Meaning

I’ve been leading students through John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (A Theology of Lordship) for the past 15 years, and every year I’m impressed all over again. Frame is solidly biblical, creative, careful. His multiperspectival approach allows him to incorporate the best insights of nearly everyone, and also to resist all forms of reduction.

He says this, for instance, in his argument that meaning is application (97-8): “When we ask him to know the meaning of a word or sentence, we are expressing a problem. We are indicating that we are not able to use the language in question.” This might suggest that Frame is heading toward a narrowly pragmatic definition of meaning, but he adds, “That problem may be relieved in a wide variety of ways: synonymous expressions, ostensive definition, references to mental images, intentions, methods of verification, and so forth may all be of help.” That is, syntactic and semantic as well as pragmatic tools are available, but they are tools that aim to relieve a practical, existential problem: “The goal . . . is not merely to supply one of those; the goal is to relieve the problem, to help the questioner use the language in question.”

Too subjectivist? Frame argues not:

“True enough, application must be the application of something! But in my view, the objective basis of application must be the text [of Scripture] itself, nothing more and nothing less.” If someone wanted to say that the text itself is “meaning,” then he would acknowledge a distinction between meaning and application. But that, he says, goes against normal usage. And “what we must categorically reject . . . is some mysterious, intermediary thing called ‘the meaning’ that stands between the text and its application. Instead of increasing the objectivity of our knowledge, such an intermediary is a subjective construct that inevitably clouds our understanding of the text itself.”