Reading between the lines

1. In his ill-fated debate with Chris Date, which I reviewed here:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2019/06/tuggy-v-date-jesus-is-not-divine.html

Dale Tuggy accused Trinitarians of "reading between the lines"–unlike unitarians, who read the lines. Supposedly, unitarians just go with what the text says whereas Trinitarians are forced to go behind the text. Ironically, Date cited numerous examples in the course of the debate where Tuggy was reading between the lines to salvage unitarianism whereas Date accepted the text as it stands.

2. But now I'd like to make a different point. In the past, I've documented how Tuggy has a very naive grasp of semantics, and this is another example–albeit of a different kind. Evidently, it never occurred to Tuggy how much communication relies on the ability to read between the lines. A technical term for this is implicature. At least, that's one dimension of the phenomenon. For instance:

Cases in which what a speaker means differs from what the sentence used by the speaker means. Consider the following dialogue.

Alan: Are you going to Paul's party? 

Barb: I have to work.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/#Phe

On the face of it, Barb's response doesn't answer the question. If you just go by the meaning of the statement, that's unresponsive to the question. That's because the answer is compressed. Alan is expected to be able to fill in what was intended, but not actually stated. She's not going because she will be at her job at the time of the party, and she can't get off work. Yet the speaker doesn't say all that. It's up to the reader to complete the train of thought. 

3. There are many examples in which speakers say less than they mean (mean more than they say). The onus is on the listener to read between the lines. That's similar to the distinction between high-context and low-context communication, where low-context communication relies on the explicit meaning of the statement whereas high-context communication relies on the implicit meaning. Low-context communication is more dependent on the speaker's contribution while high-context communication is more dependent on the listener's contribution. For instance, take cinematic genres like science fiction movies about time-travel or parallel worlds. Or horror films about vampires or werwolves. These take for granted stock conventions which the viewer is supposed to recognize without exposition or explanation. Consider how puzzling a vampire flick would be to a viewer with no background knowledge of the vampire mythos. 

4. I once read an article about how foreign tourists sometimes find it confusing to order at American fast-food joints because customers are expected to use idiomatic shorthand. To take an example from my own experience, when I used to eat lunch at Wendy's, years ago, I'd order "double cheese mayo only". But that's not self-explanatory. The first few times I went, I ordered off the menu. I said something like: "I want a cheeseburger with a double patty and mayonnaise only". However, I noticed that when the casher verbally relayed the order to the chef, she'd translate my statement into "double cheese mayo only". After that, I used the same telegraphic expression the cashiers did. 

5. Another example: one time a supermarket employee asked me if I was going to watch the football game that evening. I asked him which team he was rooting for. He said he was a Dolphins' fan. Consider how baffling that statement would be to someone without the requisite background knowledge. How can dolphins play football? Dolphins are marine mammals. They have no arms, legs, hands, or feet? To understand the statement, you need to know the convention of naming sports teams after animals. 

6. A final example is the use of hyperbole in the Sermon on the Mount. There's nothing in the meaning of the words that flags the language or imagery as hyperbolic. Rather, that relies on the ability of the listener to read between the lines.

7. And those are just samples. Interpreting the NT isn't merely a matter of construing what the text says. For the sense of the NT often carries an OT subtext. In addition, exegesis frequently benefits from having background knowledge which was common knowledge to the original audience, but is lost on a modern audience, absent historical supplementation. What the original audience knew through cultural osmosis a modern read must acquire through study of the ancient culture. 

"Reading between the lines" isn't some ad hoc expedient by Christians to read the Trinity or Incarnation into the text of Scripture. To the contrary, reading between the lines is a universal and necessary feature of communication. 

Of course, we must guard against eisegesis. Just because reading between the lines is an indispensable hermeneutical principle doesn't ipso facto warrant just any willy nilly reading between the lines. But for Tuggy to act like the principle is eisegesis per se reveals a woeful ignorance of how communication operates.