'TRUTH' ON TWO HILLS

What Happens When Church and Culture Conspire to Ignore the Meaning of Words

By Bob Wenz

It's been almost nine months since two significant but seemingly unrelated events happened — events symbolized by two separate hills in our nation's capital. The U.S. Senate, in an overnight session, failed to muster a supermajority of 60 votes to break a filibuster over presidential nominations for the federal court bench. As a result, the minority in the Senate stonewalled four seemingly qualified nominees because they were considered "outside the judicial mainstream."

About the same time, despite the pleas and threats of a large minority of its constituency, the Episcopal Church in the United States — whose symbolic "see" is the Washington National Cathedral in D.C. — invested a practicing homosexual with the title of bishop. Although the stories were covered in different sections of the newspapers, the two are closely linked, and much more so than appears on the surface.

The key to understanding the connection is found in the appendix of a new book on preaching. Dr. Walter Kaiser, president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, writes: "In my judgment, the most dramatic moment in the entire 20th century came in 1946 when W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published their article 'The Intentional Fallacy' in The Sewanee Review" (Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament, Baker 2003).

Wimsatt and Beardsley, according to Kaiser's summary, taught that "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 the author's text. On this basis, the reader is the one who sets the meaning for the text." Also called "formalist criticism," this school argued, in short, that paying attention to the author's intentions is a fallacy.

The author first encountered the idea 30 years ago — not in a philosophy class but in a graduate class on literary interpretation. The doctrine had spread from a doctoral committee chairperson influenced by literary critic Kenneth Burke, and within 25 years had reached the colleges educating the baby-boomer generation. Now, a half-century since it was first proclaimed, the Wimsatt-Beardsley doctrine has so thoroughly permeated major social institutions that even the church has not been spared.

THE IMPACT ON CAPITOL HILL

One philosophical stalemate surfaced in the Senate over judicial nominations. Those who may never have heard of the "intentional fallacy" have nonetheless been indoctrinated in what is called judicial activism — the view that the Constitution is a "living document" that must be reinterpreted in each generation according to the needs, wishes, and politics of the day. Judicial activism was the vehicle for finding in the Constitution the rights of privacy and a woman's near-absolute right to abortion. It continually seeks to redefine the very words of the founding fathers, words chosen with care and precision.

As a result, otherwise qualified nominees for federal courts have been quashed on the grounds that they are "outside the judicial mainstream" — a cryptic phrase for describing, for example, people who do not believe that the Constitution provides an absolute right to abortion.

Standing guard on this hill are the "strict constructionists." Viewed as dinosaurs by activists, they regard the Constitution as a sacred trust, continually asking the question dismissed by Wimsatt and Beardsley: What did the authors intend? They seek to interpret the document with a commitment to its truest meaning.

AND ON THE SACRED HILL

A few miles northwest of Capitol Hill, the Washington National Cathedral is set on another hill overlooking the city — a symbolic center of the Episcopal Church U.S.A. Here, a slightly different strain of the intentional fallacy has manifested itself among a people historically grounded in the words of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. The result is that Anglicans all over the world are at war over the elevation of an openly non-celibate gay man to bishop of New Hampshire.

Supporters of the new bishop downplay the matter, insisting that the rest of the church will get used to a gay bishop over time, just as it eventually became accustomed to female priests. But the issue is clearly different — this is not a debate over a secondary theological point. Like the strict constitutional constructionists, Episcopal conservatives divide from the supporters of the gay bishop at deep fault lines.

These conservatives read the Bible and seek to interpret it by determining, as best they are able, the intended meaning of the text. They will not always agree about the meaning of particular passages, but they desire to know and be faithful to the original intent of Scripture.

In the Episcopal Church, however, the effect of "The Intentional Fallacy" can clearly be seen. Those who have embraced this philosophy apply their flawed hermeneutic to important biblical passages that speak of God's judgments over homosexuality — Genesis 19, Leviticus 18, Romans 1:24-32 — and come away saying that homosexuality is good and even blessed by God. Gene Robinson, the newly ordained gay bishop, put it this way: "Just simply to say that it goes against tradition and the teaching of the church and Scripture does not necessarily make it wrong."

This same disregard for authorial intent has been witnessed elsewhere. In March, a United Methodist court acquitted openly gay pastor Karen Dammann of charges that she was in violation of the denomination's laws regarding homosexual practice. The jury said the Methodist Book of Discipline was unclear in stating: "Homosexual practice is incompatible with church teaching." The jury doubted whether those words were intended as a formal declaration of church law.

Among Presbyterians (PCUSA), the pattern continued: Stephen Van Kuiken, former pastor of Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, was convicted in 2003 of performing a same-sex marriage. After the Presbytery of Cincinnati rebuked and removed him, a synod court restored his ordination in February of this year, citing a 2000 decision by the denomination's Permanent Judicial Commission that, while saying same-sex marriages are impermissible, "avoids an outright prohibition by using the words 'should' and 'should not.'" What part of impermissible do they not understand?

MASTER OF WORDS

Evangelicals are seeing the alarming results of this disease in two of the three institutions God ordained — the church and the government. The third institution, the family, is also being dismantled by those in both church and government who have embraced "The Intentional Fallacy" and extended it into postmodernism. The attempts to redefine marriage as something other than the union of a man and a woman for a lifetime are consistent with the implication that words have no intrinsic meaning.

A skeptic once asked: "If God is all powerful, can He make a square circle?" The question points to a categorical impossibility. Yet there are those who would, for the sake of their agenda, give us "gay marriage." Marriage by definition has always involved a man and a woman. Stripped of conventional meaning, words take on the value of junk bonds.

In its front-page story on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision striking down the ban on same-sex marriage, The Washington Post noted that Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall "acknowledged that it was finding in the words of John Adams a meaning that he could hardly have foreseen when he wrote the Massachusetts Constitution 223 years ago."

One must wonder if those who embrace the intentional fallacy grasp the implications of reducing language — including their own — to meaninglessness.

NOTHING NEW

The professor who introduced the author to this doctrine gave a midterm examination. To express disdain for the concept, he simply wrote an answer to a totally different question than she had asked. He received a zero, then used a follow-up visit to her office to challenge her. She told him he had not answered the question she wrote. He responded that once she had written the question, he had no need to determine what she — the author — originally intended. She was clearly angry, because she was not yet, in 1973, a fully postmodern woman. A fully postmodern woman would have found a consistent worldview unnecessary.

Today's postmoderns — from judicial activists to the friends of the gay Episcopal bishop — find in the writings of professor Richard Rorty of Stanford University the essence of the paradoxical postmodern perspective. Rorty argues that what is needed is "a repudiation of the very idea of anything having an intrinsic nature to be expressed or represented" — except, of course, his own ideas. There can be no distinction between a true meaning of words and a false one, because "truth is not out there" — except his truth.

In one sense, Christians ought not to be surprised by any of this. The attack on authorial intent began in the Garden of Eden when the Tempter came to Eve and asked: "Has God really said?"

Wimsatt and Beardsley's article may or may not have been the most dramatic moment of the 20th century, but it was certainly one of a number of events that declared war on the idea that truth depends on words having specific meaning and on knowing with some certainty what an author intended. This is not only a religious issue — the very fabric of our culture is at stake. In both government and church, the stakes could not be higher. These are two hills worth dying on.

Bob Wenz is vice president of national ministries for the National Association of Evangelicals in Washington, D.C., and a professor at Nyack College in New York.