BARRIE EVANS
NARRATIVE MEANING AND INFERRED MEANING
‫תה ַ ֲע ֶה‬
ַ ‫ד ֶא‬
ָ ‫אי ְמ ָצא ָה‬
ִ ֹ‫תהעֹ ָל ָנ ַת ְ ִל ָ ִמ ְ ִלי ֲא ֶר ל‬
ָ ‫ ַ ֶא‬...
# ‫רע ָה ָה ֱאלֹ ִהי ֵמרֹא ְו ַעדס‬
ָ ֶ ‫ֲא‬
1. Introduction
Authors such as Wright and Newbigin have argued that narrative meaning in Scripture is primary.
Similarly, Goldingay has argued that narrative predominates in Scripture, and unless we acknowledge
this and interpret accordingly we can distort the meaning of Scripture. Along another line, Stephen
Fowl has proposed that no theory of meaning is adequate for a hermeneutic of Scripture, since any
theory of meaning will attempt to assign determinate meaning to the text, to the exclusion of other
meanings which it is appropriate for the Church to draw from the text. In this article I wish to apply an
inferential theory of meaning, specifically Relevance Theory, to a short narrative text, and attempt to
consider the usefulness and appropriateness of this theory of meaning for the interpretation of Scripture.
2. Some Comments on Narrative Meaning
Goldingay, quoting McGrath, remarks on a shift from narrative thinking to ‘conceptual’ thinking in
ancient times which may affect our ability to understand scripture:
“..McGrath has noted that ancient Greece and traditional African cultures resembled
scriptural writers in tending to use stories as a way of making sense of the world.
But just before the time of Plato a decisive shift occurred: ‘ideas took the place of
stories’ [McGrath 1992:34] and a conceptual way of thinking gained the upper hand and
came to dominate Western culture.” (2000:128-129)
If much of scripture is narrative and in our culture ‘conceptual thinking’ dominates, how might this
affect our ability to interpret and the manner in which we interpret scripture? Wright queries this in his
seminal article on authority in scripture:
“Much of what we call the Bible – the Old and New Testament – is not a rule book; it is
narrative. That raises a further question:… How can an ancient narrative text be
authoritative? How, for instance, can the book of Judges, or the book of Acts, be
authoritative? It is one thing to go to your commanding officer first thing in the morning
and have a string of commands barked at you. But what would you do if, instead, he
began ‘Once upon a time…’?” (1991:10)
One locus of this problem is in whatever relationships exist between narrative ‘truths’ and timeless or
non-transient ‘truths’. Wright again comments:
“The problem goes back ultimately, I think, to a failure on the part of the Reformers to
work out fully their proper insistence on the literal sense of scripture as the real locus of
God’s revelation, the place where God was really speaking in scripture. The literal sense
seems fine when it comes to saying, and working with, what (for instance) Paul actually
meant in Romans… It’s fine when you’re attacking mediaeval allegorizing on one sort
or another. But the Reformers, I think, never worked out a satisfactory answer to the
question, how can the literal sense of stories – which purport to describe events in (say)
first century Palestine – how can that be authoritative? If we are not careful, the appeal
to ‘timeless truths’ not only distorts the Bible itself, making it into the sort of book it
manifestly is not, but also creeps back, behind the Reformers’ polemic against allegory,
into a neo-allegorization which is all the more dangerous for being unrecognised.”
(1991:11-12)
Wright also comments:
“[The interpretive] methods I have outlined involve a certain procedure which
ultimately seems to be illegitimate: that one attempts, as it were, to boil off certain
timeless truths, models, or challenges into a sort of ethereal realm which is not anything
immediately to do with space-time reality in order then to carry them across from the
first century to any other given century and re-liquify them (I hope I’m getting my
physics right at this point), making them relevant to a new situation.” (1991:12-13)
Newbegin, a few years before Wright, similar to Hauerwas, nevertheless claims advantages for a
narrative presentation of meaning:
“What this... suggests is that our proper relation to the Bible is not that we examine it
from the outside, but that we indwell it and from within it seek to understand and cope
with what is out there. In other words, the Bible furnishes us with our plausibility
structure. This structure is in the form of a story. In Hans Frei’s phrase, it is realistic
narrative which ‘renders’ the character which it portrays. What is involved in this phase
‘realistic narrative’? Consider what it means to get to know a person. One can read an
account of his character and career such as might be embodied in an obituary notice.
