Scripture & Theology

Where I have some evaluative comments of my own to intersperse, these shall be in bold italics.

The importance and value of speech-act theory is the main theme of the second volume. One studies the bible in the light of linguistic and literary turns. The title After Pentecost: Language and Biblical Interpretation (2001) denotes something of a Christian response to the necessary but insufficient analysis of Steiner’s After Babel. Bartholomew helpfully gives the example of Jacob Milgrom’s refusal to countenance the use of anything like metaphor in legal texts of the bible. This stance seems helpful because it brings us to the nitty-gritty of the texts and their exegesis as well as matters such as the concept of revelation and the message of the bible. Batholomew is trying to warn us of the danger of idolatry of the signifier, which he thinks that canonical approach may help deliver us from. But also, with John Milbank, he is aware of the need to see the need for a stop to the chain of semiosis, an infinite regress of meaning: original metaphor implies either a primal personification of metaphor (‘paganism’) or else a primal response to nature as a personal address (‘monotheism’)’ (The Word Made Strange, 106, quoted p 162) . Yet, in my opinion this means too much an attention to God as origin and not enough to the newness of God in creation and in eschatology. As Ricoeur argues (The Rule of Metaphor, 295ff) the traffic is not all one way: metaphor does not just take us up to God but is about God allowing us to see the things of this world in him (cf. Jüngel’s treatment of the parables) A cultural issue is that of the difference between Anglo-American ‘analytical’ approaches and Continental. Language is not over-arched by some extra-linguistic Reason even if it is agreed that the verbum may be subordinate to the res (the covenant between word and world as noted by Steiner, see p155f, who also reminds us of a lack of reverence in many ‘bible as literature’ approaches). Too much deconstruction can lead to a ‘Gnostic’ separation of sense and meaning.

Tony Thiselton thinks that we must as biblical exegetes move beyond explanation to understanding and beyond significance to application. And in a nicely crafted paragraph which undeservedly draws criticism from his respondent (William Oldhausen) for doing just that, Thiselton fuses bible and Tillich: ‘If God is more that an existent object within the world, such poetic creative hymnic forms as ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the earth is full of his glory (Is 6:3) transcends representational, referential, single meaning. In Tillich’s use of the term, we enter the realm of double-edged symbol, which opens up both reality and our own self-hood’ (110)

But before this Vanhoozer has spelled out how the communicative act mediates between the word and the deed. (I am not sure it is good scholarship to try to harness Goethe by saying ‘Goethe roots our thinking about speech acts in theology—Trinitarian theology, to be exact.’) He writes: ‘The question that needs to be asked is whether the incarnation alone exhausts the divine speech, or whether Scripture itself maybe legitimately considered a divine speech act of sorts.’ (5) We move to the concept of covenant (which is nowhere sufficiently unpacked for this reviewer’s liking): ‘Language has a “design plan” that is inherently covenantal’ (10) and ‘The paradigm for a Christian view of communication is the triune God in communicative action’. And if we believe in actions we have to believe in (authorial) intentions. Speech acts have other agendas than transmitting information, that one does something (illocution) or achieves something (effect—perlocution). Promising is the paradigmatic speech act of an illocutionary sort. But surely there needs to be someone promised to, so that such illocutions are also perlocutions–Wirkung.’ Thiselton had earlier pointed out that there is a network of relationality, to which covenantal promises tap in. ‘Whereas Thiselton pays special attention to covenantal promising, I tend to see all communicative action in covenantal terms’ (18). The author has some normative stance towards his words which affect their meaning but also stand to be ignored, refuted, misunderstood. A Habermasian confidence in the ability that to a certain extent we mean what we say. Communicative action means asking for the salt to be passed rather than strategically reaching out for it. So that commmunicative action depends on understanding. As he then says (in trying to unite Habermas with Austin with help from Alston, Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning), ‘The real question is whether perlocutionary acts are essentially strategic rather than communicative’ (28). A perlocution should not happen and cannot really be itself without illocution. ‘The danger lies in thinking about communication, and interpretation, in terms of effects produced on communicants.’ It is this which Thiselton has touched on in his view of Paul as eschewing rhetoric for logic. Of course ‘some illocutionary acts may be associated with texts rather than sentences’ since forms of literature (genres) ‘function like metaphors they are models, indispensable cognitive instruments for saying and seeing things that perhaps could not be seen or said in other ways’ (34f); a generic illocution (‘thrust’?). Thus the canon as a whole is where God’s illocutionary act is to be located. ‘On my view, Barth is partly right and partly wrong: He is wrong if he means to deny that God performs illocutionary acts in Scripture. He is right if one incorporates the reader’s reception of the message into one’s definition of ‘communicative act’—The Spirit is the energy that enables the Word to complete its mission’ (38). Yet Vanhoozer does not allow room for the freedom of the recipient and the whole question of how Providence, both general and special, operates. For Vanhoozer, it is not a ‘perlocutionary’ matter of the bible’s discourse creating another world as Stanley Grenz thinks. ‘Moreover, it is the peculiar role of narratives to display a world. This is an illocutionary, not a perlocutionary act. The Spirit does indeed perform perlocutionary acts; no disagreement here. Yet the Spirit does so only on the basis of the concrete textual illocutions (the content) of Scripture. The Spirit’s creating a world, then, is not a new illocutionary act, but rather the perlocutionary act of enabling readers to appropriate the illocutionary acts already inscribed in the biblical text, especially the narrative act of ‘displaying a world’ (42). And perlocutionary spiritual formation without necessarily understanding it is to be avoided. So that ‘the Spirit speaks in and through Scripture precisely by rendering its illocutions at the sentential, generic and canonic levels perlocutionarily efficacious’: in other words, analogously with the mode of origin of Son and Spirit, it is a case of illocutioque but not of perlocutioque. (sic: illocutioneque/perlocutioneque?) This is by far the strongest essay in the collection so far.

