The discovery of the logical base of the language used by an author is parallel to the discovery of the logic the author is using in order to communicate his intended point within a text. This means that authorial intent is the logical base that must be discovered through the contextual clues that exist within the referential world of the text. Calvin argued, “It is the first business of an interpreter to let his author say what he does say, instead of attributing to him what we think he ought to say” (Preface to Calvin’s Commentary on Romans). As Vanhoozer comments, “The author is the foundational principle in what we might call the traditional metaphysics of meaning. According to this standard picture, the author is the sovereign subject of the sign, the one who rules over meaning, assigning names to things, using words to express thoughts and represent the world” (Is There Meaning in This Text? 40 digital).
Although the idea of authorial intent has been
challenged by postmodern philosophies such as those advocated by Derrida, these
authors defeat their entire movement by communicating their ideas in languages
that assume that their audiences will understand their authorial intent to undo
the idea of authorial intent. In other words, as is the case with logic itself,
the assumptions of its legitimacy must be assumed in order to disprove its legitimacy,
and thus it becomes self-defeating.
Of course, most Christian interpreters will not argue from atheistic worldviews that give rise to subjectivism. They will agree with the idea that one must find the authorial intent of a text in order to discover its original meaning. The question becomes, What is authorial intent?
Authorial intent is the logical base of all communication.
When someone attempts to communicate anything, whether explaining an advanced
idea or asking someone to pass the salt, he attempts to be logically understood
by his audience. He will therefore use language and references within the
audience’s understanding of the world to communicate to them.
What this means is that authorial intent of an ancient
author is rooted in the ancient language of the author and the referential
world of the author, not the language and referential world of the modern
interpreter.
When we come to biblical interpretation, this is often
the most misunderstood concept of authorial intent. The search for authorial
intent is often reduced to what I refer to as “soundslikegesis,” where the
modern reader assumes that because the text sounds like X to him, that is the
intent of the ancient author who may be lightyears away from him in terms of
his language and referential world.
To give an example of this, missionaries often have a
hard time translating the word “God” in Chinese Bibles. The closest word for
God in Chinese, I am told, is the word tao as in the word Taoism.
Of course, the word tao refers to an impersonal lifeforce that pervades
all of creation and is not understood as a personal being. As a result, the
Chinese Christian may read his Chinese Bible and assume what he considers the “plain
reading” of the text, mainly that God is an impersonal lifeforce that pervades
all living things. But the real question is not what the Chinese reader of his
translation thinks the word tao sounds like to him but what the original
word meant to the biblical author and his ancient, religious audience.
Absent of a shared linguistic and referential world,
the words Elohim, theos, “God,” and tao only correspond
to one another superficially. Even in our own Western context, the word “God”
can refer to so many different things that to use the word is to simply be ambiguous
until further referents are added to it by more descriptive words that would
provide a larger context for the purposes of exposing authorial intent in its
use.
This means that the “plain reading” to the modern
interpreter is not necessarily authorial intent, and in fact, is often a method
of eisegesis that ignores authorial intent, since it places the modern readers
referential world into the text by assuming that what the text sounds like to
him is what the author intended to convey.
What this ultimately assumes, then, is that the modern
reader, and his modern world, along with all of the referents that come with
it, is the intended audience the author had in mind when he attempted to
communicate his ideas through the biblical text.
This, of course, is not likely true. In fact, I would
argue that God communicated through these ancient men and their ancient
references so that the entire world would have a key to understanding the
Scripture, perhaps, in times such as ours when its meaning has been reduced to
the subjective whims of the modern reader.
What this all ultimately means is that the key to
understanding the text is authorial intent and the key to understanding the authorial
intent is reference-filled context of the author’s literary work and the author’s
world his words reference.
We will explore the implications of this for hermeneutics
and exegesis, and how one who is being consistent with the logic of language should argue to establish a legitimate interpretation of the text, in subsequent posts.