RW Blog

MEANING AND THE WORD OF GOD

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"In my judgment, the most dramatic moment in the entire twentieth century came in 1946 when W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published their article “The Intentional Fallacy” in the Swanee Review. This shot would eventually be heard throughout the century and around the literary world. Most of the careful distinctions this duo made have now been lost in the popular versions of their work, which are now understood to advocate something like this: Whatever an author may have meant or intended to say by his or her written words is now irrelevant to the meanings we have come to assign as the meaning we see in that author’s text! On this basis, the reader is the one who sets the meaning for a text.

This astounding thesis changed all the rules of communication and interpretation. It gave the course for postmodernism, with its attendant methodologies, an enormous boost by setting a literary work free from its author’s affirmations and thought and substituting instead a multiplicity of meanings that were imputed to the work by each and every individual reader! This has become the heart of the integrity issue as the twenty-first century now struggles to see if the word integrity has any meaning left for our day!

From

Biblical Integrity in an Age of Theological Pluralism

Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament

A Guide for the Church

Walter C. Kaiser