What Follows from What: Authorial Intention and the Public Logic of Texts

This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores questions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical conditions for Christian belief.

One of the persistent assumptions of modern hermeneutics is that the meaning of a text ultimately resides in the intention of its author. To understand what a text means is therefore to recover, as nearly as possible, what the author meant by writing it. Whether expressed in Schleiermacher’s psychological reconstruction, Hirsch’s distinction between meaning and significance, or more recent intentionalist accounts, the governing conviction remains remarkably stable: meaning is fundamentally an event in a mind.

There is much to commend this instinct. Historical interpretation would be impossible if we ignored the circumstances in which texts were written, the linguistic conventions of their age, and the problems their authors intended to address. Yet a profound difficulty remains. An author’s intention is not itself publicly available. What is publicly available is the text. The intention is always reconstructed through the text rather than directly observed.

This distinction is more than epistemological. It concerns the very object of interpretation.

Authorial Intention as Historical Hypothesis

My recent study of Luther’s Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam forced this question into sharper focus than I had anticipated. The ninety-seven theses repeatedly ask what follows from what. They deny certain consequences, affirm others, and expose inferential patterns they regard as theologically impossible. The most conspicuous evidence appears in the Latin itself. Thesis 8 says nec ideo sequitur; thesis 13 calls an inference absurdissima est consequentia; theses 58–60 display a chain: sequitur ex ea, ex eadem sequitur, item sequitur; thesis 61 says non sequitur; thesis 63, sed sequitur. The public object before us is therefore not an inaccessible sequence of psychological states but a structured network of assertions and inferential commitments.

What grounds the claim that this inferential vocabulary is doing serious philosophical work rather than functioning merely as rhetorical ornament? Here history becomes decisive before it becomes systematic. Luther entered the University of Erfurt in 1501, the very year in which Jodocus Trutvetter’s Summule totius logice appeared. Trutvetter defines argumentation, when the word is taken broadly, so that it is convertibiliter idem quod consequentia: discourse containing antecedent and consequent together with an affirmed sign of inference. He then calls the general rules by which consequences may be assessed the metrum et mensura omnis argumentationis—the measure and standard of all argumentation. When the 1517 theses ask what follows from what, they are not borrowing a phrase from thin air. They are operating within a logical grammar whose precise vocabulary, examples, and pressure points are documented in a text Luther would have studied at Erfurt.

This primary-source concordance changes the interpretive situation. Instead of reconstructing Luther’s “inner life” at the moment of composition—a task epistemically unavailable to us—we can compare two publicly accessible texts. The logical cluster of theses 45–53 employs suppositio, forma syllogistica, termini divini, scitus, creditus, universalia, and petere principium. These same terms, distinctions, and characteristic problem-cases appear in Trutvetter’s manual. The consequence-structure of the theses responds, point by point, to a grammar documented in a text we possess. Historical interpretation proceeds by comparing publicly available inscriptions, not by reconstructing private mental events.

From Historical Reconstruction to Formal Analysis

The historical discussion prepares the way for a more precise philosophical claim. Suppose we distinguish between a text T, an author A, and the author’s actual intention I. Traditional intentionalism is often committed, implicitly if not explicitly, to something like the following claim:

Meaning(T) = I(A,T)

The meaning of the text simply is the author’s intention in producing it.

The difficulty is immediate. The author’s actual intention is never publicly available. What interpreters possess is not I but a historically reconstructed hypothesis about I. The relation is better expressed as:

Ĩ = H(T,C)

where H is a historical reconstruction produced from the text T together with its historical context C. The reconstructed intention, however plausible, remains a hypothesis. It is defeasible, open to revision, and never simply identical with what was actually passing through the author’s mind.

Once this distinction is made, the object of interpretation changes. Instead of attempting to recover an inaccessible psychological event, interpretation asks what propositions the text publicly asserts and what follows from those assertions. If Γ denotes the propositions asserted by the text, then the primary question becomes:

Γ ⊨ φ

Does proposition φ follow from the public commitments already incurred by the text?

A text can commit an author to implications the author never consciously entertained. Anyone who has published extensively knows this from experience. Readers often discover consequences, tensions, and conceptual relations that the writer did not explicitly foresee. Sometimes they are mistaken. Sometimes they reveal something genuinely present within the public logic of the text. This is why interpretation cannot simply identify meaning with recovered intention.

The Logic of Consequence at Work

The formal account developed above becomes concrete in Luther's engagement with scholastic theology.

