Does the Text Have Meaning?

Introduction

The previous four lessons have addressed questions about the canon's authority, formation, and theological foundation. But there is a question that logically precedes all of them — a question that many students of the Bible never think to ask but that increasingly shapes how the Bible is discussed in academic and popular settings: does the text have meaning?

This may seem like a strange question. Of course the text has meaning — that is why we read it. But in the world of contemporary hermeneutics (the theory of interpretation), the question of whether texts possess stable, determinable meaning has been hotly contested for more than half a century. An influential school of thought argues that texts do not have inherent meaning; meaning is created by the reader, shaped by the community, and always unstable. If this view is correct, then the entire project of canon studies is transformed: the Bible does not contain a fixed message that the church must faithfully transmit but is a collection of texts whose meaning shifts with every new reading community.

This lesson examines the major positions in the debate over textual meaning, engages the postmodern challenge to stable interpretation, and argues that the question of meaning must be settled before the question of canon can be meaningfully addressed. If texts have no inherent meaning, then it does not ultimately matter which texts are in the canon. If texts do have meaning — meaning grounded in the intention of their authors and, ultimately, in the intention of God — then identifying the right texts and reading them faithfully becomes a matter of the highest importance.

The Traditional View: Authorial Intent

For most of the church's history, the answer to "what does this text mean?" was straightforward: it means what the author intended it to mean. The goal of interpretation was to recover the authorial intent — the meaning that the original writer sought to communicate to the original audience. This does not mean that every text has only one application, but it does mean that every text has one basic meaning: the meaning its author intended.

This view was articulated with particular clarity by the literary theorist E.D. Hirsch in his landmark work Validity in Interpretation (1967). Hirsch distinguished between meaning (what the author intended) and significance (the text's implications for different readers in different contexts). Meaning is stable and determinable; significance varies with context. A text can have many significances — it can speak to many different situations in many different ways — but it has only one meaning, rooted in what the author intended to communicate.

For the Christian tradition, the authorial intent model has a theological dimension that goes beyond ordinary literary interpretation. Because Scripture has a dual authorship — human and divine — the "author" whose intent we seek includes God himself. The human author's intent is important and is the starting point of responsible interpretation. But the divine Author may have intended meanings that exceeded what the human author fully grasped. This is what theologians call the sensus plenior — the "fuller sense" — a meaning that becomes apparent in light of later revelation. When Isaiah wrote about the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53), he may not have fully understood how his words would be fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. But God, the ultimate Author, intended that meaning from the beginning.

The Postmodern Challenge

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, a series of philosophical movements challenged the traditional understanding of textual meaning in ways that have profoundly influenced how the Bible is read in academic settings and, increasingly, in popular culture.

The Death of the Author

In 1967, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes published a famous essay entitled "The Death of the Author," arguing that the meaning of a text is not determined by its author's intention but by the reader's interpretation. Once a text is written, it is released from the author's control, and its meaning becomes whatever its readers make of it. Barthes was not making a modest point about the difficulty of recovering authorial intent; he was making a radical claim that authorial intent is irrelevant to the meaning of the text.

Deconstruction

The philosopher Jacques Derrida went further, arguing that language itself is inherently unstable. Meaning is always deferred, always slipping away, always dependent on a chain of references that never reaches a final, fixed point. Texts do not contain meanings; they contain traces of meaning that are endlessly reinterpreted without ever arriving at a definitive reading. Deconstruction — Derrida's method — aims to show that every text undermines its own apparent meaning, revealing contradictions, assumptions, and exclusions that destabilize any claim to a single, authoritative interpretation.

Reader-Response Theory

Reader-response theory, associated with Stanley Fish and others, shifted the locus of meaning from the text to the reader. Meaning is not "in" the text waiting to be discovered; meaning is "created" by the act of reading. Different readers will create different meanings, and no reading is more "correct" than any other — there is no neutral, objective standpoint from which to adjudicate between competing interpretations. What determines meaning is not authorial intent but the interpretive community to which the reader belongs. Fish's crucial claim is that texts do not constrain interpretation; rather, the interpretive strategies that readers bring to the text determine what the text "means."

The Implications for Canon

If the postmodern critique of meaning is correct, the implications for canon studies are devastating. Consider the consequences:

If texts have no stable meaning, then inspiration becomes meaningless — there is nothing to be inspired, because there is no determinate content for God to communicate. If texts have no stable meaning, then canonicity becomes arbitrary — it does not matter which books are in the canon, because no book has a fixed message to preserve. If texts have no stable meaning, then orthodoxy becomes a power game — doctrinal boundaries are not faithful interpretations of an authoritative text but impositions of one community's reading over another's. If texts have no stable meaning, then preaching becomes performance — the preacher is not delivering God's word but constructing one meaning among many with no claim to privileged truth.

This is not a slippery slope argument. These are the explicit conclusions drawn by scholars who have applied postmodern hermeneutics to biblical studies. The Bible becomes a "site of meaning-making" rather than a source of meaning. It becomes a mirror reflecting the reader's concerns rather than a window into divine reality. The canon becomes a cultural artifact rather than a divine gift.

Responding to the Postmodern Challenge

The postmodern critique contains genuine insights that should not be dismissed. It is true that readers bring presuppositions to texts. It is true that interpretation is influenced by cultural context. It is true that no reader achieves perfect objectivity. These are legitimate observations that should produce humility in interpretation — a recognition that our readings are always partial, always in need of correction, and always benefited by dialogue with readers from other times and places.

