Conclusion
Although we can speak of the original cultural horizon shared between a text’s ideal author and audience without addressing the more controversial question of authorial intention, the current debate on this subject invites some attention to this subject as part of this discussion. Here I contend that seeking to understand the ideal author’s textual design helps us better understand how to discern, and therefore how to accurately reapply, the message that shaped the text.
Those who read Scripture enough recognize that inspiration normally used, rather than obliterated, different biblical writers’ distinctive vocabularies and styles, even in the books of the prophets. This observation has serious implications for hermeneutics. Scholars may argue whether it can ever mean more than what it originally meant to its authors (the debate often centering on definitions of “meaning,” sometimes as well as what it originally meant to whom ), but we should not expect it to mean less than that. 1 Those of us who believe that God knows the future will affirm that God surely intended implications beyond what the authors imagined, perhaps especially in prophetic literature. But since God normally inspired the authors to write in their own vocabulary and style and in the language of their culture, that is the surest place to start.
Emphasis on authorial intention has both supporters and critics, noted below. Although some current theories of literary interpretation reject the priority of the author’s historical intention as the “intentional fallacy,” most do not rule out the validity of this historical question, 2 recognizing the author’s intention as at least one level of meaning, especially for those with historical interest. 3
Well before postmodernity, formalists studying poetry warned against limiting artistic value to a text’s meaning in the original historical context. Significance, they argued, lies in the text and not in the author. 4 These are, however, primarily aesthetic considerations. Seminal challenges to authorial intention did not, despite widespread citation to this end, dismiss interest in authors or historical criticism. They merely distinguished them from the different approach of poetic studies, 5 arguing that it is more valid to ask what an author might have thought rather than what they did think. 6 Notably, Wimsatt and Beardsley, in their widely cited seminal work against authorial intention, applied their critique only to aesthetic, poetic texts; they viewed communication as successful only insofar as readers accurately inferred authorial intention. 7
Advocates of paying attention to the original meaning of a passage usually appeal to the intention of the passage’s author. Whenever we read texts as communications, we try to reconstruct what the author was trying to communicate. 8 If a text is encoded in a particular language and culture, we can seek to decode it to understand it before reencoding it for a different language and culture. 9 If one takes a completely reader- or hearer-oriented approach to communication, this exclusive or excessive emphasis on the reader’s understanding can lead to a situation in which readers find offense or feel insulted about a remark and often cannot accept an author’s explanation of what he or she really meant. 10
As an author, I hope that you understand what I am saying, and I work to try to facilitate that understanding. I presume that readers of good will seek to understand my books; I expect even more fully that my students will seek to understand my syllabus, since there are serious consequences for misconstruing my intentions. Because I believe that God inspired the biblical authors to communicate his message, I am interested in understanding what those texts communicated in the settings in which they were framed. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, not English, Spanish, or Chinese. Likewise, because I believe that God inspired the biblical authors to communicate his message, I am further interested in how I can respond to the heart of that message today, by means of analogy and in keeping with the original principles informing these models.
A conversation affords us direct communication. When we read ancient texts for meaning, we move to what relevance theory identifies as a secondary level of communication—hearing what an author was saying to a different original audience; even if the author wished for an audience as wide as possible, 11 the author would rarely envision one in a different culture and era for whom some of the text’s allusions might not be intelligible.
Yet if we seek to hear the wisdom of those texts, we must be willing to grapple with those allusions, which requires presupposing, to the extent possible, the ancient context. Normally the particularities of the text invite us to consider what the author that may be inferred from the ancient text was communicating to the ancient audience. Whatever else we might suppose that a text could mean in a different context, a text’s range of potential receptions will normally mean no less than what we can observe that it was designed to communicate in its own general social and linguistic context. If, for example, the Stoic philosopher Seneca commented on an earlier Stoic thinker such as Chrysippus, it was often because he wanted to learn from (or cite the authority of) that thinker’s wisdom. Yet Seneca was normally interested in what that thinker meant historically, and was therefore ready to criticize him if he disagreed. 12
If authors design texts to communicate, one goal of the ideal audience for which the text was designed will be for them to understand, insofar as possible, what the text’s author apparently wished to communicate. 13 (How readers evaluate the communication in practice may depend on their relationship with the text and with its author.) Thus if we put ourselves in the place of the text’s implied readers, this is what we shall seek to hear.
