Helping Your Hermeneutic: Intended Audience (6 Min Read)

Therefore it pleased the Lord at sundry times and in divers manners to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterward for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan, and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing; which maketh the Holy Scriptures to be most necessary, those former ways of God's revealing his will unto his people being now ceased.

-Second London Baptist Confession 1.1, Of The Holy Scriptures

Intended Audience

When you write a letter or an email you'll often begin with a salutation of some sort (e.g., "Dear Jimmy"). Such a greeting indicates a writer's intended audience. The intended or original audience is the individual or group of individuals the author means to address with their communicative act. Sometimes, biblical audiences are explicitly stated within a salutation, while others are discernible through inference (e.g. the post-exilic audience of Chronicles).

Here are some examples of salutations within New Testament epistles:

"Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy, To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thessalonians 1:1). 

"Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, To Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord" (1 Timothy 1:1-2).

"Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia" (1 Peter 1:1).

Contextual Necessity

The concept of an intended audience is essential for Bible interpreters because familiarization with the original audience contributes to the ever-valuable attainment of context! Jeannine K. Brown captures this lesson well with the following example:

Let's look at an everyday example. In families, communication can be done in shorthand much of the time, given the large amounts of shared context among family members. For example, it would not be unusual in my family for my husband, Tim, to arrive home from work after I have and call out as he enters the house, "Heidi?" Although this is the name of our dog, Tim is not directly addressing her. Instead, he is asking me in significant shorthand if I have fed our dog her evening meal yet . . . Over time, we have developed a communicative shorthand to facilitate this exchange. "Heidi?" is all that is necessary.[1] 

Brown and her husband share a significant amount of context within their relationship that you and I do not. Were we an outside observer, simply reading a manuscript of the dialogue between this couple on a given evening, we may find the isolated word "Heidi?" perplexing or in the least wanting for more meaning . . . more substance . . . more context! We may wonder, is Heidi a female, their daughter, a niece, a friend, a pet, or a code word communicating something altogether different. Did Tim say the word Heidi with sarcasm, anger, or excitement? The point is, when Tim says, "Heidi?" his intended audience is his wife, Jeannine, who knows what he means to communicate with his one-liner because she shares a significant amount of context with her husband. Likewise, Paul and Timothy, along with Peter and the elect exiles, share a context that facilitates the assumption of unwritten details that would ultimately prove very helpful for the modern reader. Brown continues, saying: 

Unfortunately for someone outside our family circle, the shorthand would probably provide too little information for understanding to occur. Similarly, the biblical writers often assume and therefore leave out, or only allude to, information familiar to their original audience. Our task as responsible readers will be to acquire, as much as possible, that assumed information. This is why an important interpretive question is, "What would the original audience have understood when hearing the text?"[2]

Providing Confessional Clarity

To be sure, such an acknowledgment does not compromise the sufficiency of scripture but rather admits that some aspects of doctrine are explicit in scripture and some exist implicitly. At times, the reader must search beyond a given text throughout the rest of the Bible to form a full understanding of the information surrounding a passage. The Confessions acknowledge as much, saying:

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit, or traditions of men. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word, and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be observed. ( 2 Timothy 3:15-17; Galatians 1:8,9; John 6:45; 1 Corinthians 2:9-12; 1 Corinthians 11:13, 14; 1 Corinthians 14:26,40)

-Second London Baptist Confession 1.6, Of The Holy Scriptures

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of ordinary means, may attain to a sufficient understanding of them. ( 2 Peter 3:16; Psalms 19:7; Psalms 119:130)

-Westminster Confession of Faith

AND

Second London Baptist Confession 1.7, Of The Holy Scriptures

Conclusion

As Brown mentions, our task as responsible readers is to acquire "assumed information" between the author and his intended audience so that we may understand the text as close to the same way as the original audience did as possible. This "assumed information" is often discovered by grasping the "historical setting" within which a particular biblical book exists, a topic we will explore next time.

Notes:

[1] Jeannine K. Brown, Scripture as Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academy, 2007), 91.

[2] Jeannine K. Brown, Scripture as Communication, 91.