Reader-Response, Deconstruction, and Intertextuality

Introduction: Postmodern Turns and the Practice of Exegesis

By the late twentieth century, biblical studies found itself looking not only behind the text (to sources, forms, redaction) and at the text (as narrative, rhetoric, structure), but also around the text—at its readers, its instabilities, and its webs of relation to other texts. Three intertwined currents shaped this shift. Reader-response criticism insisted that meaning is not deposited in the text like a coin in a slot; it comes to life in the encounter between text and reader. Deconstruction pressed a different, unsettling claim: texts are never wholly coherent; their own rhetorical energies generate tensions, slippages, and undecidabilities that resist closure. Intertextuality, finally, argued that no text is an island: every scriptural sentence is a node in networks of citation, echo, and transformation that both constrain and expand interpretation. These postmodern turns altered exegetical practice, not by abolishing earlier methods, but by re-situating them in a more complex account of meaning—where implied readers and interpretive communities, différance and aporia, echoes and hypertexts all matter.

This chapter will map these approaches at doctoral depth. It begins by clarifying the philosophical claims and methodological proposals of leading figures—Rosenblatt, Iser, Fish and Eco for reader-response; Derrida and de Man for deconstruction; Kristeva, Bakhtin and Genette for intertextuality—and then shows how biblical scholars adapted these insights for exegesis. The heart of the chapter is a series of worked soundings: Mark’s open ending and the making of meaning; a deconstructive pass through a “text of terror” and a Gospel paradox; and intertextual readings of Paul, Matthew, and Revelation. Throughout, the aim is neither celebration nor dismissal, but skilled use: to learn how these lenses reveal things we otherwise miss, to police their limits, and to integrate them with historical, literary, and canonical reading. The chapter closes with advanced assignments calibrated to the doctoral level.

I. Reader-Response Criticism: Where Meaning Happens

From Text as Container to Reading as Event

Early reader-response theory did not announce that “anything goes.” It argued that reading is a transaction or encounter in which texts and readers co-constitute meaning. Louise Rosenblatt described reading as a “transaction” in which a text becomes a poem in the act of reading; the reader’s purposes and affective engagement shape what is realized (Rosenblatt, 1978). Wolfgang Iser emphasized the text’s structure: by its “gaps” and “blanks,” it invites readers to fill in, to concretize possibilities that lie only implicitly in the written cues. The “implied reader” is the role the text designs—competences and expectations it programs to be activated by actual readers (Iser, 1978). Stanley Fish took a sociological turn: meanings are produced by “interpretive communities” who share strategies for noticing, valuing, and concluding; the stability we call “the meaning of the text” is the durability of a community’s conventions (Fish, 1980). Umberto Eco held these impulses together with a warning: texts presuppose a “Model Reader” who actualizes a limited but open set of possibilities; there are misreadings as well as creative ones, because texts constrain interpretation even as they invite it (Eco, 1979, 1994).

For biblical studies, these insights landed in a field habituated to treat authorial intention (as hypothetically reconstructed by historical criticism) as the principal meaning-making horizon. Reader-response did not banish intention; it multiplied horizons. There is the authorial horizon; the textual horizon (cues, gaps, generic signals); the readerly horizon (competences, communities, desires). The exegete’s task becomes more dialogical: to show how textual structures solicit certain readings, how communities have historically responded, and how present readers might respond responsibly.

Biblical Adaptations: Implied Readers and Interpretive Communities in Scripture

Biblical scholars translated these categories into practice in several ways. First, they tracked how biblical books construct an implied reader. Joel’s rhetoric presumes hearers who know covenant curses and temple liturgy; Mark presumes readers who grasp apocalyptic symbolism and the irony of misunderstood messiahship; Hebrews presumes readers steeped in Levitical idiom but tempted by weariness. Second, scholars traced how communities have read: Jewish and Christian lectionaries generate different expectations; ecclesial traditions, academic guilds, and liberation movements discern differently, not only because of ideology, but because they inhabit distinct practices of attention. Third, they argued for responsible readerly agency. If a text’s gaps leave room, how do we fill them? If readers inevitably bring themselves, what virtues—humility, patience, charity—should govern the transaction?