In academia, we like to simplify complex issues and complicate simple ones, but outside academia, we would normally consider listening to the author as common sense. If we believe that Paul would be the best person to explain what he wrote in his letters, we are interested in Paul’s intention; that is why scholars comb Paul’s other letters to help understand what he was communicating more than we explore Shakespeare or Dickens to do so. 14 Likewise, narrative critics normally read Acts in light of Luke’s Gospel more than in light of Mary Shelley or Isaac Asimov.
The closest we can come to a normative foundation for other readings is what the Spirit inspired the biblical authors to say to the contexts they originally explicitly addressed—the audiences in whose languages they wrote, and whose situations they cared about and sometimes referenced. Whatever else meaning includes, it must include at least what these inspired authors sought to communicate to their audiences. Insofar as we hear texts as communications, it should matter to us what the author was trying to communicate.
As noted earlier, the Spirit usually communicated through these authors’ individual styles rather than a cosmic voice—prophetically rather than the heavenly voice at Mount Sinai. Of all people, those who, with Paul, value the gift of prophecy should understand that, for most of us, the Spirit does not usually produce a prophetic trance in which we cannot remember what we say; rather, the Spirit inspires our faculties and works through them (1 Cor 14:2–3, 32; Rev 1:19). 15 We may not always recognize the full implications of what we are saying to a recipient, but we do recognize that prophecies usually come in our own style, just as those of Isaiah, Jeremiah or Ezekiel reflect their respective styles. (God even used a special title for Ezekiel, “son of man” [NRSV: “mortal”], that he did not apply to others.) 16 Certainly Paul’s letters reflect his style, his reasoning with his audiences and so forth; the Spirit most often works through 17 the author rather than in spite of the author.
Authorial Intention in Premodern Exegesis
Earlier, in chapter 8, I noted the premodern interest in original meaning; here I note premodern interest specifically in authors’ meaning. Some critics associate commitment to discovering authors’ intention with “an Enlightenment rationalistic hermeneutic” 18 or “the historical-critical method.” 19 Attention to the intention of the inspired writers, however, figured prominently in evangelical hermeneutics well before evangelicalism made peace with historical criticism. 20 Indeed, interest in authors’ intention even predates the Enlightenment.
Some scholars, in fact, argue that authorial intention is the oldest hermeneutical approach, “and almost the only viewpoint available to the writers of the Bible.” 21 To some extent this verdict may depend on genre: ancient hearers reveled in collected stories in mythography and used psalms and hymns for praise. Many considered inspired poetry to be from the gods rather than the poets’ minds, 22 although later critics sometimes accused poets of misrepresenting the gods. 23
Nevertheless, it is certainly true that ancient thinkers studying and commenting on earlier works frequently asked the same sorts of questions that we do today, questions involving authors’ style, historical context and the like, as noted in the previous chapter. These questions often included authorial intention. 24 Obviously that was true of prose narrative, letters and the like, but it proved true also even of epic poetry such as Virgil. Poirier helpfully cites Augustine’s hermeneutic as seeking to discern the authors’ thoughts and thus God’s will. 25 Certainly second-century fathers looked askance at gnostics reinterpreting the Bible based on their extrabiblical ideas. 26
Although historically people normally have read communications with the interest of discerning the author, scholars often associate the ideal of authorial intention in twentieth-century criticism with Eric Donald Hirsch. His critics are harsh and sometimes dismissive, accusing Hirsch of turning back the clock regarding current trends. 27 Nevertheless, whenever trends change, previous trends become unfashionable, and that will include trends now current. Indeed, because there is “nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9), “old” ideas regularly return to fashion, often repackaged as new ones.
