Protecting Sola Scriptura from Sophism, Part II: Arguing from Authorial Intent

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.