Language Games and the Meaning(s) of ‘Meaning’: Two Problems with Jonathan Rowlands’s Defense of ‘Theological Readings’

Abstract

Jonathan Rowlands recently argued that the historical-critical and the TIS approaches to reading Scripture are both justified, by their own lights, in that each represents a ‘language game’ whose rules are grounded in nothing more than a preference for a particular reading goal. This brief response will challenge two of Rowlands’s main claims: (1) that Wittgenstein’s ‘language game’ concept is applicable to the reading of texts, and (2) that the coexistence of authorial and textual (types of) meaning in a text justifies a plurality of approaches.