Partly for that reason, but particularly because my interest in Christian reading is in hearing the inspired texts, I find most helpful approaches that provide insight into the production of the texts as we have them. Some have critiqued evangelical and Pentecostal scholars who support authorial intention as being Hirschian and thus behind the times, but authorially focused scholars have generally adopted elements of Hirsch’s argument because of their interest in grounding our reading in Scripture, which came to us first as ancient texts. 28
Hirsch traces the historical banishment of the author 29 that succeeded the more necessary banishment of early positivistic biases (with their focus on causal patterns) and postromantic fascination with feelings. 30 Ultimately, however, he believes the process climaxed in critics usurping the author’s place as arbiters of meaning. 31 He grants that authors’ views change over time, but he contends that the meaning the author invested in a text does not change (thus an author’s occasional need to qualify views earlier expressed). 32 He also acknowledges that not all attempts to communicate prove successful. 33
Yet the author’s meaning remains a legitimate goal of interpretation, he argues; authors who did not believe this would ordinarily not attempt communication. 34 Indeed, even those who argue that authors do not control texts’ meaning do not imply that the author is irrelevant to texts’ meaning. 35 They recognize that texts do not exist without authors and historical contexts, although they also include the history of subsequent readings (what biblical scholars might call reception history) under the widened rubric of a text’s “meaning.” 36 Meanwhile, Hirsch also affirms significance beyond authorial intention, which I will note below.
Some of the debate may be semantic, differing over the choice of elements included in the label “meaning.” Thus, when we speak descriptively of a text’s “meaning” in this wider sense, we may wish to define the context in which the text is being read; the question for us when reading Scripture prescriptively for the church is: which level(s) of meaning is/are our ideal objective?
Pentecostals and Authorial Intention
Among Pentecostals, a minority of scholars dispute the value of seeking the author’s intention. Nevertheless, seeking authorial intention remains the majority view among Pentecostal scholars, as its detractors recognize. 37 Pentecostal scholar John Wyckoff, whose dissertation addressed pneumatic hermeneutics, for example, contends that Scripture is the final authority only if the authors’ “original intended meaning,” as opposed to the perspectives of the readers, is determinative for all other possible valid ‘meanings,’ ” in which he includes what many prefer to call “applications.” 38
Many recognize Gordon Fee’s seminal role in the wider academic discussion of Pentecostal hermeneutics. 39 Fee has argued that “Exegesis by definition means that one is seeking an author’s own intent in what has been written”; the meaning is in what the author intended to communicate. 40 Fee concedes that deconstruction is right to note the limits on our ability to reconstruct and on our objectivity, but he argues that these caveats do not diminish the goal of understanding the author’s intention. “After all, every one of those who argue against me at this point are very intentional in their writing, and would (rightly so) take great exception to me if I were to misconstrue their words in the same way they seem willing to treat the words of the biblical writer.” 41
Some criticize Fee and others for highlighting the importance of the author’s intention. 42 Fee, however, grounds his interest in authorial intention in Paul, who did not appreciate the Corinthians misunderstanding his letter (1 Cor 5:9–10). 43 Likewise, Fee notes that Paul qualifies his meaning in Phil 3:12, showing that he wants to communicate, and wants his audience to care about, his true intention. 44
The same approach to Paul’s letters could be expanded beyond the examples that Fee offers. For example, some Christians in Thessalonica may have misinterpreted Paul’s insistence on the imminence of Jesus’s coming (1 Thess 5:1–3). A worldwide day of judgment was foreign to Greek thought, and some apparently “contextualized” Paul’s message wrongly, believing that the future day of the Lord had already come (2 Thess 2:2). Paul corrects such misunderstanding by reminding them of his teaching, thus appealing to authorial context (2 Thess 2:3–5; cf. 1 Thess 5:4–5). 45
As noted above, we normally read in this way communications—including letters—as a matter of common sense. It is no coincidence, however, that Fee is especially a Pauline scholar and that authorial intention functions particularly clearly in letters, which typically name authors and function as direct communications to their readers or listeners. Intentions are sometimes more difficult to recognize in some other genres, especially narratives of various kinds. 46
Implied Authors and Limits in Ascertaining Authorial Intention
Inferring an author’s intended meaning is not the same as the older, romantic psychologizing approach of reconstructing the author’s feelings or thoughts. Authorial intention as inferred from texts differs from the author’s inaccessible “thought processes.” 47 We have no infallible access to an author’s mind; technically we may speak more plausibly of what the text appears designed to communicate, given our limited knowledge of the author and the author’s and ideal audience’s contexts.
