grew up in a Christian home and is so immersed in the Bible, and because the authors present themselves as Christian, that he is assuming the author’s words have a biblical meaning.
I did not grow up in a born again Christian home, and I went to schools and churches (Kindergarten through college) that taught us that the things in the Bible didn’t really happen. So when I read certain statements by these authors or hear them say certain things in a video that sound so much like the unbiblical things I grew up with, it makes me think that they are dissatisfied with the Bible for what it is and what it says, so they are trying to see it a different way. If they mean what my pastors are saying they mean, then they should just say that.
I think that Bell, Miller, and Erwin McManus, just to name a few, are very gifted writers and speakers, but I am so disappointed that they characterize faithful, dedicated, courageous, loving pastors and missionaries as “bricks” and things like that. I’m grateful for people who were brave enough to tell me the truth about Jesus and the Bible. I realize that some Christians were/are legalistic and mean–which makes one wonder if they are really Christian. Then they should point that out and not put them all in the same basket. And they should not stir up doubt about what the Bible says. Jesus paid a great price for us. His followers gave up everything–including their lives in many cases–so that we could have God’s Word. So much depends on whether people see the Bible as true and trustworthy or not. They should not cast doubt on things that are true and people who are dedicating their lives to making the truth known.
Thank you for listening,
Chris D.
“New is now truth.”
Well, this of course is not good.
But I fear that when we criticize the church for failing to hold on to “God’s truth,” we throw an awful lot into that category that may not actually have ever belonged there — at least not with the confidence we in evangelical – fundamentalist circles put it in the battle against theological liberalism.
“Sophistication”: hate the term
“relevant”: only in the sense that spirit still speaks and the sprit has always spoken to people in the here and now. God in Christ and the Spirit in the Scriptures are of course difinitive, but our rediscovery of critical truths for our time, of messages in the prophets that are for us now, etc. are essential.
“intellectual”: Hmmm… I only desire want this in contrast to ‘anti-intellectual.’ But even there I would prefer anti-intellectual and full of the spirit to intellectual and dead.
“affirmation”: A contentless term and ‘idea’
“emerging”: I’ve never really understood what this means. Perhaps someone could enlighten me? I’ve read the books, I just still don’t get the term.
“historic remnant”: I certainly ‘affirm’ the idea of an historial remnant surviving within the visible church in a time of serious corruption, but it makes me a little nervous when a particular group sarts using this — especially around a paricular set of ideas or dogmatic formulation. That path has also been mistakenly trod.
All those terms aside, the foundational issue is that the written revelations of Scripture are no longer considered the exclusive reference for truth (doctrine).
*Sometimes this is done openly and with breathtaking honestly.
*Sometimes this is done by a redefining of terms and phrases by tethering them to some previous Hebraic understanding
*Sometimes this is done by a tortured malleability of linguistic meanings
*Sometimes this is done by a structured pragmatism that insults the spiritual essence
*Sometimes this is done by preacher celebrity-ism which not only affords an unhealthy platform, but encourages a continuing search for anything new
*Sometimes this is done through hyper relevantism which takes all truth and stronghandedly removes any transcendent substance.
*And, yes, sometimes this is done by the orthodox church worshiping their doctrines in such a foramlistic, stagnant, and self righteous manner as to encourage others to find new truth.
And in the end, you have a have a giant round table at which any and all doctrinal views are welcomed as legitimate. The heresy goalposts have been moved way back and the theological field now accomodates teachings that were once pervasively considered aberrant and heretical.
And just as Martin Luther nailed his thesis’s upon the door of Castle Church, so must the majority of the blame be placed on the door of the evangelical community. It is our hedonism, our prayerlessness, our complacency, our politics, our doctrinal petrification, and our contentment with the status quo around the world that has lead many of these movements to be birthed.
The genie is out of the bottle now, so instead of us seeking God with unsual prayer and fastings for our own spiritual condition, we will find meaningless edification by stating the obvious in the error of others while ignoring the spiritual elephant in the orthodox village. We are in desparate need of a massive revival that brings the prodigal back to the Father in devotion and sacrifice.
Hypocrisy = One prodigal lambasting another prodigal for being a prodigal.
I think the real contention is that Scripture has never really been the exclusive reference point for truth.
It’s been formally affirmed as such, but functionally it really doesn’t work that way.
“It’s been formally affirmed as such, but functionally it really doesn’t work that way.”
There is always been a subjectivity to processing information, but if there is no unchangeable source of that information, then all you have is subjectivity.
The to make Scripture the exclusive reference point is different than it as such.
The attempt to make Scripture the exclusive reference point is different that denying it as such.
Correction.
But if the attempt is never really able to or fully achieved, then what’s the point?
Nathan – you must by faith accept it is or isn’t achieved. So it’s a faith carousel! Every man believes that which is right in his own heart.
And if the Scriptures are not the exclusive authority, then there is no authority.
[...] of recent concerns (via e-mail) about my calling Chesapeake Community Church a cult, and given Abraham Piper’s recent post regarding author’s intent, here is my working definition for “cult”: “A cult is a group or movement [...]
It’s a shame you don’t allow posts on your own blog, Rick. I would be intrigued to take up some of your barrage, but don’t want to do it on Abraham’s generous 22 words. :-)
I would be particularly interested in hearing your defense (on your blog) of what you could possibly mean by eschewing:
*Sometimes this is done by a redefining of terms and phrases by tethering them to some previous Hebraic understanding
Hebrew audience. Hebrew story out of which the gospel emerged. Jewish Messiah. Maybe I just don’t get what you’re saying. For a self-confessed fundamentalist, this should just be the prerequisite to a healthy historical literalism. What did it mean to the original audience first and foremost? I find it odd that so many fundamentalists become incenses when NT Wright follows their own hermeneutical principles only does them more faithfully.
*Sometimes this is done by a tortured malleability of linguistic meanings
Words are such funny things, aren’t they?
So.
What it meant is NOT what it means now?
I’m confused.
Point of order. I do allow comments on my blog now. They must be without coarse language and with a semblence of understandibility.
What it meant is NOT what it means now?
No, the opposite.
I’m confused.
I concur as a brother. :)