Presence, Absence and the Authority of Scripture

1
Presence, Absence and the Authority of Scripture
2
The Presumption of Presence

• Scripture is authoritative for the Church
• A text that means nothing or everything cannot
  function authoritatively
• The recent deregulation of meaning may be taken
  either as threat or as opportunity
• Both those approaches which claim too much, and
  those which claim too little, effectively tame
  the text

3
Recognising the readers contribution to meaning

• The event of meaning is shaped in part by what
  the reader brings to it.
• The readers response is not to the meaning it
  is the meaning (Fish)
• More moderate versions see the text as offering a
  framework for interpretation, but leaving gaps to
  be filled in by the reader
• Meaning thus a joint venture

4
Determinate readings

• BW III Meaning resides in the text and is
  placed there by the author by means of his or her
  configuration of its words and phrases.
• Wolterstorff meaning is something which
  sentences have, although they may be used in
  various ways to generate distinct sense.

5
Fowls under-determinedapproach

• We should stop speaking of meaning, and ask in
  each case of the use of a text how it is being
  used.
• This involves relativising the significance of
  the authors contribution
• Is this necessary in order to secure what he
  wants to secure?

6

• Will the distinction between meaning and
  significance hold?
• The personal coefficient can never be eradicated
  from our attempts to discern the original sense
• BUT texts are the products of intentional acts
  of communication, and we cannot relegate the
  question of this intention to an accidental or
  incidental significance.

7
Meaning as an event

• Meaning is an event with a transmitter and a
  receiver, as well as a text and something to
  which the text refers.
• Both transmitter and receiver contribute
  something important to the event, but not evenly.
• The basic shape and direction are contributed by
  the transmission which the receiver seeks to hear
  and under-stand.

8
Taming the text

• Overly objective approaches think they have the
  texts meaning, and thereby risk closing
  themselves off from its otherness and authority.
  
• Indeterminate readings mistake the elusiveness
  of presence for absence. They too effectively
  relocate authority from the text to the reader
  (or community).

9
The genius of language

• Language (hence texts) both provides sufficient
  stability for genuine communication to occur, and
  sufficient instability for language to refer us
  to a world of experience which is complex, ever
  changing and open-ended.
• The biblical text furnishes a given to which we
  have a moral obligation, but also speaks to ever
  new and changing contexts.

10
Reading in the Spirit

• A Christian reading of the text as Scripture must
  presume not just the presence of the human
  authors voice, but also the presence of Gods
  speaking through the Spirit.
• The Spirit is not an aid to getting at the
  meaning of Scripture, but is himself God in his
  relatedness to us in the event of meaning through
  which he addresses us.

11

• In the presence of this same God, who is the same
  yesterday, today and forever, the gaps between
  differing cultures and times fade in their
  significance.
• In the Spirit we read, and this breaks the text
  open because it was in this same Spirit that the
  text was produced, and to which the text itself
  refers us.