LANGUAGE

THOMAS W. GILLESPIE

3. LANGUAGE

202 CURRENTASSESSMENTS BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND INTERPRETATION 203 of Hirsch that interpretation can achieve probable validation with

regard to the sense of a text if not absolute verification.13 With this concession, however, Ricoeur seems to give back what he has taken away by his advocacy of semantic autonomy. The latter turns out to mean little more than a recognition of semantic ambiguity that is characteristic of all discourse, and, in the case of literature, im- possible to clarify by direct appeal to the author. Here the semantic autonomy of a text is based upon the absence of its author rather than upon a banishment of its author from consideration.

If writing limits the dialogical character of speech, it also tran- scends the situational nature of oral discourse. When meaning is committed to writing, it escapes the immediate and original hori- zons of the author. This impacts the reference of meaning decisively.

For the ordinary ground of reference in our conversations is the common situation of speaker and hearer. We refer to realities which are ostensive, and even when reference is made to inostensive real- ities they can be identified more clearly by the speaker where there is confusion over what he or she is talking “about.” Authors of literature and their readers, other than those originally intended, do not, however, share a common situation. The reference pole of meaning is for this reason more difficult to establish than the sense pole. Fortunately, human beings who do not share a common sit- uation do share a common world. To the extent, therefore, that textual meaning refers a reader to realities which transcend situa- tions and which constitute the world of human experience, it opens up for the reader the possibility of experiencing those realities per- sonally and thus appropriating at a level of fundamental depth the meaning of the text as reference. When that occurs, of course, “ref- erence” has achieved “significance. ” For Ricoeur the referential as- pect of textual meaning is of central importance for interpretation theory, and it will be discussed further when the counterpart of

“meaning” is taken up, namely, “understanding.”

For biblical interpretation, the following results of this exposition of the meaning of “meaning” may be offered in summary fashion.

The Bible is written discourse. It participates fully in the nature of such discourse. The meaning of a biblical text is, therefore, consti- tuted by its sense, its reference, and its significance. Consequently, textual meaning is nuanced according to the particular constitutive element of meaning that is under consideration. The sense of a text is determined by the linguistic conventions of biblical Hebrew and Greek. Meaning at this point bears the sense intended by the author or editor and is a constant. Where the sense of a text is theologically referential, as the Bible is in its witness to God, to Jesus Christ, to

13. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, p. 78.

the Holy Spirit, or to the themes of the gospel, it directs the reader beyond the text itself to the realities attested. The assumption is that such realities are potentially significant to the interpreter.

204 CURRENT ASSESSMENTS

Synchrouic linguistics is focused upon the use of language at one particular point in time. Diachronic description thus depends upon synchronic description, but not the reverse. Parole (speech), in other words, is always synchronic. And semantics, as the science of the sense expressed in speech, is related to synchronic linguistics and is oriented to history for this reason. Semantics takes seriously the diachronic distance between the text and its interpreter, and rec- ognizes the necessity of discerning its linguistic sense within the horizon of its synchronic possibilities. By limiting itself to the orig- inal language world of the text, semantics is virtually synonymous with traditional hermeneutics. The same limitation distinguishes semantics from the new hermeneutics which seeks to bridge the diachronic distance and the situational difference between the text and its interpreter.

The axiom that language functions on the basis of human con- vention has a direct bearing upon the issue of the relation between language and thought. Answers to this question tend to fall into two traditions. Saussure and the majority of modern linguists con- tend, on the one hand, that there is no inherent dependency of human thought upon conventional and accidental differences of morphology and grammar. The same applies to lexicography. The fact that a language system has no word for a particular concept is no indication that the concept cannot be expressed within that sys- tem. It is on this premise that James Barr challenges Thorleif Bow- man’s exposition of the venerable distinction posited by biblical scholarship between Greek and Hebrew thought on the basis of their respective surface grammars. l4 Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Ludwig Wittgenstein argue, on the other hand, that language decisively influences human thought and world- views. Because it comes to expression in language, thought is shaped by the unique language tradition in which it occurs. This is partic- ularly true of human “preunderstanding,” a concept that plays an important role in the interpretation process. The two positions are not, as Anthony Thiselton recognizes, mutually exclusive.15 Citing the conclusion of B. L. Whorf that language is both conventional and influential upon thought and culture, Thiselton argues that the issue of whether language actually shapes our cultural views or merely serues them on the basis of agreements established previously by convention is moot; it can be answered both ways. He thus concurs with Saussure and Barr in their conviction that the structures of language are mere linguistic accidents which do not determine

