Posted on 07/09/2004 5:41:30 PM PDT by rhema
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 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.
Among Presbyterians (PCUSA) it goes like this: Stephen Van Kuiken, former pastor of Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, was convicted in 2003 of performing a same-sex marriage. A church court had warned him not to do so. The Presbytery of Cincinnati rebuked and removed Van Kuiken, who lost his ordination and membership in the PCUSA. When, in February of this year, a synod court restored his ordination, it cited a 2000 decision by the denomination's Permanent Judicial Commission: "While [saying] that same-sex marriages are impermissible," the ruling states, the 2000 decision "avoids an outright prohibition by using the words 'should' and 'should not.'" What part of impermissible do they not understand?
Here we see steps taken beyond formalist criticism, an offspring of the intentional fallacy. Not only is an author's intention bypassed, but the clear meaning of the naked words is also ignored. Evangelicals of all denominations who stand firmly committed to the Word of God-and to the plain meaning of words in their churches' fundamental documents-are rightly alarmed at such cavalier disregard for truth. The hostility to authorial intention, born in academe, is a deadly virus that seems to be spreading.
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 both those in the church and those in the 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, in the end, words have no intrinsic meaning.
A skeptic once asked me: "If God is all powerful, can he make a square circle?" The question points to a categorical impossibility. Yet there are in our world those who would, for the sake of their agenda, seek to give us "gay marriage." Marriage by definition, however, has always involved a man and a woman. Stripped of conventional meaning or even the possibility of conventional denotations, words take on the value of junk bonds.
In its front-page story on the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which struck down the ban on same-sex marriage, The Washington Post noted: "Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall wrote the 4 to 3 majority opinion, which 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 and apply the intentional fallacy and its children grasp the implications of reducing language-including their own-to a level of meaninglessness.
The professor who introduced me to this odious doctrine gave us a midterm examination. In order to express my disdain for the concept, I simply wrote an answer to a totally different question than she had asked. I got a zero on the question, of course, and used a follow-up visit to her office to challenge her doctrine of intentional fallacy. She told me I had not answered the question she wrote. I responded that once she had written the question, I had no need to determine what she-the author-originally intended. I had interpreted the question as I had wanted. Trying to determine what she intended by the question, I argued, was a fallacy.
Nothing New My professor 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, we Christians ought not to be surprised by all this. We know the attack on authorial intent began in the Garden of Eden when the Tempter came to Eve and asked: "Has God really said?"
To be sure, Wimsatt and Beardsley's article may or may not be 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 the articulation of 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.
Bump for later, serious read.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322 ---
"On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
Everything we are about, hinges upon this page.
A very sobering article. One tool of all totalitarian movements is to corrupt language to such an extent that no one can be sure what any law means. The purpose is not only to cripple and distort law but to prevent people from thinking. When language is corrupted and people cannot think clearly, the rulers can say anything -- however contradictory or obviously false -- and people will believe whatever they say. Perhaps the word "believe" is inaccurate. People are conditioned to not have the capacity to judge and to beleive or not believe -- they are in a mental haze and will follow the totalitarian leader because they cannot think of an alternative.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, SHALL NOT be construed to DENY OR DISPARAGE others retained by the people."
I would say it was the our founders "intent" that the right to privacy is a right "retained by the people."
The author of the article reveals by his remarks that he has not read Roe v Wade.
The "right to privacy" was formerly acknowledged first in Griswold v Connecticutt in 1963.
In the Roe v Wade decision of 1972 the Supreme Court correctly reaffirmed the right to privacy.
In the same case, the Supreme Court incorrectly did not apply the right to privacy to a fetus until after the "first trimester."
As a staunch strict constructionist of the constitution and a vehement anti-abortionist, I applaud my right to privacy as being acknowledged legally, but wretch in disgust that an embryo, which can only be a human, does not have the same rights "retained by the people" who exist out of the womb.
Memo to Christians: The "right to privacy" does not equal "a right to abortion," only.
You will rue the day when your "right to privacy" is violated by your government when it applies directly to you and the right to privacy does not involve abortion.