But in order to know the person one must see how she meets situations. It is in narrative
that character is revealed and there is no substitute for this.” (1989:98-99)
And again:
“This is our story, and it defines who we are. Just as character can only truly be
rendered in narrative form, so the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ can only be given
if we ask ‘What is my story?’ and that can only be answered if there is an answer to the
further question, ‘What is the whole story of which my story is a part?’ To indwell the
Bible is to live with an answer to those questions, to know who I am and who is the one
to whom I am finally accountable.” (1989:100)
I wish to address the following question in this article: is there is a linguistic theory of meaning which
can credibly and profitably be used in the interpretation of narrative?
As a general point, Goldingay comments on the need for a hermeneutic to understand scripture:
“Understanding scripture is a particular instance of the general task of understanding.
‘The hermeneutical question’ is intrinsic to Christian faith because of the nature of that
faith’s origins. Jesus Christ first came to be understood by means of an interpretation of
the existent Jewish scriptures, and this process involved interpretation of these
scriptures in the light of him. Questions regarding the relationship between the Hebrew
2
scriptures and the Christ event are thus a feature of Christian faith from the beginning,
and inevitably so if Christian faith wishes to be seen as the fulfillment of a longstanding
purpose and promise…” (1995:2)
3. Elaborating the Problem
The author who in recent years has most proposed a linguistic approach to hermeneutics in general and
Biblical hermeneutics in particular is probably Kevin Vanhoozer. By contrast, Stephen Fowl wagers
that no linguistic theory of meaning can do justice to the interpretation of the Biblical text. In his book
Engaging Scripture, in laying out the differences that he sees between determinate interpretation,
anti-determinate interpretation and, his proposal, underdetermined interpretation, he states:
“Underdetermined interpretation is underdetermined only in the sense that it avoids
using a theory of meaning to determine interpretation.” (1998:10) And: “Throughout
this book I have presented the view that Christian interpretation of scripture is not
primarily an exercise in deploying theories of meaning to solve textual puzzles. Rather,
Christian interpretation of scripture is primarily an activity of Christian communities in
which they seek to generate and embody their interpretations of scripture so that they
may fulfil their ends of worshipping and living faithfully before the triune God.”
(1998:161)
In this proposal one also sees an influence of the claim that a narrative understanding of scripture is
primary. A very useful summary of the differences between Vanhoozer’s and Fowl’s approaches to
biblical interpretation can be found in a 1999 web article by Scott Foutz:
“Fowl’s proposal for a hermeneutic of underdeterminacy stems from what he sees as a
fundamental systemic error within determinate approaches. Simply put, this error is the
claim that humanity’s hermeneutic endeavor can ascertain and possess the determinate
meanings of texts… Fowl identifies the cause of determinism’s fundamental error in its
belief that meaning is a property of the nature of a text. Once such a property is
attributed to the nature of the text it is but a short step to defending reason’s universal
ability to apprehend a nature’s properties…. Fowl’s denial of meaning as a property of
the text is the foundation for his proposed underdeterminacy. Underdeterminate
hermeneutics is characterized by the explicit admission that given the ambiguous nature
of the text, interpretational differences will inevitably arise. According to Fowl, virtuous
hermeneutics, even at its best, cannot eliminate such disagreement, but instead
‘provides part of the context in which disagreements can best be articulated’ (87) This
being the case ‘our discussion, debates, and arguments about texts will be better served
by eliminating claims about textual meaning in favor of more precise accounts of our
interpretive aims, interests and practices. (56)” (Foutz 1999, quoting Fowl 1998)
In the next section I will outline a linguistic theory of meaning known as Relevance Theory. What can
be noted here in the first place is that Relevance Theory also claims that a text or utterance
‘underdetermines’ (and in later descriptions of Relevance Theory ‘radically underdetermines’)
meaning.
3
4. Underdetermining Utterances: Relevance Theory
Relevance Theory is a theory of communication which aims to describe how speakers and hearers
communicate using utterances which underdetermine their intended meaning. It can claim to have its
roots in the Natural Language philosophies of Austin and Searle, and Grice in particular, and therefore
to trace its roots further back to Wittgenstein.1
The following is an all too brief summary of Relevance Theory. The reader is referred to Sperber and
Wilson 1995 (first edition 1986), Carston 2002 or the web article, Wilson and Sperber 2002, for fuller
descriptions.