14. See Barr, The Semantics ofBiblical Language (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 46-79.

15. See Thiselton, The Two Horizons, pp. 133-39.

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND INTERPRETATION 2 0 5 thought, worldview, or preunderstanding. Languages differ, but not absolutely. The differences between them are differences of language uses or “language games” (Wittgenstein). This is what makes all languages inter-translatable. But Thiselton goes on to point out that though these uses are established merely by convention, they do in fact exert influence upon the way human beings see things conven- tionally. Conventionality hands on an inherited language tradition which makes certain questions either easier or more difficult to ask.

Thus it is language use, rather than the accidents of surface gram- mar and lexicography, which conditions thought. Gadamer sum- marizes the point: “If every language represents a view of the world, it is this primarily not as a particular type of language (in the way that philologists see it), but because of what is said or handed down in this language.“‘”

Undergirding the conventionality of language is the reality of a shared world. This, according to the early Heidegger, is the pri- mordial assumption which makes communication possible in dis- course. The sharing of meaning between human beings is not predicated ultimately upon abstract considerations of logic but upon the common world of understanding which has developed among them. “In discourse Being-with becomes ‘explicitly’ shared; that is to say, it is already, but it is unshared as something that has not been taken hold of and appropriated.“l’ Gadamer also emphasizes that a common world is always the presupposition of speech,. For this reason the use of language cannot be altered arbitrarily. Be- cause they live, language traditions do change and grow. They in- fluence human horizons and yet they are not prisons. For through the use of the language tradition fresh experiences and perceptions develop new concepts that come to expression in new language uses.

In this way language use is changed conventionally but not arbitrarily.

This discussion of the conventionality of language has a direct bearing upon biblical interpretation. It compels us to recognize that the surface grammar and syntax of biblical Greek and Hebrew are

“linguistic accidents” which do not determine the way reality is experienced and expressed. Biblical texts are, however, influenced and shaped by the conventional uses of language common to their time and place. The assertion, often made, that the language of the Bible is “culturally conditioned” is thus a truism. At the same time, the conventionality of language warns us not to press the cultural differences between biblical times and our own too hard. For they are not absolute differences. The language uses of Scripture have parallels in the conventions of other languages, including our own,

16. Gadamer, Twth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 399-400.

17. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 205.

206 CURRENT ASSESSMENTS

and it is this linguistic fact which makes them both understandable and translatable.

Corresponding to the question of the relationship between lan- guage and thought is that of the relationship between language and reality. What is the connection between the sense of human dis- course and its reference? T. F. Torrance is probably right in his opinion that the relation of statements to reality cannot be expressed in statementsr8 Yet the question is a crucial one in that it bears upon the way we conceive of truth. For example, if truth is limited to the sense of discourse, it loses touch with the reality of its refer- ence. Both Protestant Orthodoxy and the Rationalism of the En- lightenment fell into this trap. Each in its own way identified truth in language with its propositional or logical content. Hermeneutics in the post-Reformationperiod thus focused upon the grammatical content of biblical texts to the exclusion of their reference. Recog- nizing that speech seeks to convey more than rational content, Schleiermacher and Dilthey oriented the truth of discourse respec- tively to the “psychic experience” and the “lived experience” of the speaker or author. Here the primary reference of language was iden- tified with what Husserl would later call the “intentional act” of the subject. Rudolf Bultmann, following the early Heidegger’s analysis of human-being, similarly viewed discourse as the externalization or the objectification of the existential self-understanding of the speaker or author. His hermeneutical program of “demythologizing”

biblical texts aimed at interpreting the objectifying mythological language of the Scriptures by means of the categories of human existence provided by Heidegger. Truth here is a matter of “au- thentic existence,” which Bultmann equated with faith.

