To explain how the same words can be bearers of different speech acts
when addressed to different people in different circumstances, Wolterstorff
uses the following example. A child in despair that Christmas will never
come is comforted by her mother, who says, “Only two more days till
Christmas.” 27 To her husband, however, the message is something like
“Get off your duff and fi nish the Christmas shopping you promised to
do.” 28 The same words, but two different speech acts, one of comfort,
another of exhortation.
It is useful to compare the situation in which Mom knows that Dad
will overhear her from the one in which he does so without her knowing.
In the former case, we can say that she intends both speech acts. In the
second case, she intends only the speech act of comfort, and the word of
exhortation transcends the immediate world of her and her child. I think
it is fair to say that in Wolterstorff ’s double hermeneutic, God is in the
fi rst situation, knowing who subsequent readers will be and what their
situations will be. The meaning of Scripture doesn’t go beyond the inten-
tions of God as author. The human authors of the Bible, by contrast, are
in the second situation, not knowing what subsequent readers will rightly
fi nd in their texts. This means that subsequent readers might rightly hear,
on the basis of the text, a speech act not intended by the human author,
which is what we discover by grammatico-historical exegesis. Of course,
Dad would be misinterpreting Mom if he took her to be saying, “Since
there are two more days before Christmas, you don’t need to worry about
your shopping until late tomorrow evening.” He has no “anything goes”
license.
I think a good example of this double hermeneutic is found in the
apostle Paul on slavery. It would be a real stretch (or worse) to suggest
that when Paul spoke about slavery in Galatians and Philemon, he meant
and his intended readers would have understood that it was their Christian
duty to oppose the institution of slavery and work for its abolition. Yet
later Christians came to believe on the basis of their biblical faith that they
should do just that. Rather than accuse them of an “anything goes” rela-
tivism because they heard God saying to them through Scripture what
none of the biblical writers or their original audience anticipated, we are
more likely to think that on the basis of our biblical faith we should work
to abolish those forms of slavery, economic and sexual, that continue
today. Former President Jimmy Carter’s book A Call to Action: Women,
Religion, Violence, and Power makes just such a claim. 29
26 M. WESTPHAL