Is There a Meaning in This Text? : The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge
by Kevin J. VanhoozerFormat: Paperback
Pub. Date: 2009-09-01
Publisher(s): Zondervan
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Summary
Is There a Meaning in This Text? is a comprehensive and creative analysis of debates over biblical hermeneutics that draws on interdisciplinary resources, all coordinated by Christian theology. It revitalizes and enlarges the concept of author-oriented interpretation and restores confidence that readers of the Bible can reach understanding. The result is a major challenge to the central assumptions of postmodern biblical scholarship and a constructive alternative proposal-an Augustinian hermeneutic-that reinvigorates the notion of biblical authority and finds a new exegetical practice that recognizes the importance of both the reader's situation and the literal sense.
Author Biography
Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Ph.D., Cambridge University) is Blanchard Professor of Theology at the Wheaton College and Graduate School. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including The Drama of Doctrine and the forthcoming Remythologizing Theology.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. xiii |
| Preface to the Anniversary Edition | p. 1 |
| Preface | p. 9 |
| Introduction: Theology and Literary Theory | p. 13 |
| Faith Seeking Textual Understanding | p. 15 |
| Three parables on reading and reflection | |
| Philosophy and literary theory: from Plato to postmodernity | |
| Meaning and interpretation: the morality of literary knowledge | |
| The three ages of criticism: the plan of the book | |
| Augustinian hermeneutics | |
| Undoing Interpretation: Authority, Allegory, Anarchy | p. 37 |
| Undoing the Author: Authority and Intentionality | p. 43 |
| Authorship and authority: the birth of the "author" | |
| Undoing the author's authority | |
| Undoing the author's intention | |
| Has the Bible lost its voice? | |
| Undoing the Book: Textuality and Indeterminacy | p. 98 |
| Demeaning meaning? | |
| What is a text? | |
| Meaning in Antioch and Alexandria | |
| Textual indeterminacy: the rule of metaphor | |
| Interpretive agnosticism? | |
| Undoing the Reader: Contextuality and Ideology | p. 148 |
| The birth of the reader | |
| The aims of reading: literary knowledge and human interests | |
| Interpretive violence | |
| Power reading and the politics of canon | |
| Undoing biblical ideology | |
| The ethics of undoing: the "new morality" of knowledge | |
| Redoing Interpretation: Agency, Action, Affect | p. 197 |
| Resurrecting the Author: Meaning As Communicative Action | p. 201 |
| The physics of promising: from codes to communion | |
| Dissenting voices: speech rehabilitation | |
| The "what" of meaning: texts as communicative acts | |
| The "who" of meaning: authors as communicative agents | |
| Communicative action and the author's intention | |
| Meaning and significance redivivus | |
| Redeeming the Text: The Rationality of Literary Acts | p. 281 |
| Belief in meaning as properly basic: the nature of literary knowledge | |
| The conflict of interpretations: the problem of literary knowledge | |
| How to describe communicative acts: the norm of literary knowledge | |
| Genre and communicative rationality: the method of literary knowledge | |
| Reforming the Reader: Interpretive Virtue, Spirituality, and Communicative Efficacy | p. 367 |
| The reader as user, critic, and follower | |
| Is exegesis without ideology possible? | |
| Reader response and reader responsibility | |
| Understanding and overstanding | |
| The Spirit of understanding: discerning and doing the Word | |
| The vocation of the reader: interpretation as discipleship | |
| Conclusion: A Hermeneutics of the Cross | p. 453 |
| A Hermeneutics of Humility and Conviction | p. 455 |
| Trinitarian hermeneutics | |
| The verbal icon and the authorial face | |
| Hermeneutic humility and literary knowledge | |
| Bibliography | p. 469 |
| Name Index | p. 487 |
| Subject Index | p. 492 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
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