Jacob Moore’s Reviews > Is There a Meaning in This Text? > Status Update

431: Second Vatican Council documents describe the church reading Scripture as the "Pupil of the Holy Spirit." Reformers likened the church to a schoolroom in which believers become competent in the Christian way. Scripture is God's interpretation of reality, summed up in the story of Christ. Christians then have a schoolroom (church), subject (Christ), and a teacher (Spirit). And yes, there is a text in this class.

367: Even to judge against the text's grain, you must first judge with it: receptivity before resistance, competent reading before liberated counterreading, poetics before politics.

335: Eschatology means only that the end is postponed. Interpeters lives this side of the eschaton, and truth outruns interpretation for this reason... This should not disturb us. To be human is to be an interpeter, a communicative agent, a citizen of language. We know things not immediately as angels, but mediately through ... language ... Yet we know enough -- enough to go on reading, to go on with our lives.

237: Ellul is in no doubt about what is at stake: The rupture between the speaker and his words is the decisive break. If a person is not behind his words, it is mere noise. Unless there is something in what we say, we will never be able to witness to what is other than ourselves. And unless we are faithful to what we say, our witness will be null and void. Fidelity to our words exacts a sacred bond.

206-7: The design plan of language is to serve as the medium of covenantal relations with God, with others, with the world... Language is ... a covenant that bestows dignity and responsibility on the agent of language... It is therefore no little part of our Christian vocation to bear witness to the trustworthiness of the institution of language by being responsible authors & responsible readers.

186: Deconstructive ethics amounts to an iconoclastic gesture followed by a shrug of the shoulders... There is no escape from context, no escape from a plurality of possible meanings. Yet, at the end of the day, must we not say, decide, do something? If the responsibilities of the reader are merely negative ... then is it ever possible to move beyond the ethics of prohibition to an ethic of love?

161: Christian orthodoxy believes that God is essentially the one who communicates himself to others in trinitarian fashion. A trinitarian theology of the Word of God conceives of God as author, as message, and as power of reception... The Incarnation ... grounds the possibility of human communication by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to enter into the life of another so as to achieve understanding.

138: Behind these debates about the nature of interpretation lie conflicting visions of what it is to be authentically human. Whether there is determinate meaning in texts is ultimately linked with the question of whether there is determinate meaning to human life... Desire yearns to be free of hermeneutical, epistemological, and ethical constraints... The author's meaning must die so that the interpreter might live.

123 & 126: We are now in a position to to formulate a general rule describing the relation between meaning and metaphysics: textual meaning will only be as determinate and decidable as the conception of reality that it ultimately presupposes... The question, "is there a meaning in this text?" is, in the final analysis, linked to another: "What think ye of Christ?"

105: The "book" us therefore a theological idea, insofar as it implies that there is a single unified meaning and order... to speak of texts rather than books is to effect more than a change in terminology. It is to change paradigms. It is to participate in an epistemological shift as radical as the change from Newtonian to Einsteinian science.