Critical Analysis
Wolterstorff opens his book with a reflection on Augustine’s encounter with God in the garden. He frames the entire book as an attempt to answer the question of what happened to Augustine in the garden: did God speak to Augustine in the encounter with the girl or not? Wolterstorff argues that God did indeed speak, but not in the way that people typically think. Rather than speaking words (illocution), God utilized the girl’s words through an illocutionary act. God commanded Augustine to read through the girl’s sing song utterance. Even though the girl did not intend for Augustine to take her statement in the way that he did, God did intend it and thus God spoke. Wolterstorff admits that there are a number of issues with his theory and attempts to address them throughout the rest of his book.
First, Wolterstorff addresses the historical issue that most theologians and philosophers collapse divine revelation into divine speech or discourse. He defines revelation as the unveiling of that which is veiled or removal of ignorance through the presentation of knowledge. Wolterstorff argues that illocutionary acts do not necessarily reveal anything. As an example, he cites Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. In that scenario he argues that though God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, God did not actually reveal anything about Himself, His intentions, or His desire for Abraham to actually do anything. It was a command in pure form unattended by revelation. Due to the unknown nature of the illocutionary act, it cannot be said to be revelation as such.
Additionally, Wolterstorff argues that while revelation requires reception by an “other,” illocution does not. In revelation, there must be a subject for whom true unveiling has occurred. A command, on the other hand, can be given without being heard or understood and still the one commanding is said to have commanded. Communication is necessary for revelation, whereas it is not required for illocution.
Wolterstorff moves on to discuss the possibility that God does not need to audibly say anything to speak; God only needs to be able to engage in discourse. He argues that there are multiple modes of discourse that are open to God that do not involve utterance. First, it is possible that God deputized people to speak on His behalf. God could have dictated mentally a message for a commissioned Prophet to deliver or given the illocution of what He intended to accomplish and let the Prophet craft the words to communicate the message. A second way in which God could speak is through appropriated discourse. In this model, God could have divinely supervised the production of the various stories and narratives that would eventually comprise the books of the Bible. Then, through the divinely orchestrated process of canonization, God appropriated these inspired works as His own discourse. Under this view, the words and works are entirely human and fallible, but God’s illocution is infallibly executed in their appropriation. Additionally, this theory opens up the possibility of multiple meanings of the text as illocutionary acts can do different things to different people in different times.
Next, Wolterstorff attempts to summarize Karl Barth’s doctrine of the Word of God to ascertain whether or not Barth believes God speaks and if so, how. He argues that Barth’s attempt at a three-form Word of God boils down to a single form of the Word of God: Jesus Christ Himself. Jesus, as the divine logos, is the only form of revelation and the only form in which God can be said to speak authorially. He interprets Barth as believing that proclamation and Scripture are only witnesses to the revelation and thus are not the Word of God itself; instead, they are presentational speech. The connection between the witness and the revelation itself is the acknowledgement of the witness through faith. Wolterstorff argues that Barth’s theology about God’s Word and speech was driven by the biblical criticism of his day that demonstrated the errancy of the Bible coupled with Barth’s view that God speaking would compromise His freedom.
Next, Wolterstorff uncovers what he deems to be the foundation of language: the fact that communities ascribe “normative standings” according to normative rules (loc. 1768). Under this view, language is fundamentally subjective, but it is given a degree of objectivity in that the community’s norms are binding on the individuals within a community at a given point in time. He argues that without this framework, all meaning, and language itself, would completely dissolve. However, this presents two problems for God speaking. First, He must be able to enter into the morally binding situation that discourse engenders; and second, He must be able to be the direct cause of discourse.
Wolterstorff deals with the duties and responsibilities of discourse first. He attempts to formulate a modified version of Divine Command Theory to explain how God could engage in speech acts which obligate Him to certain actions and yet not end up with a God bound by those external obligations. In order to plug the hole in the argument, he asserts that there is no act of speech that God could utter that obligates Him in a way that is new to His character. Therefore, any obligation God might find Himself under due to communication is perfectly in line with the obligations He is under due to His nature as a loving God. Thus, God remains immutable.
