Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks

By Nicholas Wolterstorff

Cambridge University Press

326 pp.; $59.99, hardcover; $18.95, paper

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard relates the Hasidic legend of Rebbe Shmelke from Nickolsburg. Shmelke, it is told, never heard his teacher, the Maggid of Mezritch, complete a teaching, because as soon as the Maggid would say "and the Lord spoke," Rebbe Shmelke would start shouting in wonderment, "The Lord spoke! The Lord spoke!" and continue in this vein until he had to be carried from the room.

Shocking as it sometimes seems, many theists--especially those in Jewish and Christian circles--believe that the Lord of the universe speaks. More surprising still: many of these believers claim that God speaks to them. Saint Augustine is famous for confessing that he was led to Christianity when he heard God speaking to him through a young child's voice in a garden. Contemporary evangelicals are (in)famous for saying things like "I felt God speaking to me through that passage" or "I really heard from the Lord on that issue." In Divine Discourse, Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff reflects on these kinds of claims and concludes that they may be philosophically defensible.

Leaving God speechless

Can Divinity discourse? After all, "God is Spirit," says the apostle John; and spirit-beings don't have vocal chords and they do not use pens, paper, or word processors (though stone tablets and palace walls have been utilized on special occasions). This does not deter Wolterstorff: We know of many cases, he says, "in which one person says something with words which he himself hasn't uttered or inscribed. Cases of double agency, we might call them." An ambassador, for example, is authorized to speak in lieu of the head of state, while many a CEO has "composed" a letter by the hand of a secretary.

These are the kinds of creative comparisons Wolterstorff makes as he tries to bring questions about the nature of language (which have dominated philosophical inquiry in this century) to bear on questions about God's way of speaking (which have not). He also makes a relatively subtle but crucial distinction: that between speech and revelation. The idea that God reveals himself in the twin books of nature and Scripture is hardly revolutionary (though there is still debate over what that revelation consists in and how it is apprehended). But speaking, according to Wolterstorff, is something altogether different.

In short, to speak is "to take up a normative stance in the public domain." Candidates delivering political speeches, for example, may promise things in such a way that they do not, in the main, reveal anything about themselves. Rather, they utter sentences that sound like promises, and we listeners (and voters) ascribe to them the rights and obligations that are conventionally given to one who has promised. It is possible (and perhaps all too common) that, in taking up this "promiser" stance, the candidate may not be revealing his true intentions at all.

Wolterstorff thinks that other speech acts--like commanding or asking or even asserting--work in much the same way. It may seem natural to assume that when someone issues a command, he is revealing his will to us. But, says Wolterstorff, this just won't do: God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, after all, but God was not thereby revealing his will that Isaac be sacrificed (since he didn't will that at all).

These are knotty issues, and Wolterstorff unties them with characteristic grace. Many of his points assume Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin's speech-act theory of language, in which all "speeches" are evaluated as sorts of public actions. Even more fundamental to Wolterstorff's work here, however, is a certain understanding of God--an understanding that, as we shall see, is more often found in pulpits and prayer closets than in systematic theologies.

The God of Divine Discourse is not the unresponsive, impassible monad depicted in some traditional theologies; in other words, he is not a God whose "participation" in history consists in the unfolding of a sovereign will that was in place at Creation. Rather, Wolterstorff pictures God as a free communicator who is involved in a dynamic dialogue with his speaking creatures. Wolterstorff implicitly aligns himself here with people like Clark Pinnock and William Hasker who argue for what they call the "openness of God." In a rather controversial book by that title (InterVarsity Press, 1994), Pinnock and company claim that the view of God that is most consistent with the Bible is one that allows God to interact with, suffer with, and even dispute with his creatures without compromising his transcendence and other omni-properties. On this view, God and human beings are "cocreators" of the future: God's will interacts with ours and changes in response to the decisions we make. In a class at Yale entitled "The Other God," Wolterstorff reveals his sympathies for this sort of theology; in Divine Discourse, he publishes them.

Those concerned with mystical or charismatic understandings of the way this open/other God speaks, however, will be disappointed with the book. Wolterstorff is not interested here in speaking about (or in) ecstatic utterances or audible voices; most of his work deals with the "speech" that is recorded in the biblical text. But this takes him from the frying pan to the fire, so to speak, for the climate of contemporary hermeneutical philosophy is very hot indeed for one who would search a text for what the author was saying (or intending to say) when he or she authored it.

Can God be an author?

Wolterstorff isn't daunted. Having shown that God can speak, he goes on to try to show that God can speak as an author. In doing so, however, Wolterstorff is not willing to countenance an inerrancy theory of inspiration, nor does he want to say that all the biblical writers were prophets directly deputized to deliver "the word of the Lord." On the contrary, most of them were just people writing in order to say something--in a letter, in a poem--and it so happens that God decided to "appropriate" their speech as his own. "All that is necessary," says Wolterstorff, "for the whole [Bible] to be God's book is that all the human discourse it contains have been appropriated by God, as one single book, for God's discourse." And how do we know that God has "authored" a text in this way? Well, says Wolterstorff, "the event which counts as God's appropriating this totality . . . is presumably that drawn out event consisting of the Church's settling on the totality as its canon."

So God has "authored" by appropriating human texts and having them canonized. Our job is simply to figure out what the human author was intending to say, and then go on to interpret what God was "saying" when he chose to appropriate that human discourse. Wolterstorff calls this practice "authorial-discourse interpretation" and claims that it is the one used in most homiletical and devotional settings anyway.