Unfortunately, you then will have no ground to stand on to defend that right to privacy constitutionally because for so many years you incorrectly "denied and disparaged" that right "retained by the people" as being only an "abortion right."
Do you want an example?
When the "over population" wackos, sometime in the future, convince a majority of citizens that only certain couples can have children and those designated couples can only a certain number of children. (Sounds like Nazi Germany in the past and China in the present, n'cest pas?)
Do you not think that the "right to privacy" that is "retained by the people" is the right to have the number of children that you and your spouse wish to have versus how few or many children your government says you should have?
What a wanker. All the evidence in the world can be put in front of these people, and they come up with answers like this. It really makes me want to smash their teeth in.
FMCDH(BITS)
I think that is what happened at the tower of Babel....Nimrod started questioning what "is Is" and the cohesiveness of the society began to fall apart...then, the other languages came later.
How do you translate the "right to privacy" into the "right to murder"?
As we know, the word "liberal" used to have the opposite meaning from what it means today. In the nineteenth century, to be a liberal meant that you believed in individual rights, freedom, reason, and justice. I believe John Stuart Mill was credited as the originator of the philosophy.
These days, to be a liberal means you reject reason, support lynch mob "justice", advocate slavery (...of the doctors, for instance), and believe as Hitler and Marx did that the individual must subjugate himself to the collective.
A few nights ago, Alan Colmes was desperately trying to defend Kerry and Edwards' liberal record. He actually said with a straight face, "Liberalism is not a bad thing. Our founding fathers were liberals." Nice try, Alan. I'm sure all your liberal viewers actually believe that, since they reject reason as a tool for living.
And we have a volvo-driving be-ach up here where I live sporting a bumper sticker: "Jesus was a Liberal".
Someday I am going to stop her and ask if Jesus really believed in homosexual marriage and abortion.
Homosexual Agenda Ping - Looks like a good, long read. What do words mean? Do they have anything other than a subjective meaning, especially regarding words in scripture?
I haven't read it yet but will. Is everything open to subjective interpretation? As in, "If you don't like abortions, don't have one"? Or "If you don't like homosexuals recruiting children, don't do it yourself"?
Let me know if anyone wants on/off this pinglist.
In this country, we have the freedom to believe as we like regarding the sanctity of the Constitution. We can believe that it is the most magnificent and timeless blueprint for governance ever devised by the mind of man. Or we can believe that it is an outmoded government design, in need of constant revision, because it was written by nearsighted men who couldn’t see past the eighteenth century.
We also have the freedom to believe that the Bible is the infallible, inspired word of God … or that it is simply a collection of fairy tales … or that it is merely an insidious book, used by controlling people to instill fear and obedience into the masses.
Being allowed to embrace any or all such beliefs is what individual freedom is all about.
But there are a certain few among us who, by virtue of their position, ought not to have the right to such beliefs.
There once was a time when national office holders (especially presidents, senators, congressmen, and Supreme Court justices) believed that the Constitution was the incontrovertible law of the land and that it was their honored duty to uphold it. The words preserve, protect and defend had a tangible, concrete meaning. And that meaning in no way allowed the infiltration of the concepts of edit, assault, and declare obsolete. As a matter of fact, it forbade them.
That someone would seek elected or appointed national office, the prime duty of which is to preserve, protect and defend a document, would consider that document malleable, and every aspect of it interpretable in countless ways, is ludicrous. Why would anyone want to take an oath to protect something whose very definition (and therefore its value) is forever changing?
There once was a time when America’s leaders were (as they should be) a cut above the rest of us. That time is long past (it has been waning for decades, but drew its last breath around 1989). If they were not Constitutional scholars per se, they at least had a working knowledge of the document they were charged to defend, and they were committed to seeing to it that it remained whole, and supreme.
As this article so beautifully observes, those once-upon-a-time strict constructionist leaders, who regarded the Constitution as a sacred trust, for the most part are now viewed as dinosaurs – and dangerous dinosaurs at that. ‘After all, we really don’t know what the Founding Fathers meant. And even when we do know, their intent is secondary to the dictates of our current [immoral, irresponsible] situation.’