Relevance Theory (hence RT; I have put in italics terms which receive a definition in RT) claims that
an utterance underdetermines the author-intended meaning. For the hearer to assign an adequate
meaning, his or her mind undertakes a cognitive inferential search for relevance2 in a context.
RT envisages this as resulting first of all in a cognitive enrichment to a proposition, in which
ambiguity, vagueness, ellipsis and reference are resolved. The proposition is further cognitively
enriched by assignment of a speech act to an explicature; and then further enriched, if adequate
relevance has not yet been found, by the inferring of implicatures.
RT assumes that the meaning which the hearer searches for is that intended by the author of the
utterance. The context (or cognitive environment) is not just the co-text in which the utterance occurs,
but will include any information known to, able to be observed by or able to be deduced by the hearer.
One of the inferential tasks a hearer’s mind has to undertake in this search of meaning is the selection
of an appropriate context to process the utterance; the principle of relevance (see the previous footnote)
allows the hearer to assume that this is no other than the context intended by the author. Sperber and
Wilson state: “…the selection of a particular context is determined by the search for relevance”
(1995:141). The principle of relevance, therefore, is considered sufficient to guide the hearer to the
speaker-intended context. According to the presumption of relevance, it will be the responsibility of the
speaker to frame his utterance in such a way that the hearer selects the speaker’s intended context
without gratuitous effort.
RT claims that a hearer or reader will accept the first meaning that satisfies the criterion of relevance. It
does not claim that communication will always be successful; indeed, one of the outcomes of the theory
is to show how communication may break down.3
1
It might also be said to be compatible with the more recent epistemological approach known as Critical
Realism.
2
More technically: “An assumption is relevant to an individual at a given time if and only if it has some
positive cognitive effect in one or more of the contexts accessible to him at that time”, “an assumption is
relevant to an individual to the extent that the positive cognitive effects achieved when it is optimally
processed are large” and “an assumption is relevant to an individual to the extent that the effort required to
achieve these positive cognitive effects is small” (Sperber and Wilson, 1996:265-266).
3
Neither is it prescriptive, that is to say it does not claim that we always communicate only relevant things in
the general sense of the word. ‘Relevance’ in RT is a technical term denoting the criteria the hearer’s mind
invokes in his or her search for the meaning of an utterance.
4
5. A Narrative Example
In Acts 23:27-30 there is a short narrative, told by the original author about himself. We know quite a
lot about the events referred to in the story, since the author of Acts has himself already told us in
narrative form about these events at greater length in this and the preceding two chapters:
“26Claudius Lysias, To His Excellency, Governor Felix: Greetings.
27
This man was seized by the Jews and they were about to kill him, but I came with my
troops and rescued him, for I had learned that he is a Roman citizen.
28
I wanted to know why they were accusing him, so I brought him to their Sanhedrin.
I found that the accusation had to do with questions about their law, but there was no
charge against him that deserved death or imprisonment.
29
30
When I was informed of a plot to be carried out against the man, I sent him to you at
once. I also ordered his accusers to present to you their case against him.”
What can we say about the meaning of this short narrative?
A structural analysis, such as that proposed by Beekman, Callow and Kopesec, would label verse 26 as
‘orienter’, and verses 27 to 30 as ‘content’ of this ‘orienter’. The main events in each of the subsequent
verses would be labelled as being in an ‘addition’ relation to each other, specifically ‘sequential
chronological’. Within verses 27, 28 and 30 there are three support relations, all ‘reason-result’: they
are rendered differently – “for” (v27), “so” (v28) and “when” (v30) – and one wonders whether they
should all be considered to have exactly the same (relational) ‘meaning’, as this type of analysis
requires. In verse 29 there is an ‘associative’ (rather than ‘addition’) relation of ‘contrast’. In verse 27,
“but I came with my troops” is contrasting as well as sequential: however the Beekman-Callow analysis
requires that a relation be assigned unequivocally to one or other category. An important question for
this type of structural analysis is whether it can be considered to have exhaustively analysed the
meaning of a passage. If not, what more is there?
