Authorial intent and the art of slow reading

It’s been interesting to watch how some in certain reformed circles are eschewing authorial intent. I mean “interesting” in the same way a train wreck is interesting. Nevertheless I found a comment buried in this article which grabbed my attention. To my knowledge the scholar makes no claim to Christianity but he gets it right in the interpretive department.

But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term “slow reading”, disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader’s creativity, as uncovering the author’s. “My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content,” the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. “I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can’t understand something written in the text, it’s your fault, not the author’s.”