Both this rationalizing and subjectivizing of the truth of language results in a reduction of the fullness of discourse. If in discourse someone says something about something to someone else, the her- meneutics of Protestant orthodoxy reduced the truth of language to the “something” said (or written), and the line of hermeneutics from Schleiermacher to Bultmann reduced the truth to the “someone”

who speaks (or writes). What is missing is the reference of discourse to realities which transcend both speech and its speaker. This omis- sion precludes speech from having its say “about” such realities.

In the hermeneutical reflections of Hans-Georg Gadamer, the use of language is oriented neither to the rationality of the text nor to the subjectivity of the author expressed in the text but to textual

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND INTERPRETATION 207

18. See Torrance, Space, lime and Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), pp. 10-11.

content understood as its subject matter.lg James M. Robinson calls this “an ontological turn” in the discussion.20 In a clever play upon German words, Gadamer focuses attention upon the dialectical re- lationship between the Sprache (speech) and the Sache (subject mat- ter) of literature. By this he wishes to emphasize that in every serious text someone says something to someone about something. The reference of speech is its subject matter. And the subject matter provides the bond between a text and its interpreter. For in the act of interpretation, Gadamer argues, the subject matter “emerges”

(herauskommt) in the interaction between the text and the interpreter.

This “coming-into-language of the subject matter itself” is the ma- terial issue of hermeneutics.

Paul Ricoeur follows Gadamer’s lead in this concern to do justice to the referential function of discourse. As previously noted, textual meaning for Ricoeur is constituted by the sense and the reference of the text. As constituted, the text not only opens up the world of reality to which it bears witness but actually projects such a possible world. The meaning of a text is therefore neither lurking somewhere behind the text in the subjectivity of the author nor in the grammat- ical structure of the text. It is manifest infront of the text. In a word, discourse enables reality to manifest itself to the interpreter.21

It is crucial to note that for both Gadamer and Ricoeur the sub- ject matter or reference of discourse is not merely conveyed by but manifested through the language of the text. To get at this “manifes- tation” function of language, Gadamer traces “the emergence of the concept of language in the history of Western thought.“22 Beginning with Plato’s analysis of the nature of language in the Cratylus, Gad- amer notes that an epoch-determining decision was made here which continues to influence the philosophy of language. Plato chose to view words as signs rather than as images. It is the nature of signs that they have their being solely in their function, in the fact that they point to something else. A sign thus acquires its meaning as a sign only in relation to the thing signified. It is not something that establishes a content of its own. The image, by contrast, does not gain its function of pointing or representing from the thing signified but from its own content. An image is not a mere sign, for in it the Sache imaged is itself represented, caught, and made present. By its resemblance character, it makes present in itself what is not other- wise present. Yet this understanding of the nature and function of the word is thoroughly discredited by Plato. In place of the image

19. In addition to Gadamer’s Tnrth and Method, see Palmer’s Hermeneutics, pp. 194-222, and Thiselton’s Two Horizons, pp. 293-318.

20. Robinson, “Hermeneutics since Barth,” pp. 69ff:

2 1. See Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, p. 92.

22. See Gadamer, Tnth and Method, pp. 366-97.

208 CURRENT ASSESSMENTS

(eikon), he sets the sign (semeion). This, for Gadamer, represents a tragic loss.

Plato considered thought to be silent. Thinking is essentially speechless. It is not dependent upon language. He thus separated thought from language in this radical way and viewed words as mere signs at the disposal of thought. Words refer to something, to the idea or to the Sache intended, and thus bring the Sache into view. Yet here the words adopt a wholly secondary relation to the Sache. They are mere tools of human communication. Gadamer con- cludes that this pragmatic or technological view of language has led to the forgetfulness of language in the Western cultural tradition.