Following Umberto Eco, some value the text’s intention for limiting interpretation but distinguish this textual intention from the intention of the author. 48 But as Dale Allison suggests, “once we acknowledge ‘the limits of interpretation’ (Umberto Eco), it is all but impossible to define those limits without taking into account a work’s original historical context,” in which Allison includes coherence with what we can reconstruct of an author’s intention. 49
The method that one uses for interpretation depends on one’s goal in interpretation. Hirsch argues that there is nothing self-evident in texts that requires a universal norm, unless that norm is what the author meant when composing the text. 50 Here postmodernists will demur, doubting that any universal, validating norm is necessary to begin with.
In later work, Hirsch admits that he tied meaning and normativity too tightly to the author, but he appeals to widely shared ethical considerations to support listening to the author as a person distinct from us as readers. 51 The ethical consideration merits more than dismissal as a last line of defense. For example, Gordon Fee lambasts the travesty of an interpreter who twisted Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol, inverting its meaning to suggest Scrooge as a positive character and Bob Cratchit as a negative one, the opposite of what Dickens intended his story to communicate. 52
Norms are not in fact necessary for all interpretive tasks (especially descriptive ones); for those whose objective is hearing the voice of sacred documents, however, a foundation is necessary at the level of production and not merely at the level of various historical receptions. Those documents are in turn more fully understood when we take into account the formative context (shared between originating authors and audiences) that informs them, shapes their choice of potentially valuable content and presentation, and that they therefore necessarily assume.
The modern objection that the author’s intention is unrecoverable, while strictly speaking true with regard to attaining sophisticated levels of certainty, raises the bar too high for historical inquiry. All historical endeavor is necessarily conditioned by probability, and scholars often make probable inferences about the implied author from the text’s literary strategies in their originating context. 53
While intention is not fully recoverable, however, in texts that function as instruction it does make a difference whether one construes the intention of a passage, say, as irony, or as straightforward instruction, 54 contrary interpretations that the words could receive in settings other than their first ones. Other approaches that do not focus on the author and the author’s context (“unconscious constraints” on the author) often include it as at least an element of meaning. 55
We might express in a more nuanced way this interest in approximating authorial intention, given the limitations of evidence available to us. Strictly speaking, we cannot infallibly reconstruct an author’s intention; nevertheless, this limitation does not prevent us from examining the text’s design and inferring from such strategies relevant aspects of the text’s implied author’s interests. 56 The approximation is imperfect but usually sufficient for communication to work. 57
Some who object to the language of “authors” emphasize an “implied reader”; 58 an implied author mostly simply projects the textual interests in the other direction. The “implied reader” can help us hear the text as addressed to its first horizon, thus making it particularly useful in hearing the designed message of the text. 59
The debate today is not whether authors provide a factor in meaning, but whether they control it. The answer we give depends largely on how we define “meaning.” The meaning of “meaning,” as with other terms, is determined by its usage, and scholars often talk past one another by using the term in different ways. The author’s influence is minimal insofar as “meaning” includes all possible readings, with the authorial proportion of influence increasing when the range of accepted uses of “meaning” is constricted.
If our interest is original meaning, however, the author’s agendas are maximal to the extent that the author communicates optimally for the “original” context. For those who value the text in its current shape as authoritative, rather than simply the text as a useful mine of symbols for our agendas or traditions of interpretation, “original” meaning certainly remains a valuable goal.
Of course, we cannot perfectly reconstruct the original meaning. We have access neither to everything authors thought nor to the full original contexts that they assumed their ideal audiences shared, the information needed to fill lacunae in secondary communication. But whatever else a biblical text might mean, it usually means at least what it meant to the inspired author, who understood his own language, idioms, and cultural allusions better than we do. Offering historical reconstructions as responsibly as possible (given the limits of the evidence and our own horizons) is a reasonable objective that need not be discounted simply because it cannot be perfectly achieved.
Our goal, then, remains to hear the design of biblical works (a literary approach) in their ancient context (a culturally and historically sensitive approach). The latter element invites us to take into account everything we can know about that ancient context, including whatever we know about the author’s thinking. Thus, for example, we can read Paul’s vocabulary in light of his use of terms elsewhere, as well as in light of how that term was used in the contexts of early Christianity, Scripture, and more widely in Greek sources. This observation invites us to use both literary and historical approaches (chapter 10).