Related articles and links |  1 of 6

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.

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).

next page... |  1 of 6

July 2004, Vol. 48, No. 7