1/3/10

We could apply this hermeneutical rule to many other passages, but I won’t belabor the point. The heart of the issue is that we need to overcome and finally reject the 18th-century notion that the truth of a text is found in the author’s intention. The concept of authorial intention only developed in the Enlightenment and forever wreaked havoc on our reading of Scripture. Instead of distinguishing between the translatable gospel and the historical text, authorial intention reduces everything to what the historical scholar can uncover about the original author’s context and world-view. The result is that the text only comes to mean what we think the original author meant by it. But this is horribly reductionistic and turns interpretation into what Mark Alan Bowald calls “hermeneutical archaeology.” It’s not really interpretation at all. While the emphasis on authorial intention is certainly better than the “fundalit” approach that ignores the historicity of these texts altogether, it is not sufficient as an interpretation of the text. Interpretation is an act of cultural, historical, and conceptual translation. It is a “fusing of horizons,” as Gadamer puts it: the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader. Interpretation is neither “objective” archaeology nor “subjective” anthropology; it is instead a merging of the two within the existential moment of understanding. We become contemporaneous with the prophets and apostles in their witness to the truth, while at the same time the ancient witness becomes contemporaneous with us in our present situation.  – Congdon blog, on homosexuality but addresses ‘authorial intent’ which was a big theme of Sparfam’s paper.