In his introduction Bartholomew strongly hinted that the Wolterstorff-Hesse interaction was the heartbeat of the book. Wolterstorff reminds us of the hermeneutical tradition of philosophy that we are always throwing ourselves ahead of ourselves (77), although our anticipations are pre-judgments are shaped by tradition. ‘The interpreting self is always an anticipating self whose anticipations are formed by tradition.’ There is an ontology of sense or ideality which language expresses. Derrida hates to be hoist be his own petard when people would give ‘performance interpretations’ of his text. But authorial-discourse interpretation (what they actually said) is the norm of our everyday discourse, not authorial-intention interpretation (what they intended to say), however: this is a middle way’. God indeed speaks through and as his deputies speak: and what unites Scripture is that it is God’s book…’ The fact that the human authors of Scripture express various false beliefs does not prevent God from nonetheless infallibly speaking by way of what they say’ (85). Enlightenment hermeneutics was about throwing off dogmatic or rule of faith—supremely in Dilthey; a myth. One can try to avoid prejudice at level one (academy) but not at level 2 (church). But, as Hesse points out in the response, where metaphor is part of the literal (stage one) understanding of the text, is that not already spilling over into theology. Rather than moving from stage 1 to stage 2 it might be better to speak of a dialectic between the two in our arriving at the final (or provisionally final) account of the meaning of a biblical text. (Hesse in her response mentions an interesting-looking paper by Fergus Kerr given at the consultation but not published here.)

Two other chapters are especially worthy of attention in this strong set of essays. First, Stephen I Wright’s interaction with Stephen Prickett who has observed that in the C20 miracle has been turned into parable and parable into universal truths. The Romantics were nearer to seeing in the ‘prophetic as poetic’ nature of biblical discourse, ‘a metaphorical quality in language which allows it to speak of a reality outside its own system, to give voice to new disclosures, and to transcend historical distance in order to break into the hermeneutical circle of the past’ (236). Or, ‘the possibility of “disconfirmation” invites a bolder suggestion: that we be ready to see in the Bible a language that not only subverts conventional usage, but also aims at replacing it’ (234). Second, for Neil B. MacDonald, meaning did not dislodge from that of the story to a historical referent during the Enlightenment as Hans Frei claimed. The meaning is the stories themselves. What did change was a faith seeking understanding moving to a foundationalist epistemology where evidence has to be presented under the influence of John Locke. Here MacDonald follows Wolterstorff: such that ‘the belief that the biblical stories referred to and described actual historical occurrences changed from being a basic belief to being a non-basic belief.’ (326) The world of the bible was not like the present world and to be true the former had to be justified on the latter’s terms. Both of these are strong papers, but neither receives a response or interrogation which is a weakness of much of Vol II.