Limitations
Author-centered approaches , as previously noted, are limited in that the
author’s intention must be inferred from what he wrote, namely, the text,
based on what we know about the author, the original audience, and their
relationship and respective historical-cultural settings.
Of course, we no longer have access to the author, and we are sepa-
rated by time and cultural differences. With most biblical documents, we
do not even know who the original author was, though Judaism and the
Church have made some traditional identifi cations. It is sometimes dif-
fi cult to achieve a high degree of certainty or precision in setting forth an
author’s intentions. In addition, what we now possess is a canonical text;
for those with a high view of Scripture, it is what the author wrote that the
Spirit inspired, not everything the author was thinking, even at the time
of writing.
Text-centered approaches can ignore the communicative function of
many biblical genres. Even Willam K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley
admit that in practical communication it is essential to infer the intent of
the author. 31 The tendency of these approaches to focus on artistic aspects
is somewhat limiting in reference to biblical texts, which are not pure art;
their artistic aspects are applied art, art with a message. Even literature that
is pure art often contains a mimetic aspect, that is, the world of the text to
some extent refl ects the real world: the story or poem makes a truth-claim
that the real world does or does not work in certain ways.
Reader-centered approaches have been criticized as allowing the text to
mean anything the reader makes it mean, but moderate forms of these
approaches allow the text to exercise a degree of control over the legiti-
mate range of meaning.
Reality-centered approaches must face the problem that to some extent,
reality as we experience it is a construct. Reality is interpreted by indi-
viduals and groups according to their worldviews and systems of thought.
To the extent those worldviews and systems are different, correspond-
ing reality- centered approaches will reach strongly divergent results. In
addition, these approaches can have diffi culty in dealing with literary
conventions. 32
Literature-centered approaches face three problems: fi rst, they some-
times have diffi culty in relating meaning in the text to the “real,” empiri-
cal world 33 ; second, there is a circularity involved in interpreting a text by
means of conventions arising from other texts, which would fi rst have to
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