His own position is that language is something other than a mere sign system. It has a resemblance to an image. The word has “a mysterious connection with what it represents, a quality of belong- ing to being.” This is meant in a fundamental way. Language is not wholly detached from the intended Sache. It is not merely an instru- ment of subjectivity. Rather, it has an ideality which lies in the word itself, which is its meaning (or, as Ricoeur would say, its “sense”).

It is meaningful already. Gadamer concedes that language arises out of experience, but argues that experience itself is linguistic. It is of the nature of experience that it seeks and finds words that express it. We seek for the right word, the word that belongs to the Sache, so that in it the Sache itself comes into language. This is not a matter of simply copying. The word participates in the Sache and the Sache in the word, and it is this mutual participation of language and being which makes language something more than a mere sys- tem of signs.

How reality which transcends language can manifest itself through language that attests to it is suggested to Gadamer by Aquinas. The word, according to Thomas, is like a mirror in which its Sache is seen.

What is curious about this mirror, however, is that it nowhere ex- tends beyond the image of its object. Nothing is mirrored in it but this one thing, so that it reproduces only its own image. What is remarkable about this image is that the word is understood here entirely as the perfect reflection of the Sache -that is, as the expres- sion of the Sache-and has left behind the thought to which it owes its existence. The word thus does more than express the mind. It reflects the intended subject matter. The starting point for the for- mation of the word is the intelligible Sache that fills the mind. But the thought seeking expression through speech refers to the subject matter of discourse rather than to the mind which produces it. Thus the word that is the expression of the mind is concerned with the image of the being which it attests. Through the image created by discourse is reflected the reality attested. It is for this reason that Gadamer asserts that in discourse the Sache, the subject matter,

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND INTERPRETATION 2 0 9

“emerges.” The function of language as parole (speech) is not merely to “point” to realities which transcend language, but to “show” such realities. In brief, “saying” is a way of ‘showing.”

Gadamer’s dialectic between Sprache and Sache, in which the sub- ject matter of a text is manifested through its language, has its parallel in Ricoeur’s dialectic between sense and reference in discourse.

Both philosophers provide biblical interpreters with a formal anal- ysis of how the scriptural texts function theologically as a witness to the God who reveals himself to us in his Word. It is by means of the power of the sense of a text to refer us to God. that God continues to manifest himself thr&gh the text. Calvin’s doctrine of the cor- relation between the Word and the Spirit in the interpretation of Scripture assumes the same dialectical functioning of language. As is well known, Calvin taught that in spite of the many rational arguments which may be adduced in support of the belief that the Scriptures are the Word of God, the assurance of their truthfulness comes only through “the internal testimony of the Spirit” (Inst., 1.7.4). His point is not that the Spirit whispers assurances into the ear of the reader that what the text says is true. It is rather that the witness of the text to God is confirmed to the reader by the Spirit of God who manifests himself through this testimony. The following explanation provided in the Institutes scores the point clearly:

Therefore, being illuminated by [the Spirit], we now believe the divine original of the Scripture, not from our own judgment or that of others, but we esteem the certainty, that we have received it from God’s own mouth by the ministry of men, to be superior to that of any human judgment, and equal to that of an intuitive perception of God himself in it.

(ht., 1.7.5; italics mine)

This is the key to Calvin’s own hermeneutical procedure. With re- gard to the exegesis of the epistle to the Romans, Barth once noted

how energetically Calvin, having first established what stands in the text, sets himself to re-think the whole material and to wrestle with it, till the walls which separate the sixteenth century from the first become transparent! Paul speaks and the man of the sixteenth century hears. The conversation between the original record and the reader moves round the subject-matter [Sache], until a distinction between yes- terday and to-day becomes impossible.23

The Sache to which Barth refers here is, in his own words, none other than “the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit.” It is the Spirit of the God who continues to reveal himself in and through his Word that constitutes the theological subject matter of

23. Barth, The Epistle to the Remans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 7; italics mine.