Standing for the Truth on Two Hills

What happens when church and culture conspire to ignore the meaning of words
By Dr. 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 reats of a large minority of its constituency, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America-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 politics and the religion sections-the two stories 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.

I first encountered the idea 30 years ago --not in a philosophy class but in a graduate class on literary interpretation. This idea came through a professor who had been "infected" by her doctoral committee chairperson, who in turn had been influenced by literary critic Kenneth Burke. Twenty-five years after it was first presented, formalist criticism's hostility toward an author's intention had spread to many of the colleges that would educate the baby-boomer generation.

Now, a half-century since it first was proclaimed, the Wimsatt-Beardsley doctrine, along with its children, is so widely accepted that it has tainted nearly all major social institutions-even the church.

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" or the names of Wimsatt and Beardsley have nonetheless been indoctrinated in what has been called judicial activism. Judicial activism regards the Constitution of the United States as a "living document" that needs to be reinterpreted in each generation according to the zeitgeist—the milieu of needs, wishes, and politics of the day. Judicial activism was and is the vehicle for finding in the Constitution the rights of privacy and a woman's near-absolute right to abortion. It seeks continually to redefine the very words of our founding fathers, words that were chosen with the same care and precision with which they were written with quills by hand on parchment. We cannot, judicial activists argue, really know what the founding fathers meant, and even when we do know, that intent is secondary to our current situation.

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 the absolute right of abortion. The message is clear: If you don't believe that the Constitution protects a woman's absolute right to make reproductive choices, you are "out of the mainstream" because you oppose the "law of the land" (as expressed not by legislation but by case law determined by five of nine justices at a particular point in time).

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 of the Constitution intend? They seek to interpret the document with a commitment to the truest meaning of integrity.

And on the Sacred Hill

A few miles northwest of Capitol Hill, the Washington National Cathedral is set on another hill overlooking the city. It is a symbolic center of the Episcopal Church U.S.A. Here, a slightly different strain of the intentional fallacy has been manifested among a group of people who historically were established on 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 high-profile, but otherwise secondary, theological point (secondary in that it does not deal with issues of the nature of God, the person of Christ, or salvation). Like the strict constitutional constructionists, Episcopal conservatives divide from the supporters of the gay bishop at deep fault lines.

These Episcopal 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 intended meaning of particular passages, but they desire to know and be faithful to the original meaning of the biblical text.

But in the Episcopal Church, the effect of "The Intentional Fallacy" can clearly be seen. Those who have embraced this fallacious philosophy of interpretation apply their flawed hermeneutic to important biblical passages that speak of God's judgments over homosexuality (Gen. 19, Lev. 18, Rom. 1:24-32), and come away saying that homosexuality is good and even blessed by God. To do this, these church leaders must buy into the idea that it doesn't matter what the Bible writers meant. 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 the authorial intent of the church's authoritative words 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 to be a formal declaration of the church and whether they should be regarded as church law.