Second, Wolterstorff dismantles the notion that the laws of nature have essentially ruled out God’s interaction with the universe. To prove this, he argues that the laws of nature are brute facts and that they are probabilistic in nature. Thus, they do not preclude divine intervention, rather they simply dictate what will most likely happen in the case that divine intervention does not occur.
Critical Evaluation
Though Wolterstorff’s theory of divine discourse answers a variety of critical questions, it requires several changes to evangelical doctrine in order to wholly accept it. First, his view on inspiration is adoptionistic. Though he states that the authors of the Bible are supervised by God, he refrains from stating that God authored the Bible. Rather, he puts forward the idea that God appropriates the divinely supervised discourse of man. This means that there could be errors in the locution of the discourse while maintaining the infallibility of the illocutionary ways in which the discourse is being appropriated. This understanding goes against the current evangelical doctrines on inerrancy and infallibility.
Second, Wolterstorff’s comment that God’s illocutionary acts may accomplish different things in different people relativizes Scripture. Even though he states that one cannot leave the bounds of normative ascription of normative understanding when interpreting Scripture, he indirectly affirms that as those norms change, the meaning of Scripture can change as well. The illocutions of God will accomplish different things to different people in different normative environments. This is a multivocal view of Scripture and cannot serve as a solid basis of hermeneutics.
Third, Wolterstorff’s attempt to explain God’s causality of divine speech leaves him in a place where he must assert that the laws of nature are brute facts. This assertion that “some event is necessitated by an event consisting of God’s doing something must be grounded in the brute fact of the existence of a law of nature,” seems to deny God’s creation of the universe ex nihilo (loc. 2633). Whether or not he actually thinks this is unclear as he makes his statement within the bounds of a philosophical argument; however, it would have been better for him to come to a conclusion in a more orthodox framework.
Critical Analysis
In the eighth chapter, Wolterstorff defends his view of authorial-discourse against Ricoeur by pointing out that Ricoeur unnecessarily assumes that written text is more distant from the author than spoken words. Though Ricoeur argues that everything one needs to understand illocution can be found in the text, he also admits that there are elements like genre that are not necessarily present in the text. His refusal to acknowledge these as important is arbitrary. Additionally, Ricoeur ignores the designative content that the author is actually referencing in a text. Using his method, Ricoeur is missing the real connection between the text and the reality that the author intended to connect it to. Finally, Ricoeur’s theory also fails at the point where he tries to assert that the neometic content of sentences is found only within the sense of the sentence. Without knowledge about the circumstance in which the sentence was written, its meaning may not be discernable. Thus, Wolterstorff found that Riceour’s thesis of sense interpretation is insufficient to account for the meaning of text.
Next Wolterstorff discusses Derrida’s theory of language that is rooted in anti-metaphysics. Derrida argues for a form of writing called “archi-writing” in which words are used without attempting to engage in discourse. In his theory, the author is not actually attempting to convey meaning, nor is he attempting to use words in a way that refers to metaphysical realities. Rather, the author attempts to write in such a way that the text can become whatever the reader so desires it to become upon reading it. Wolterstorff argues that Derrida’s method is valid in its appropriate setting (some forms of poetry) but that there is no reason to hold it imperialistically over and above all other forms of interpretation.
After evaluating other theories, Wolterstorff sets forth his method of interpretation, focusing first on mediating human discourse. Under his theory, the meaning of a sentence is linked to the sentence token, not the sentence type. Thus, the meaning is instantiated by the author’s intent in the utterance of the sentence token. Wolterstorff then provides an interpretive framework for determining whether a sentence should be interpreted literally or metaphorically. He argues that all sentences should be interpreted literally unless it is highly unlikely that the literal interpretation is what was intended. In those situations, the metaphorical or tropical meaning is the better interpretive choice. Thus, the difference between metaphorical and literal meaning is in the illocutionary act. Wolterstorff asserts that the illocutionary act can be found in two places. First, the mood of the sentence, which is internal to sentence itself; and second, the literary genre to which the text as a whole belongs. According to Wolterstorff, Genre is the ground rules of literature that a specific community applies to their texts unto a given purpose.