We can also ask to what extent this analysis has ‘rendered character’. One thing we can say about an
analysis which limits itself entirely to structure, as in this Beekman-Callow analysis, is the omission of
any relation between the text and context. In this case, we have Luke’s telling of this episode over four
chapters, in which this first person retelling by Claudius Lysias is embedded both as part of the episode
and as a partial retelling of the episode. One striking ‘meaning’ that emerges, as we read Claudius
Lysias’s version of the events against the background of Luke’s story, is that, according to Luke, v27 is
a lie! According to Luke, it is only after Paul’s arrest and when there is an intention to flog him that
Claudius Lysias learns that Paul is a Roman citizen. We should ask: where is this meaning? or, where
does it come from? According to Foutz, one of Fowl’s main concerns about the application of linguistic
theory to text, is the “belief that meaning is a property of the nature of a text.” According to Relevance
Theory, this type of meaning is attained inferentially, as part of a cognitive-inferential processing of the
utterance by the hearer or reader. That is to say, if the text underdetermines meaning, as both Relevance
Theory and Fowl assert, we do not have to say that this meaning (or any meaning) is purely ‘in’ the
text; rather, according to RT, the text is a kind of shorthand; that is to say it supplies (usually sufficient)
clues as to author-intended meaning. No doubt this can be disturbing to those that look for determinate
5
meaning in scripture; but this is Fowl’s concern. If language does not naturally supply determinate
meaning, should we make scripture to be a kind of unnatural language, and claim that, contrary to other
texts, it does supply determinate meaning?
It is in this same inferential fashion that ‘meaning’ about the commander’s character emerges4 – his
concern, for instance, to show himself fully informed of the situation: no doubt military intelligence
was as much a concern then as it is now. Is this author-intended meaning? It is here that the application
of RT to scripture requires some reflection. In a book such as Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, no
doubt the author is attempting to communicate, as any fiction author would, the ‘character’ of her main
characters. She does this in a way that requires us to revise our inferences over the course of the book 5
– initially Wyckham seems to have the more sympathetic character; Darcy’s emerges more gradually
and in a contradictory fashion. How do we know, however, that Luke is intending us to infer very much
about the character of chiliarchos Claudius Lysias? In their presentations of RT, Sperber and Wilson
claim that there is no clear boundary between inferences that the hearer can assume the speaker
intended and those that he or she did not intend. In a discussion of the ‘indeterminacy of implicatures’
they propose: “[w]hat [the examples presented] show is that there may be no cut-off point between
assumptions strongly backed by the speaker, and assumptions derived from the utterance but on the
hearer’s sole responsibility” (Sperber and Wilson 1986,1995:199). For our purposes, it is worth quoting
their argument more fully:
“An act of communication merely makes more manifest which assumptions the
communicator intends to make manifest, or, equivalently, it merely makes these
assumptions manifest on the further assumption that the communicator is trustworthy. It
does not necessarily make the audience actually entertain all the assumptions
communicated. This is true of implicatures too. Implicatures are merely made manifest
by the act of communication (again, on the further assumption that the speaker is
trustworthy). Some implicatures are made so strongly manifest that the hearer can
scarcely avoid recovering them. Others are made less strongly manifest. It is enough
that the hearer should pay attention to some of these weaker implicatures for the
relevance of the intended interpretation to become manifest.” (1986,1995:197)
4
As a simple example of character meaning arising from narrative expression one could take the phrase
“he smiled”. From this phrase, embedded in narrative, a reader might infer ‘he is pleased or happy’, ‘he is
charming’ (or ‘wanting to charm’), or, possibly, ‘he is deceptive’ – one or more of these. Further information
in the cotext, or during the course of the story, would probably confirm or disconfirm these possibilities.
An author might want to keep us in suspense as to which of these are correct. In Relevance Theory such a set
of assumptions, intended by the author, is termed a range of implicatures.
5
An article by Uchida (Uchida 1998) is a good example of the application of Relevance Theory to narrative.
Uchida proposes two phenomena utilised by (fiction) authors, ‘suspense’ and ‘twist’: ‘twist’, according to
Uchida, can be ‘local’ or ‘global’. The revising of opinions about Wyckham and Darcy, imposed on the
reader, seems to be a good example of ‘global twist’.
6
This is elaborated in subsequent paragraphs:
“Let us say that the implicatures of an utterance – like assumptions in general – may
vary in strength. To communicate an assumption A is to make mutually manifest one’s
intention to make A manifest or more manifest. The greater the mutual manifestness of
the informative intention to make manifest some particular assumption, the more
strongly this assumption is communicated. The strongest possible implicatures are those
fully determinate premises and conclusions… which must actually be supplied if the
interpretation is to be consistent with the principle of relevance, and for which the
speaker takes full responsibility. Strong implicatures are those premises and
conclusions… which the hearer is strongly encouraged but not actually forced to supply.
