Reflection for the Week

While it is true that biblical interpretation is always mediate, indirect, a task of seeking sense, as opposed to immediate, direct, or a giveness of complete sense, a text is never entirely semantically autonomous. Texts are author intended entities, not necessarily enclosed within the psychological constraints of the mind, but opened by a literary act, which unfolds a world out into the world, which a reader's world is then able to engage with. An author’s intentions must be considered as pertinent to textual interpretation as it is communicative actions that set the literary genre for and the content of the text. A search for the meaning of biblical texts, therefore, is to be concerned with what the author has accomplished as an action of communication and then how that arrow of sense points the reader towards a meaningful encounter that will refigure life in ontological, epistemological, and ethical matters, to the glory of God.