Exegetical Sounding 1: Mark 16:1–8 and the Work of the Reader

The earliest recoverable text of Mark ends abruptly: the women flee the empty tomb “for they were afraid” (16:8). The narrative arc thus refuses to supply any sighting of the risen Jesus or reassurance that the women obeyed the commission. An historical critic asks what original ending was lost. A reader-response critic asks what this ending-as-open does to readers. The text leaves gaps: Who will tell the disciples? Will fear be overcome? What does resurrection mean if its proclamation falters? The implied reader is thrust into the story-world as a potential witness: you must “go to Galilee”—in other words, carry forward what the characters do not. Interpretive communities respond differently. Some liturgical traditions supplied later endings to close the gap; others embraced 16:8 as an intentional device that enrolls readers as participants. The exegetical payoff is not relativism; it is attentiveness to how form and reception co-produce meaning. Theologically, the open ending makes the church’s reading practice part of the Gospel’s completion.

Exegetical Sounding 2: Psalm 137 and Ethical Readers

“Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (Ps 137:9). A reader-response approach foregrounds the responsibility of the reader’s stance. The text’s affective charge invites anger and vengeance in exile; the implied reader is one who has suffered. But an actual reader today must decide how to transact with the text. Rosenblatt’s emphasis on purposes is vital: reading devotionally inside a community shaped by Jesus’ enemy-love will actualize this psalm as a cry of pain and a deposition of vengeance into God’s hands, not a warrant to imitate violence. Reader-response here does not evade the verse’s difficulty; it places the moral work firmly in the reading event and in the community that must instruct its own desires.

II. Deconstruction: Reading the Text Against Itself

Derrida, Difference, and the Impossible Closure

“Deconstruction” is often caricatured as meaning-destruction. Jacques Derrida meant something subtler. Because language signifies through differences (this word means by not being those words) and because every sign carries traces of other contexts and possible uses (iterability), textual meaning is never fully present; it is deferred and differentiated—différance (Derrida, 1976). To deconstruct is to read with exquisite care for how a text’s binary oppositions (speech/writing, literal/figurative, center/margin, presence/absence) are not stable but depend on what they exclude and so can be shown to wobble. Paul de Man trained readers in how rhetorical figures undermine purportedly stable meanings; a text often says more—and less—than its argumentative surface would like (de Man, 1979).

For biblical interpretation, deconstruction has been a goad to intellectual honesty. It refuses the illusion that we can stabilize meaning simply by invoking “original intention” or “plain sense.” It invites us to follow a passage’s rhetoric past the safe harbor of doctrinal summary into its aporia—points where the text both affirms and unsettles.

Biblical Adaptations: From Suspicion to Patient Attentiveness

In the New Testament guild, scholars such as Stephen D. Moore showed how deconstructive reading can be both incisive and generative: John’s Gospel elevates truth and presence, yet foregrounds misunderstanding and absence; Paul’s boasts of weakness unravel heroic conceptions of apostolic power (Moore, 1994). A deconstructive pass is not an act of vandalism; it is a discipline that tracks slippage and honors the text’s unmasterable surplus. Theologically minded readers such as Kevin Vanhoozer accepted the admonition about textual instability while arguing for “improvisational” hermeneutics that answer deconstruction with canonical and ecclesial practices rather than denial (Vanhoozer, 1998).

Exegetical Sounding 3: Judges 19 and the Rhetoric of Horror

Judges 19 is among Scripture’s most devastating chapters: a woman is brutalized and dismembered; Israel slides into civil war. A deconstructive reading resists the temptation to smooth the narrative into a moral. The story’s rhetoric invites the reader to identify with the Levite’s perspective; yet his gestures of concern are undercut by his instrumentalization of the woman’s body—she is unnamed, spoken over, offered to the mob, carved into pieces to provoke outrage. The narrative is saturated with the refrain “In those days there was no king…,” a subtle push toward monarchy as a remedy. But the book of Samuel will deconstruct that hoped-for closure: kings will replicate violence. The text thus undoes any naïve confidence in institutional fixes. A deconstructive pass lets this internal critique bite: the story’s horror exposes the lethal underside of patriarchal and political scripts, and its own gestures toward remedy are troubled from within. The point is not nihilism; it is chastened theological speech that refuses to rush past the aporia the text itself generates.

