- We can see this confusion in Stephen B. Chapman, who responds to a
claim about hermeneutical signifi cance simply by noting that meaning-as-
readerly-understanding is always present: “[I]n the widely used evangelical
handbook How to Read the Bible for all its Worth by Gordon Fee and
Douglas Stuart, one reads: ‘a text cannot mean what it never could have
meant to its author or his readers.’ The problem, of course, is that texts
always mean something they never could have meant to their authors and
(fi rst) readers!” (“Reclaiming Inspiration for the Bible,” in Canon and
Biblical Interpretation , ed. Craig G. Bartholomew, et al., Scripture and
Hermeneutics 7 [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006], 183).
- Some readers perhaps noticed that I began this chapter by asking what
meaning “is,” rather than where meaning “lies.” In a broad sense, both
questions are basically the same, but in a narrower sense, there is a bit of a
difference. It is only when considering “Meaning” (as opposed to “mean-
ing”) that the locative version of the question really applies.
- There might be room for doubt, however, in that the fi lm’s working title
(during production) was once The Molten Meteor.
- See James Hoopes, “Introduction,” in Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on
Signs: Writings on Semiotic , ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991), 7. “Triadic relation” is a widespread term
within Peircean studies.
- D. Christopher Spinks, The Bible and the Crisis of Meaning: Debates on the
Theological Interpretation of Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 125 (see 111–114, 171). Kevin Vanhoozer had claimed that
for us to view meaning as something objective necessarily entails that we
assign it to a single locus. While honoring Vanhoozer’s call for something
“objective,” Spinks responded that “a concept of meaning is possible
wherein we are not limited to placing meaning in only one location”
(110). Spinks argues that Vanhoozer’s identifi cation of meaning as an
“emergent property” actually leaves room for a triadic concept of meaning
(111).
- Spinks, The Bible and the Crisis of Meaning , 168 (quoting Hoopes,
“Introduction,” 7; C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce ,
vol. 5: Pragmatism and Pragmaticism , ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934], 448 n. 1 [emphasis
Spinks’]).
- Spinks, The Bible and the Crisis of Meaning , 111.
- See Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the
Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
1998), 249.
- Vandevelde, The Task of the Interpreter , 4.
- Vandevelde, The Task of the Interpreter , 36.
THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE THE INTENTION: ADDRESSING “MEANING”... 79
