"Is There A Meaning in this Text?", Chapter 1

Some authors are able to take large issues and condense them into small books. In my opinion, Colin Gunton did that in "Actuality of Atonement." Kevin Vanhoozer has taken a large issue--do texts mean anything outside their encounter with a reader and if so, how does one interpret ethically?--and written a large book. The book is large because Vanhoozer describes the work of deconstructionists and pragmatists vis-a-vis texts (Part I) and then proposes a solution (Part II). Each part is broken into three chapters, with Part II's matching the problem addressed by its Part I counterpart. If you're wondering what all this is about, then the Introduction should put us on the same footing.

Is understanding texts (books, articles, events) a matter of faith or reason or both? Going further, in reading texts, do we see ourselves or do we see a reality outside ourselves? To answer these questions, Vanhoozer starts with Plato. Do words give us knowledge of the world or not? For some, language is a human construct, which means that all interpretation is human construct, as well. And because texts are linguistically created (you can't think of an event without ascribing a word to it!), then interpretation is what originally creates the text. This need not be free-floating interpretation. For example, a "birthday party" cannot be interpreted as "a solemn, bleak affair." But even the event of "birthday party" is socially constructed and its interpretation generated by a particular society. Interpretation, as a result, is not just "recovering verbal messages," because the message itself is socially constructed.

Hermeneutics is the "reflection on the principles that undergird correct textual interpretation" (19). Philosophy has often believed that it sets these principles, but Jacques Derrida shows that philosophy itself is a kind of hermeneutics. In other words, philosophy interprets texts just as much as any other discipline (sociology, psychology, theology, etc.). This means that interpretations are situated and so hermeneutical study involved not only studying the text, but the interpreter. We now see why interpretations create new texts! It's texts all the way down and texts all the way up--theologically speaking. Even God is a text--interpreted and created by our interpretations, used to manipulate and control for the sake of some group, culture, nation, etc.

Vanhoozer does not want to leave the situation so hopeless. He believes in reality, in a reality to which texts testify that is not only the reader of the texts. So, Vanhoozer writes that "literary theory relies not only on philosophical assumptions but on assumptions that are implicitly theological as well" (25). This means that Vanhoozer believes in ethical interpretation, grounded in his (trinitarian) theological commitments. More on this in Part II.

Vanhoozer then lays out the structure of Part I: How does the recent philosophical mindset (deconstruction and pragmatism) treat the (1) Author; (2) Text; (3) Reader?

The point of the book is to ask the (what will soon be obviously) theological question: "Is there a meaning in this text?" Vanhoozer points to the answer he will give: there is a meaning that is other than the reader and that is connected to the author's intention.