Exegetical Sounding 4: John 9 and the Logic of Seeing/Not-Seeing

John 9 is built on a binary: blindness/sight. Yet the narrative inverts the terms. The blind man sees progressively; the seeing Pharisees are revealed as blind. The sign aims to stabilize an opposition by relocating sight in faith. A deconstructive attentiveness notices how the rhetoric depends on staging blindness as a metaphor for unbelief while insisting on the dignity of the formerly blind man—a tension that invites ethical care in preaching. It notices how the community’s fear of expulsion from the synagogue haunts the narrative (9:22), complicating simplistic oppositions between “us” and “them.” The text achieves its aim—the revelation of Jesus as light—precisely by letting its binary wobble. Deconstruction here is not a wrecking ball; it is a lens for the cost of confession and the impossibility of a triumphant, unambiguous “seeing” this side of glory.

III. Intertextuality: Scripture’s Polyphony

From Influence to Networks: Kristeva, Bakhtin, Genette

Julia Kristeva popularized the term “intertextuality” to describe how every text is a mosaic of quotations; meaning arises in the space between texts (Kristeva, 1986). Mikhail Bakhtin argued that novels are inherently dialogical: voices speak with, against, and past each other; heteroglossia prevents a single authoritative discourse (Bakhtin’s influence on biblical studies travels often through narrative critics). Gérard Genette gave the most precise taxonomy: intertextuality (quotation, allusion); paratext (titles, prefaces, superscriptions); metatext (commentary); hypertextuality (a later text transforms an earlier “hypotext”); and architext (generic frames) (Genette, 1997). Intertextual work in biblical studies draws on all three. It maps explicit quotations, discerns echoes that are not formally marked, follows paratexts such as psalm superscriptions or Gospel titles, analyzes hypertextual reworkings (e.g., Matthew’s midrashic use of the Septuagint), and attends to how genre cues get imported and transformed.

Biblical Adaptations: From Echo-Hunting to Figural Sense

No one has been more influential in the New Testament guild than Richard B. Hays. He urged interpreters to move beyond counting citations to training “ears to hear” aural/semantic echoes of Israel’s Scripture in Paul and the Gospels, and he proposed criteria for discerning them: volume, thematic coherence, rhetorical fit, and the way an echo refracts a broader scriptural metalepsis—a whole story-world smuggled in with a phrase (Hays, 1989, 2016). Intertextuality thus becomes a school of figural reading: the later text rereads the earlier not by erasure but by transfiguration—Israel’s stories find unexpected fullness in Christ.

Exegetical Sounding 5: Matthew 2:15 and Hosea 11:1—Figural Reconfiguration

“Out of Egypt I called my son.” Matthew quotes Hosea 11:1 to interpret Jesus’ return from Egypt. A historicist might object: Hosea refers to Israel’s exodus. An intertextual reader responds: precisely—and Matthew knows it. He is not proof-texting; he is performing hypertextual figuration. Jesus recapitulates Israel’s story—exodus, wilderness, law, mission—so that Israel’s vocation is fulfilled in him. The quotation is the tip of an iceberg that carries the whole exodus pattern into the Gospel’s plot. The criterion is not merely lexical overlap; it is narrative coherence across texts (Hays, 2016). The theological result honors both the integrity of Hosea (Israel remains God’s beloved, even in rebellion) and the Christological claim (Israel’s identity reaches its telos in Jesus).

Exegetical Sounding 6: Paul’s Midrash in Romans 9–11

Paul’s long argument interweaves Genesis, Exodus, Hosea, Isaiah, and the Psalms. Intertextual analysis shows how phrases import larger contexts. When he cites Hosea’s “not my people” to describe Gentile inclusion (Rom 9:25–26), the echo of Hosea’s restoration oracle controls the optic: God’s judgment serves mercy. When he cites Isaiah’s remnant, the context of judgment unto salvation shapes his “mystery” of Israel’s hardening until the fullness of Gentiles comes in (Rom 11). The method is not atomistic; it hears Paul’s collage as metaleptic argument: small citations open big scriptural vistas that discipline how we read the argument’s endpoints (Hays, 1989).

Exegetical Sounding 7: Revelation’s Hypertextual Tapestry

Revelation contains few formal quotations but is saturated with allusion to Exodus plagues, prophetic oracles, temple imagery, and Psalms. Genette’s category of hypertextuality captures what John does: he re-narrates Israel’s Scriptures as eschatological warfare and worship, producing a “counter-scripture” in which Babylon’s liturgy is unmasked and the Lamb’s liturgy is enthroned. Intertextual work here guards against free fantasia: proposed allusions must carry lexical or thematic markers and, crucially, must work in context—moving argument and shaping affect (Hays’s criteria again stabilize judgment).