But the leap from "interpretation is influenced by the reader" to "meaning is created by the reader" is a leap that neither logic nor experience supports. Several lines of response deserve consideration.

The Self-Refuting Character of Radical Reader-Response

The claim that "texts have no inherent meaning" is itself a claim that expects to be understood in a determinate way. When a theorist argues that all meaning is reader-constructed, they expect their own argument to be understood as they intended it — not as something that the reader is free to reinterpret in any way they please. The postmodern position performatively contradicts itself: it uses stable, author-intended meaning to argue that stable, author-intended meaning does not exist. If the theory were true, there would be no reason to read the theorist's own work — since it has no meaning until the reader creates one.

The Evidence of Ordinary Communication

Every functioning human society depends on the reality of stable textual meaning. Contracts are enforceable because they mean what their authors intended. Traffic signs communicate successfully because their meaning is not created by each individual driver. Medical instructions save lives because patients can recover the meaning their doctors intended. The postmodern claim that texts have no inherent meaning is refuted every time a stop sign successfully communicates "stop." If ordinary texts can communicate stable meaning, there is no reason in principle why ancient texts — including biblical texts — cannot do the same.

Speech-Act Theory

The philosopher J.L. Austin and, more recently, the theologian Kevin Vanhoozer have developed speech-act theory as an alternative to both naive realism and postmodern skepticism. Speech-act theory holds that language is not merely descriptive but performative — that to speak or write is to do something: to assert, to promise, to command, to bless, to warn. Meaning is grounded not in abstract linguistic structures but in the communicative actions of persons.

Vanhoozer applies this framework to Scripture in his magisterial work Is There a Meaning in This Text? (1998). He argues that the meaning of a biblical text is the communicative act of its author — what the author was doing in writing those words. God, as the ultimate Author of Scripture, performs communicative acts through the human authors: asserting truths, making promises, issuing commands, offering consolation. These communicative acts have determinate content that readers can recover — imperfectly, yes, but really. The goal of interpretation is not to impose meaning on the text but to receive the communicative action that the Author has performed through it.

The "Bible Doesn't Say That" Phenomenon

A contemporary manifestation of the meaning debate deserves specific attention. In recent years, a genre of popular biblical commentary has emerged — particularly on platforms like TikTok and YouTube — that specializes in telling audiences that the Bible "doesn't actually say" what they think it says. The format typically involves a scholar or content creator correcting a common evangelical reading by appealing to the original languages, ancient Near Eastern context, or critical scholarly consensus.

Some of these corrections are genuinely valuable. Evangelicals do sometimes misread texts, ignore context, and proof-text irresponsibly. The original languages do sometimes reveal nuances that English translations miss. Ancient Near Eastern context does illuminate passages that are otherwise opaque. Responsible biblical scholarship — including critical scholarship — is a gift to the church, and Christians should not be afraid of it.

But there is often something subtler happening beneath the surface. When someone says "the Bible doesn't say that," they are frequently doing more than correcting a bad reading; they are replacing one reading with another while implying that only the new reading counts as what the text "really" says. The rhetorical move is powerful: it positions the critic as the objective, linguistically informed reader and the traditional Christian as the naive, uneducated one. But in many cases, the critic is not merely providing linguistic data; they are smuggling in a contested interpretive framework — a set of assumptions about what the text can and cannot mean — and presenting the conclusions of that framework as though they were neutral facts about the text.

The deeper issue is this: if texts have no inherent meaning and all readings are community-constructed, then the critic has no grounds for saying the Bible "doesn't say" anything — because on their own theory, the text has no determinate content to either say or not say. The very act of correction presupposes that the text has a meaning that can be gotten right or wrong. This is a tacit admission that the postmodern framework, when applied consistently, collapses under its own weight. In practice, even those who deny stable textual meaning rely on it every time they tell someone their reading is wrong.

Why This Matters for the Rest of the Course

The question of textual meaning is not a detour from canon studies; it is its prerequisite. If texts have determinate meaning, then identifying the right texts — the texts God inspired and the church recognized — matters supremely, because these texts carry a divine message that must be faithfully received and transmitted. If texts do not have determinate meaning, then the entire enterprise of canon studies becomes an exercise in antiquarian curiosity rather than a discipline of life-and-death significance.

This course proceeds on the conviction that texts do have meaning — meaning grounded in the communicative intentions of their authors and, ultimately, in the communicative intentions of God. This conviction is not naive; it is informed by the best of philosophical hermeneutics (Hirsch, Ricoeur, Vanhoozer), tested against the postmodern critique, and rooted in the theological conviction that God is a communicating God who has spoken through his prophets and apostles in order to be understood.

Conclusion

Does the text have meaning? The Christian answer is a resounding yes — not because we are naive about the complexities of interpretation, but because we believe in a God who speaks. The God who created language, who formed human minds capable of communication, and who inspired human authors to write his word did not do so in order to produce texts that mean nothing in particular. He spoke in order to be heard. He wrote in order to be understood. He preserved his word in a canon in order to give his church a sure and stable foundation for faith and life.

The postmodern critique has done the church a service by reminding us of our interpretive limitations — our biases, our blind spots, our cultural conditioning. These are real, and humility in interpretation is always appropriate. But the appropriate response to interpretive humility is not interpretive despair. The God who breathed out Scripture also sent his Spirit to illuminate it, and the church that reads Scripture in the power of the Spirit — with attention to the original languages, respect for the human authors, awareness of historical context, and submission to the divine Author — can know what the text means, even if its knowledge is always partial, always growing, and always in need of the correction that comes from the wider body of Christ.