The weaker the encouragement, and the wider the range of possibilities among which
the hearer can choose, the weaker the implicatures. Eventually… a point is reached at
which the hearer receives no encouragement at all to supply any particular premise and
conclusion, and he takes the entire responsibility for supplying them himself.
“On this approach, the indeterminacy of implicatures presents no particular formal
problem. An utterance with a fully determinate implicated premise and conclusion
forces the hearer to supply just this premise and conclusion and attribute it to the
speaker as part of her beliefs. An utterance with a small range of strongly implicated
premises or conclusions strongly encourages the hearer to use some subset of these
premises and conclusions, and to regard some subset of them – not necessarily the same
subset – as part of the speaker’s beliefs An utterance with a wide range of weakly
implicated premises or conclusions gain encourages the hearer to use some subset of
these assumptions, and to regard some subset of them – again not necessarily the same –
as part of the speaker’s beliefs. Clearly, the weaker the implicatures, the less confidence
the hearer can have that the particular premises or conclusions he supplies will reflect
the speaker’s thoughts, and this is where the indeterminacy lies. However, people may
entertain different thoughts and come to have different beliefs on the basis of the same
cognitive environment. The aim of communication in general is to increase the
mutuality of cognitive environments rather than guarantee an impossible duplication of
thoughts. ” (1986,1995:199-200)
What Sperber and Wilson seem to be saying is that there may be weakly implicated conclusions or
premises, consistent with the trustworthiness of the speaker, even though the speaker may not
specifically have intended to communicate them. Presumably, in such circumstances, if asked, the
speaker would be likely to agree with them (unless there are additional assumptions in his cognitive
environment which would negate them.) Note that the term weakly is another technical term in
Relevance Theory and does not label the implicature is unimportant, merely that is a one of a range of
implicatures, such that the hearer cannot be sure which ones were actually in the mind of the speaker.
On the question of authorial intention, Fowl believes that such a notion is not “strong enough” in the
end for the sort of interpretation that the church needs:
7
“… it seems plausible to reconstitute a notion of authorial intention, if by authorial
intention one sharply distinguishes motives from communicative intentions and focuses
on the later rather than the former. Even doing this, however, cannot secure a critical
primacy for an author’s communicative intentions. No matter how one explicates the
notion authorial intention, it is not possible to argue that an interest in authorial
intention should be the sole or primary interest of theological interpretation… This is
not because we cannot make the notion of authorial intention coherent. Rather it is
because we cannot make the notion of authorial intention strong enough to do the sort
of work such a claim needs it to do” (Fowl 2000:85).
Nevertheless, in his proposals on an appropriate hermeneutic for scripture, he includes the need to “read
with the Spirit” and to “read the Spirit”. As a consequence, it is clear that for Fowl the appropriate
‘meaning’ the church needs is not devoid of intention; the meaning the church needs to derive is still
‘meant meaning’, rather than simply deductions from the text.
How is Relevance Theory located with respect to Fowl and Vanhoozer? There are at least two
dimensions in which the reading of scripture is more complex than our everyday discourse with
contemporaries. There is the temporal and cultural distance which we experience from the context of
the original utterance; and there is also the belief by the church that God is speaking through scripture,
however this is defined in detail. It is not that these or analogous elements are missing in everyday
discourse. Wolterstorff points out that we make use of “deputised” and “appropriated” discourse
(Wolterstorff 1995) – Luke’s quotation of Claudius Lysias is a good example of appropriated discourse.
(We can ask, for instance, Whose communicative intention do we hear as we listen to Luke’s
appropriation of Claudius Lysias’ letter? And how do we cognitively reckon it?6) Evans 2004 also
argues that we look beyond the immediate meaning of utterers in everyday discourse. We also
sometimes have to try to understand those of a different culture; and there are texts other than scripture
from previous time periods. Nevertheless, these two dimensions loom large in the experience and
interaction of the church with its scriptures.
Being a ‘faithful reader’, as Kevin Vanhoozer would rightly have us be, in the sense of not minimising
either of these dimensions, still leaves room for and requires much interpretative skill, under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit, by the reader. While the first, the cultural and temporal distance, is more
the focus of attention of the scholarly, and the second, what God says to us through scripture, that of the
lay church, a faithful reader should take seriously both dimensions.7
6
I think we can presume that Claudius Lysias remained unaware that his letter was included in Holy Writ.