IV. Strengths, Perils, and Integrations

What These Lenses Give

Reader-response chastens the fantasy of “view from nowhere.” It reminds us that interpretive virtues and communal practices govern what we see. It helps explain why the same text feeds different communities without license for anarchy. Deconstruction refuses to let pious rush-to-closure override a text’s internal resistances. It teaches slow reading and honesty about instability, both textual and doctrinal. Intertextuality lets Scripture’s polyphony be heard. It makes visible the figural grammar by which biblical authors themselves read earlier Scripture and shows how the canon invites a disciplined cross-hearing across books and testaments.

Where They Can Mislead

Reader-response can dissolve textual constraint into subjectivism if “transaction” is untethered from textual cues and communal accountability. Deconstruction can curdle into cynicism or a hermeneutic of perpetual suspicion that cannot pronounce gospel; it can mistake every binary for a prison rather than attend to how texts sometimes heal them. Intertextuality can turn into echo-hunting, imagining allusions everywhere and canonizing any clever parallel; it can also over-Christianize Israel’s Scriptures by reading only forward without listening back. The countermeasures are methodological. For reader-response: specify textual cues and name the community’s conventions. For deconstruction: submit the reading to the passage’s rhetorical grain and to the canon’s counter-voices. For intertextuality: adopt and defend criteria for echoes and keep figural readings accountable to the integrity of the hypotext.

Integrating with Historical, Literary, and Canonical Work

None of these approaches requires abandoning the gains of historical and literary criticism; they flourish when braided together. A responsible intertextual reading of Matthew 2:15 presupposes Septuagint philology and Hosea’s historical setting; a deconstructive pass through Judges 19 is strengthened by social-scientific description of hospitality, honor, and gendered vulnerability; a reader-response exploration of Mark 16:8 is sharpened by narrative criticism’s account of point of view and irony. Canonical criticism offers an indispensable horizon: it authorizes figural readings and places readerly freedom under the discipline of canonical shape. The best postmodern exegesis is not method-war; it is prudent orchestration.

V. Doctoral-Level Soundings in Detail

Case Study A: The Parable of the Prodigal (Luke 15:11–32)

As narrative, the parable uses gaps masterfully. We do not hear the younger son’s inner motives beyond his prepared speech; we do not learn whether the elder son eventually enters the feast. A reader-response account shows how communities have filled these gaps differently: a penitential church focuses on the younger son’s confession; a justice-oriented community centers the elder son’s grievance; immigrant congregations hear the famine and the pig-sty as economic and ethnic humiliation. The implied reader is invited to choose a son—and then to be surprised by a father who interrupts rehearsed scripts.

A deconstructive attentiveness notes the parable’s rhetoric of gift and merit. The elder son’s calculus (“these many years I have served you”) is undone by the father’s “all that is mine is yours.” Yet the gift depends on an economy of inheritance and labor it both presupposes and revalues; the text cannot be reduced to a single moral. An intertextual hearing catches Israel’s scriptural family dramas—Jacob/Esau, Joseph/brothers—now reframed. The parable hypertextually recapitulates Israel’s fraternal rivalries and re-narrates them toward reconciliation. The theological payoff is full only when all three lenses are at work.

Case Study B: 2 Corinthians 12: The Boast, the Thorn, the Paradox

Paul “boasts” in visions and weakness; he is strong when weak. Deconstruction discloses the rhetoric’s auto-undoing: boasting in weakness is still boasting; the text inhabits the very paradox it commends. The point is not hypocrisy but cruciform speech: strength and weakness cannot be neatly separated. Reader-response attends to how communities concretize the “thorn,” ranging from illness to persecution to sin. Intertextuality hears echoes of Isaiah’s suffering servant and of the Psalms’ “strength made perfect” in weakness. This threefold reading produces a pastoral-theological discipline: speak paradox without evacuating its bite; guide readers to inhabit the paradox in practice.

Case Study C: John 1:1–18 and Genesis 1

The Prologue’s intertextuality is obvious—“In the beginning”—but the work is subtler than a citation. Genette’s categories help: this is architextual (cosmogony), hypertextual (re-narrating creation as Logos-light) and intertextual (lexical echoes). Hays’s criterion of metalepsis is decisive: the phrase imports Genesis’s creation narrative such that readers hear John’s Christology as a new creation. Reader-response enters as we ask how different communities complete the Prologue’s metaphors—Light and Darkness, Flesh and Glory—through catechesis, feast, and hymn. Deconstruction keeps us honest about the Prologue’s rhetorical excess: “grace upon grace” gestures beyond paraphrase; “no one has ever seen God” and “we beheld his glory” generate tension that the Gospel will inhabit rather than dissolve.

