The Metamorphosis of Meaning
We must stop giving nineteenth-century answers to sixteenth-century questions and try to give twenty-first-century answers to first-century questions.
– N. T. Wright
What is the nature of meaning? Does meaning live in the plane of the author, the text, or the reader?
We’re learning about speech act theory in class, which distinguishes between locution (the actual words in a text), illocution (the communicative intent of the writer), and perlocution (the author’s desired or intended response from the reader). The point is, meaning is not simply a matter of the words on a page, but what they exist there to achieve. Successful communication only occurs when not only the words, but the intent and response of the author is comprehended.
The closer the speaker and listener, the easier communication is: I know my husband so well, we have so much history and proximity in life stage and circumstances, that when I say something, he generally knows what I mean. It’s a little harder with my teenager: she may be using a phrase from popular culture that I misread. Moods and circumstantial context may lead her to hear something I never intended to imply.
Then you have the Bible, where I picture the journey of meaning through time looking something like this: an event occurs. Time passes between that event and when an author writes about it. Meaning exists in that author’s mind, then within the words on the page. Time passes, then the reader encounters that text, and meaning exists within the mind of that reader. It travels further as the reader passes it along through speech, actions, or more writings.
At each point along that journey, there exists different (sometimes vastly different) kinds of culture, geography, language, literary genres and forms, and sociopolitical conditions. There exist various interplays and dialogues between event and author, author and text, reader and text. These layers of context exist in both a broad sense, and sometimes in a way that is specific to a particular cultural moment.
“To the extent that the reader construes the text as the author intended, successful communication has taken place.”
The point is: meaning does not exist in a vacuum. It metamorphosizes. The goal can never be to isolate meaning as if it were a cell one could culture in a sterile petri dish, but rather to enter into the various worlds and dimensions within which it exists. Therein lies the thrill of Biblical interpretation, because in many ways entering worlds different from ours challenges us to see things outside of our habitual frameworks of perception in a way that is good for us. But therein lies the challenge, because the process can be unintuitive and even threatening, as we lay aside assumptions and preferences in order to seek with intention and openness what the author is saying. Because that is the ultimate goal: what is the author intending to communicate?
And so, I imagine Biblical interpretation like placing my fingers on the text and tracing it back, back to the world it inhabited at the time of its inception, when it was first birthed from mind to matter in the hands of its author. I peel back and examine my own set of assumptions and assertions, I enter into those of the author’s mind and world, before tracing my way back to see what the significance of it might be today.