7
Having written this paper, I became familiar with further work by McGrath. In The Genesis of Doctrine,
for instance, he argues for an approach which seems very complementary to the linguistic approach
proposed in this paper: “The primary literary form encountered within scripture is that of narrative, rather
than propositional formulation, suggesting that the appropriate mode of analysis is inference rather than
deduction. In that scripture recounts narrative, a set of particularities, a process of inferential, rather than
deductive, analysis is clearly indicated. The question concerns what framework of conceptualities may be
inferred from this narrative.” (1990:62) And “There is… a dynamic relationship between doctrine and the
scriptural narrative… On the basis of… scriptural hints, markers and signposts, doctrinal affirmations may
8
As an example, the storied understanding of a cosmological Christ, found in scripture, which emerges
in the work of historical scholars such as Longenecker, Dunn and more recently Seyoon Kim, I take to
be of practical importance for the church, as it takes part in this Story which is its story, and care should
be taken that it is not displaced or replaced by an ontological understanding of the creeds, whose
timeless truths are derived from these storied expressions.8 The meaning or meanings for the church of
being included in this Story are drawn out, in a way that can be described using the inferential
framework of Relevance Theory, from these primary truths or assumptions.9
6. Conclusions
In Foutz 1999, Foutz expresses his belief that there are fundamental differences between Vanhoozer’s
approach and that of Fowl, such that one could not hold to both at the same time. Vanhoozer’s
linguistic approach is based on the speech act analyses of Austin and Searle. While Relevance Theory
incorporates the notions of Searle and Austin, it goes much beyond them in proposing a general theory
of utterance interpretation. It includes a notion of underdeterminacy, in the relation between the
utterance and speaker-intended meaning, and indeterminacy, in the relation between the range of
be made, which are then employed as a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the narrative. The
narrative is then re-read and revisioned in the light of this conceptual framework, in the course of which
modifications to the framework are suggested. There is thus a process of dynamic interaction, of feedback,
between doctrine and scripture, between the interpretive framework and the narrative itself…” (1990:60; see
also 1992:35).
8
Thomas Marsh’s study, The Triune God, picking up on concerns by Rahner, points out how certain
conceptual notions came in the 4th century to replace earlier “taxic” expressions: “This taxic structure… is
basic to the understanding of God in the New Testament. It features prominently in the writers of the preNicene period [and] is still common in the fourth century: “The Father through the Son with the Spirit gives
every gift” (St Cyril of Jerusalem…); “the Father does all things through the Son in the Spirit…” (St
Athanasius…); “He (the Father) creates through the Son and perfects through the Spirit… The way to divine
knowledge ascends from the one Spirit through the one Son to the one Father” (St Basil…) (1994: 170).
And: “In the course of the 4th century [a distinction] came to be recognised between the divine
substance/nature and the divine persons… Beginning with the homoousios of Nicaea, Nicene orthodoxy
insisted that the divinity of the Son and the Spirit was the same as the Father… Essential to an appreciation
of this sophisticated position was a logical distinction between divinity or divine substance and divine
personhood. Problems begin to arise, however, when this logical distinction begins to take on real meaning,
begins to operate as a real distinction. This, no doubt, was an unconscious development, but it was all the
more powerful for that. The point can, perhaps, best be appreciated if one notices the change of meaning
which occurs in the expression ‘the one God’ between the pre-Nicene period and the post-Nicene. In the
earlier period, going back indeed to the New Testament itself, this expression always meant the Father. In
the later period, it will usually mean the divine substance, divinity. St Augustine, making the divine
substance the starting-point and central emphasis in his theology of the Trinity, pushed the Latin tradition
very effectively down this road.” (1994:165)
9
The statements in John 16:12-15 (“I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when
he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak
only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what
is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will
take from what is mine and make it known to you.”) point scripturally to the supposition that not all truth is
stated in the Gospel and that the Spirit has a role of guiding the church into further truth, which, presumably,
will include the interpretation and application of scripture.
9
implicatures that may be derived from an utterance and the speaker-intended ones. I have tried to
suggest that these principles can relate well to Fowl’s concerns of determinacy and underdeterminacy,
and that, with adequate elaboration, could be related to the use of scripture by the church which for
Fowl is primary. I have also suggested that these same principles can provide constructs for the
interpretation of narrative, the ontological, timeless, or character meaning that the church should derive
from scripture, for its doctrinal thinking and definition, for its experience of and inclusion in the story
of Christ, and for its preparation and conforming to His glorious character and Image.
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