The second half of Wolterstorff’s thesis concerns how one can interpret mediated divine discourse. He argues that the standard assumption in comprehending the divine discourse through appropriation is that God generally is taking the same illocutionary stance as the human author. However, one must apply one’s understanding of the nature and character of God to each interpretive block to make sure that the human illocution and interpretation is indeed something that God could and would say. If, as in one situation Wolterstorff mentions, something stated in Scripture like God having appendages contradicts what one knows about God, then alternative interpretations and illocutions must be considered. Additionally, Wolterstorff agrees with Swinburne that to properly interpret Scripture one must interpret with the entire biblical canon in mind as a unified work. He also admits that it is precisely at the juncture of divine illocution that his theory is open to subjective understandings of the text as the choice of one’s interpretation will ultimately rest on one’s doctrine of God.
Wolterstorff ends the main body of his book with a final reflection on whether humans can be entitled to believe that God speaks to them. He concludes that it is possible for a person to believe that he or she has heard God under the following circumstances. First, the person must have given themselves over to examination for mental illness. Second, hearing from God should be accompanied by what Wolterstorff calls “something uncanny… in one’s experience” (Wolterstorff 5579). This uncanny experience is described as the sudden apprehension of truthful statements, coupled with the inexplicable certainty that those statements did indeed come from God. Third, when the statements are revealed to one’s target community, those statements should be seen as confirmatory to the community rather than out of the ordinary or obtuse. If these premises hold, Wolterstorff argues that it is at minimum reasonable and possible to believe God has spoken.
Wolterstorff ends his book with a section discussing an ahistorical and historical reason to believe that the Bible is indeed a medium of divine discourse. First, he argues that the ahistorical proof of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit is not a good enough proof to designate that one religion’s Scripture is better than another’s. However, he does state that for the individual who has the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, it is often viewed positively and “spiritually satisfying” (Wolterstorff, 5781). Wolterstorff prefers to justify the Bible as divine discourse through grounding the books of the Bible in either prophetic or apostolic witness and testimony. Jesus, as God’s self-revelation, commissioned both prophets and apostles to be authoritative witnesses and to pass down that witness in written form. Thus, only those with direct contact with Jesus and directly commissioned by Him would be able to write Scripture. He argues that the early church accepted this and in response to false teachers affirmed the apostolic authority of the canon.
Critical Evaluation
In Divine Discourse, Wolterstorff has mounted a substantial attack against reader originated meaning of the text and has demonstrated the validity of authorial interpretation. However, he did so by creating a divide between the Word of God written and the actual act of God speaking. Under Wolterstorff’s view, God’s contribution to the written Word of God reaches only as far as his personal illocutionary act and his appropriation of the text for His own uses. God did not author the Bible Himself (dictation), nor did he co-author it (verbal plenary inspiration). As a result, the meaning of the text ultimately resides in the interpreter’s view of God. Though Wolterstorff has rescued the text from the reader through authorial intent, he has not wholly done so. Authorial intent does provide significant boundaries to interpretation, but as soon as one can detect a meaning against the nature and character of God, a plethora of other meanings can be brought to bear.
Similarly, he admitted that his theory is incapable of solving the wax nose anxiety and that an inerrantist view does not solve the problem either. He is correct in his assertion that both groups must resort to their understanding of God to ascertain whether certain interpretations are better than others. However, he does not mention that there is a substantial difference between what might count as attributes of God under errantist and inerrantist views. The inerrantist cannot write off verses of the Bible that describe God as mistakes, he or she must take all descriptive verses as true on some level in his or her development of the doctrine of God. This naturally puts boundaries on theology proper. However, the errantist has a third way option; the verse that describes God could be in error and thus not need to be taken into account when developing theology. In this way, the errantist’s range of interpretive meanings and thus anxiety is greater than the inerrantist.
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