II. Speech Act Theory and Scripture: A Summary and Evaluation
Vanhoozer emphasizes the significance of speech act theory for theology:
The most fruitful recent development for the dialogue between philosophy and theology about language is undoubtedly the emphasis on language as a species of human action: speech acts.
If written and spoken words are speech-acts then the bible can be understood as speech acts. Indeed, Timothy Ward makes the bold claim that:
… a speech-act view of the Bible is the most appropriate overall description of the Bible’s nature and function – especially so, if we want to encourage Bible-reading which seeks above all to encounter God through that reading.
Vanhoozer argues from an analysis of biblical covenants for seeing greater continuity between oral and written discourse than is sometimes allowed in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. He argues that it is clear from the book of Deuteronomy, for example, that the written covenant continues to have “determinative content and binding force” for the covenant community, showing that: “Written texts preserve the same illocutionary act potential as oral discourse”.
A major attraction of speech act theory as a model for reading the bible for evangelicals, especially in the face of challenges from postmodernism and deconstruction, is that it tends to think of meaning at least partly in terms of authorial intention (what speakers seek to do with their words) rather than an open play determined entirely by reader response.
The usefulness of speech act theory in biblical hermeneutics
Writing in 2005, Brevard Childs notes that:
Within the last decade there has been an explosion of interest in speech-act theory as a means of developing a new understanding of biblical hermeneutics.
Speech Act theory may also be an asset in the interpretation and application of Scripture. Some of the general usefulness of the theory has already been suggested above.
Vanhoozer suggests that the diverse genres of Scripture may be seen as performing different illocutionary acts: they do different things by warning, greeting, stating, questioning etc
Richard Briggs argues that:
… on reflection it is startling just how many highly significant speech acts there are [in the biblical narrative], and in fact how much of the biblical story turns on ‘things done with words’.
Similarly Thiselton writes:
In the case of the biblical writings, the persistence of the terms Old and New “Testament” serve to remind us of the covenantal context in which pledge and promise [for some, the paradigmatic speech act] feature prominently. The biblical writings abound in promises, invitations, verdicts, confessions, pronouncements of blessings, commands, namings, and declarations of love.
Nevertheless, Briggs warns that “speech act theory cannot be a panacea for all one’s hermeneutical problems”
Speech act theory may be used to analyse what is being said and done by participants in a narrative, by the narrator and by the human author of the biblical texts. Texts may also be regarded as God’s speech acts, both to their original recipients and to future generations of the church.
James Robson has recently drawn on speech act theory when employing the distinction between locution and illocution, what the bible says and what is done in saying it, when he examines “how the prophet Ezekiel’s oracles uttered against Jerusalem can function in the book that bears his name after Jerusalem itself has fallen.”
Other examples of the application of speech act theory to the understanding of the Bible can be found inSemeia
41 (1988), ‘Speech Act Theory and Biblical Criticism’; Botha, J. E.,Jesus and the Samaritan Woman
Novum Testamentum Supplements 45 (Brill, 1991); Berry, Donald K.,The Psalms and Their Readers: Interpretive Strategies for Psalm 18
JSOT Supp 153 (Sheffield, JSOT Press, 1993); Neufeld, Dietmar,Reconceiving Texts as Speech Acts: An Analysis of 1 John
(Leiden, Brill [Bib Int Ser 7], 1994); Reid, Stephen B., ‘Psalm 50: Prophetic Speech and God’s Performative Utterances’ in Reid (ed.)Prophets and Paradigms: Essays in Honour of Gene M. Tucker
JSOT Sup 229 (Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1996) pp217-230 and a number of works by Thiselton
An extra-biblical category or a biblical view of language?
On the opening page ofHoly Scripture: A Dogmatic sketch
, John Webster criticizes Ward for depending too much on an extra-biblical “philosophical theory of communicative action” (speech acts) rather than properly dogmatic material
Vanhoozer seems aware of this sort of danger. In his essay on speech acts and scripture acts, Vanhoozer wants to avoid speech act categories dominating and argues that:
On the contrary, we will see that Christian convictions concerning, say, divine authorship, the canon and the covenant will lead us both to modify and intensify the typical speech act analysis. My goal is to let the “discourse of the covenant” (Scripture) inform and transform our understanding of the “covenant of discourse” (ordinary language and literature).
Rather than being an illegitimate alien element in theology, Vanhoozer claims that:
speech act philosophy commends itself as perhaps the most effective antidote to certain deconstructive toxins that threaten the very project of textual interpretation and hermeneutics.
Ward guards against a charge of selling out to speech act theory:
It is important to note that the use of ‘speech-act’ as a controlling concept for the Bible does not represent the illicit importation of a non-theological category into theological description. Instead, it gives us the conceptual apparatus to discern more clearly the view of language to which the Bible regularly bears witness.
As Vanhoozer says:
Of course the idea that humans do things in speaking was well known to the very earliest biblical authors, even without the analytic concepts of speech act philosophy.
Ward argues that:
… a strong case can be made from exegesis of numerous biblical texts that the Bible itself holds a clear speech-act view of language in general and of God’s speech in particular
citing Gen 1; Jer 1:9-10 (where it seems Jeremiah is commissioned to break down and build by the words of the LORD); Is 55:10-11 and Rm 8:28-30 (on the efficacious call of God) so that:
A speech-act model of language is not imposed on the Bible, but is discerned, from a particular interpretive standpoint, already to be there.
In addition, when Isaac blesses Jacob in Genesis 27 it is clear that he has done something in or by speaking that cannot be undone. James 3 speaks of the power of the tongue. Acts demonstrates a dynamic view of the word of God growing (e.g. Acts 6:7; 12:24; 19:20). Hebrews 4:12 describes the word of God as living and active. Psalm 107:20 attributes the actions of healing and delivering to God’s word (c.f. Acts 10:36).
The Genesis account of God’s creating the world by his word (Genesis 1:3 etc.) is a particularly striking and foundational instance of a speech act. Man’s capacity for language and verbal communication are often seen as components of what it means for man to be in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). Beginning to exercise his vicegerency, man performs the speech act of effectively naming the animals (“And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.”, Genesis 2:19).
In a sense the incarnation of the Word, his act of becoming flesh, (John 1:14) may be seen as a theological basis for speaking of revelation in terms of speech acts, at least to the extent that it is an act described in verbal categories. Jesus exercises the power of God by speaking when he commands the wind and the waves (Mark 4:39), casts out demons (Mark 1:25) and forgives sins and heals with a word (Mark 2:5-12).