References to the "intentions" of authors or "authorial discourse" fly directly in the face of the reader-based hermeneutical theories that originated in European thought and have become popular here over the last 20 years. But Wolterstorff doesn't mind doing some "in-your-face" philosophizing on occasion, and, though he has been taken to task on this issue by many a mainstream hermeneut, he continues to claim that these other theories must give "in the face of the facts." At the Wheaton College Hermeneutics Conference in 1994, I had the pleasure of watching him square off over this issue with Merold Westphal of Fordham University, who favors the near-canonized Continental approach to interpretation. Debate between the two has continued at later conferences (most recently at the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Divisional Meeting in December 1996) with Westphal always contending that nothing about the author's intentions is relevant to the interpretive enterprise. In Divine Discourse, Wolterstorff takes aim at Westphal's concerns by addressing two of their original French formulators: Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida.

Ricoeur enjoins readers to survey the "sense" that the text itself presents to them, without regard to its author's intent. Derrida claims (and here I tread gingerly) that the discrepancies between the words of a text and the variety of meanings they may refer to indicate that there is really no set meaning at all, and that readers should learn to enjoy the "free play" of indeterminate interpretations that this affords. Wolterstorff cheerfully notes that such reader-oriented theories are interesting and even appropriate in certain contexts, but he still wonders what we should do if we are interested in what the author was actually saying. These theorists don't think we can know this, or don't think we should; Wolterstorff disagrees.

Interpreting celestial speech

The only way we can begin to infer what an author was saying, or trying to say, Wolterstorff insists, is by knowing something about her. The charitable interpreter must discern "what would be natural for the person speaking to say in the context" in which she is speaking. With respect to the human authors of the Bible, then, the historical and literary studies of the canonical texts that have proliferated in this century can be revealing. If we are able to piece together an understanding of what it was to assert, command, or promise in Saint Peter's world, then we will begin to see (or hear) what he was trying to say by using the words that he did. Likewise, if we know something about God--that he is loving and that he does not lie, for instance--we can begin to eliminate certain interpretations of the divine discourse and get closer to what God was saying when he "authored" the text.

But herein lies a problem: The human author may not have been aware of what he was saying--or of what he would be taken as saying--when he used certain words. God, on the other hand, is usually aware of such things. Thus Wolterstorff concludes that we may have to distinguish between the human and the divine speech on occasion. The psalmist talked about the earth "not being moved" in Psalm 93, and this was taken to mean certain things in ancient Palestine (and in seventeenth-century Italy). When God appropriated this human discourse, however, he could anticipate what this speech would mean when it was approached as part of a canonical whole by readers in other times and places. Wolterstorff warns that we should not take God to be saying anything different from what the human author intended unless we have "good reason" to do so. But with something like the geocentric reference in Psalm 93, Copernican Christians have very good reason indeed!

This move puts Wolterstorff at odds both with inerrantists and with Hans Frei and the other narrative theologians who preceded him at Yale. Wolterstorff is claiming that we always employ outside knowledge--about God, about reality, and about morality--in order to interpret. We know that the solar system is heliocentric, and so we interpret the divine discourse in Psalm 93 metaphorically. We know that Jesus does not lie and was not crazy, and so we take his claim to being "the door" in a nonliteral fashion.

But as Frei and the fundamentalists saw, this can cut both ways: so-called liberal theologians may "know" that miracles don't occur, and they will gloss the miracle stories accordingly. So despite his ongoing focus on the author as the source of meaning, Wolterstorff is eventually forced to confess that Scripture always bends a bit in the grip of different readerships. For this reason, he says, the responsible hermeneut will (1) do her best to make what she brings to the text as truth-conducive as possible; that is, she will get to know God and the world better; and (2) be willing to admit that any readings that diverge from the literal sense or the traditional interpretation of the church are, one might say, guilty until proven innocent.

Wolterstorff is a relative newcomer to hermeneutical philosophy, and his approach bears the marks of creativity and innovation that are often evident when an expert in one field turns his attention to another. Nevertheless, I suspect that few of the seasoned purveyors of the hermeneutical theories that are now near-orthodoxies will be won over by the criticisms advanced in Divine Discourse. Wolterstorff's treatment of these orthodoxies is insightful and incisive, but it is not involved enough to be conclusive. His criticisms of Ricouer and Derrida, for instance, constitute two of the shorter chapters in the book. He is forced to move fast, and to brush past points that could be better won in a lengthier discussion. Also, Wolterstorff simply ignores Hans-Georg Gadamer and Mikhail Bakhtin--two widely respected theorists on interpretation who are very sympathetic to Christian concerns, and whose works are the product of a lifetime of reflection on these issues.

Other interesting questions arise regarding the procedure for authorial-discourse interpretation. For instance, we might ask where we get the preliminary information about God that we take to his text (e.g., that he is loving and honest) if not from the tradition that has built up around that text in the first place. And if we do get it from there, are we moving in what Martin Heidegger calls a happy hermeneutic circle, or in a slightly more vicious one?

What Wolterstorff has done in Divine Discourse is what all good philosophers hope to do, if they are honest. By applying rigorous and innovative analysis to a relatively fresh topic, he has cracked the door to a new room in the mansion of philosophy--a room that his ongoing work may help to furbish and fill with other conversationalists. More significantly, Wolterstorff has done in Divine Discourse what all good Christian philosophers do: he has allowed believers both in and outside the academy to think more precisely about a topic of unspeakable existential importance--namely, what we possibly can mean when we say, with the Maggid of Mezritch, "this is the word of the Lord."

Andrew Chignell is a graduate student in religious studies at Yale University.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books and Culture Magazine. May/June, Vol. 3, No. 3, Page 32

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