VI. Suggested Assignments

One assignment asks you to write a sustained analysis of Mark 16:1–8 that integrates reader-response, narrative poetics, and reception history. Begin with a close reading of Mark’s rhetoric and gaps; reconstruct the implied reader and the effects of the open ending; then trace two or three contrasting communal receptions (patristic, medieval, modern). Conclude with a theologically accountable proposal for how an ecclesial community today should “complete” the story in proclamation and practice, indicating how Eco’s “Model Reader” constrains and enables your proposal (Rosenblatt, 1978; Iser, 1978; Eco, 1979, 1994).

A second assignment invites a deconstructive pass through a chosen “text of terror” (Judg 19; 2 Sam 13) or a paradox text (2 Cor 12; John 9). Your task is not to score points against the text, but to show, with page-by-page care, how binaries wobble, how rhetoric both asserts and unsettles, and how the passage’s aporia should discipline doctrinal and pastoral speech. Engage Derrida on différance and de Man on rhetoric; then show how a canonical horizon and an ecclesial context can answer deconstruction with truthful practice rather than denial (Derrida, 1976; de Man, 1979; Moore, 1994; Vanhoozer, 1998).

A third assignment requires an intertextual study of either Matthew’s infancy narrative or Romans 9–11. For Matthew, identify the explicit formula quotations and defend at least three additional echoes with Hays’s criteria; for Romans, map Paul’s chain of citations and demonstrate how metalepsis governs his argument. In both cases, show how the hypotext’s broader context disciplines your exegesis of the hypertext, and how figural reading can be both historically responsible and theologically rich (Hays, 1989, 2016; Genette, 1997).

Finally, compose a methodological position paper on “Reader, Text, and Canon.” State your stance on the role of implied and actual readers, the legitimacy and limits of deconstruction, and the criteria for intertextual claims. Articulate how your dissertation will coordinate these lenses with philology, historical context, and canonical shape. Name the interpretive community within which you write and the practices of attention and accountability by which you will govern your reading (Fish, 1980; Eco, 1994; Vanhoozer, 1998).

Conclusion: Postmodern Wisdom for Theological Exegesis

Reader-response, deconstruction, and intertextuality do not deliver a program for reading the Bible. They deliver disciplines. Reader-response teaches hospitable attentiveness to how texts solicit readers and how communities shape understanding; it calls for the virtues that make communal reading responsible. Deconstruction disciplines piety and polemic alike, requiring that we reckon with the text’s unmasterability and that we speak doctrine with a cruciform humility that does not smother paradox. Intertextuality restores the Bible’s polyphony and equips us to hear how the New Testament itself reads Israel’s Scriptures—and how our readings must answer to those figural patterns.

For doctoral exegetes, the issue is not whether to use these lenses but how. Used alone, each can distort: reader-response can devolve into subjectivism; deconstruction into paralysis; intertextuality into pareidolia. Used together and in harness with historical, literary, and canonical methods, they can make us better readers—more patient with difficulty, more precise about textual cues and communal norms, more attuned to Scripture’s music across time. They can also make us more truthful theologians, able to speak about God with reverence for the way God has given us the Word: as texts that summon readers, unsettle certainties, and sing in chords from Genesis to Revelation. The church, after all, does not read the Bible to escape ambiguity, but to be formed in faith, hope, and love amid it. These postmodern disciplines, rightly ordered, can serve that formation.

References

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Eco, U. (1994). The limits of interpretation. Indiana University Press.

Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Harvard University Press.

Genette, G. (1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the second degree (C. Newman & C. Doubinsky, Trans.). University of Nebraska Press.

Hays, R. B. (1989). Echoes of Scripture in the letters of Paul. Yale University Press.

Hays, R. B. (2016). Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. Baylor University Press.

Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Kristeva, J. (1986). Word, dialogue and novel. In T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva reader (pp. 34–61). Columbia University Press.

de Man, P. (1979). Allegories of reading: Figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. Yale University Press.

Moore, S. D. (1994). Post-structuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the foot of the cross. Fortress Press.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Southern Illinois University Press.

Vanhoozer, K. J. (1998). Is there a meaning in this text? The Bible, the reader, and the morality of literary knowledge. Zondervan.