To which I say to the dinosaur-phobes, ‘Then go back to private life, where you may hold any Constitution-related belief that you like. Let someone else take your seat – someone who reveres the document he was elected/appointed to defend.’
When those who are entrusted with the defense of ‘sacred’ ground are allowed to defile that very ground, the ground is then neither sacred nor worth defending.
The Episcopal Church USA is practicing the same convenient, duplicitous behavior. Its leadership (especially, and certainly, at the level of bishop) used to accept a certain unequivocal level of responsibility and allegiance to the sanctity of scriptural doctrine. Again, why would one choose to minister to others a theology that is not considered immutable, but changeable according to the whim of man?
As regards the scriptural description of God’s view of homosexuality (which these ‘ministers’ choose to pretend doesn’t exist between the covers of the Bible), nowhere in the Bible is there any evidence of God’s condoning it. And there are many examples of His declaring it an abomination in His eyes (Lev 18:22, Rom 1:27, and 1Cor 6:9,10 being the most frequently cited). His condemnation of homosexual behavior is explicit and not open for interpretation, except by those who choose irrational distortion over reality.
If the Lord judges homosexuality as an abomination in humankind in general, how much more of a sin must it be to be practiced by a minister of His word? And how can one preach that which one defiles?
James 3:1 reads: Not many of you should be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. Scripture tells us that the Lord holds teachers to a higher standard than others, because they are expected to have a thorough knowledge of their subject, an allegiance to it, and an unwavering dedication to imparting it without tarnishing its truth by infecting it with their own personal biases or desires.
And when the subject is the word of God, and the ‘teacher’ is a minister of the gospel, assessing the word of God as if it were malleable, revisable by man, and not timeless but dependent on human era or situation, that minister needs to retire to the public sector, where such beliefs are his right and privilege.
One of the primary reasons so many of our institutions are eroding and decaying beyond recognition (government and church sitting highest on the list) is that those in decision-making positions of power no longer remain true to the foundations of those institutions whose purity and integrity they are charged to defend.
The dismantling of the Constitution, and the ignoring or interpretational editing of scriptural doctrine, amount to the corruption of words whose sources are pure and well-conceived, in order to justify self-absorbed, irresponsible human behavior. And if we continue to allow government and church leadership to chip away at those timeless (and, in the case of scripture, divinely-inspired) documents and doctrines, we will find ourselves sailing in dark waters … without anchor or compass. And then we had better hope (having forfeited our right to pray) for a storm-free future.
~ joanie
You write beautifully, and here, especially, I am so grateful, because you have written a timeless gem.
A friend lately asked me, how did I think that we could end wars. "I just want to stop the killing." Me, too.
She asked that in the context of, as liberals are want, their notion that wars happen because people like war, people ("militarists") want war, and that if we pursue peace, if we only would, there will be peace.
I told her that warfare is a basic human institution; it may even be a basic human condition; that, the best we can do, is keep it to a dull roar.
Unfortunately, as usual, the time limit for her listening to me, expired ...
I'd like to have continued:
To have peace, we must have a system of justice that the people have sovereign power over at all times. We must adhere to the rule of law. We must preserve the keystone of this system, its constitution. We must amend it only by the procedures that we have agreed upon. We must not bend the words to mean other than their original intent.
Wars happen most because original intent is violated. The grounds upon which we agreed to live in peace, are not maintained. In effect, peace treaties are broken.
There are many reason why they are broken, yet wars start over the attending disagreements.
It's that simple.
Our Constitution is a peace treaty.
Good words. All true.
I like your new and improved FR profile page too, especially the new tribute to Reagan.
Me, too.
The only trouble with the profile page is I never heard of any of the highbrow music. The rest is awesome. :-)
Thank you, Chuck. There will never be another like him.
Yes. Brilliantly stated.
Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document - the Constitution - which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of governments - unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions - demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built.--Ayn Rand, "Censorship: Local and Express." 1982
Thoughtful and beautiful post, as always, Joanie.
(Thought you might like the read ahadams2, if you hadn't seen it.)
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