The will and the failed consequence. Theses 13–16 constitute a small disputation within the disputation. The scholastic inference Luther targets in thesis 13 runs: a person in error can love the creature above all things, therefore such a person can love God above all things. Luther calls this the most absurd of consequences—absurdissima est consequentia. Why? Because the move from “loves creature” to “therefore can love God” treats love of God as the natural intensification of a capacity already present in the errant will. Trutvetter’s standard for a good illative consequence is exact: the antecedent must necessarily infer the consequent, so that it is impossible for the antecedent to be true without the consequent. Here the antecedent remains true—the errant will really can love the creature—while the consequent is precisely what is in question. Nothing about loving a creature in the condition of sin makes loving God above all things possible without grace. The material consequence fails. Thesis 16 then substitutes the correct inference: a person in error can love the creature; therefore it is impossible that such a person loves God. The two theses do not display ignorance of consequence-logic. They use it against the scholastic position. The right consequence runs in the opposite direction from what the scholastic inference presupposed.

Righteousness and the reversal of predication. Thesis 40 gives the moral and soteriological inversion in compressed form: Non efficimur iusti iusta operando, sed iusti facti operamur iusta. We do not become righteous by performing righteous deeds; rather, having been made righteous, we perform deeds that can then be called righteous. The predicate iusta as applied theologically to works is not self-grounding. It presupposes the prior constitution of the agent as iustus. Righteousness is not the terminus of a morally cumulative process but a condition governing when an act may be identified as righteous before God.

The inferential point is precise. From the fact that an act conforms outwardly to what the law commands, it does not follow within the theological teleo-space—the objective order of relations within which theological predicates are properly assessed—that the act is righteous coram Deo. External conformity and theological righteousness are not interchangeable predicates, and the inference from one to the other fails for the same reason the inference in theses 13–16 fails: the antecedent can be true while the consequent remains false.

The consequence chain of theses 57–60. The most sustained piece of consequence-reasoning in the disputation occurs in the sequence running from thesis 57 through thesis 60. Thesis 57 isolates a scholastic formulation: the law commands that the commanded act be done in the grace of God. Rather than simply denying this, Luther displays the consequence-chain the formulation licenses.

Sequitur ex ea, quod gratiam Dei habere sit iam nova ultra legem exactio. It follows from it that having grace is already a new exaction beyond the law. Ex eadem sequitur quod actus praecepti possit fieri sine gratia Dei. From the same it follows that the commanded act can be performed without the grace of God. Item sequitur quod odiosior fiat gratia Dei quam fuit lex ipsa. It likewise follows that grace becomes more hateful than the law itself.

The argument is not rhetorical. If the law commands that an otherwise specifiable act be done in grace, the act has already been conceptually individuated before grace is added. Grace then becomes a supplementary requirement imposed upon an act whose identity does not depend upon grace for its definition. Once that individuating move is made, the following consequences are unavoidable. Having grace becomes an extra demand layered on top of the law. The commanded act becomes conceivable without grace, since grace entered only as a supplement to an already-identified act. And grace, now appearing as an additional burden, becomes more hateful than the law it was meant to complete. The scholastic formulation generates its own destructive consequences by smuggling a prior act-individuation into its conditional grammar. Luther’s move is to display what follows—sequitur, sequitur, sequitur—rather than simply to assert that the formulation is wrong.

This is Γ ⊨ φ in operation, with φ being a consequence the scholastic party certainly did not intend. Whether or not Luther consciously traced every step of this chain in sequence, the chain is there in the public propositions. And it is assessable without any hypothesis about what was passing through Luther’s mind in September 1517.

What Has Actually Been Established?

The historical comparison with Trutvetter has accomplished something quite specific, and it is worth stating exactly what that accomplishment is. We have not recovered Luther’s mental life. We have compared two publicly available texts and identified a detailed correspondence between a logical grammar and its critical appropriation. The consequence-structure of the 1517 theses is intelligible—and criticizable—on the basis of publicly checkable textual and logical relations. Nothing in that analysis depends upon privileged access to the interior life of a sixteenth-century monk.

An obvious objection presses at this point. Someone in the tradition of Volker Leppin might argue that “public assertion” does not float free of intentional context. To individuate which propositions the text is asserting—to determine, for instance, whether est in the Trinitarian syllogism expresses numerical identity or essential predication—already requires reconstructing the conventions, habits, and intentions of the author’s linguistic community. Conceded. Historical reconstruction remains indispensable. We should seek the most plausible account of authorial purpose, and we should reconstruct the intellectual world in which a text was written with as much care as possible.

But such reconstructions are precisely what Trutvetter’s text allows us to perform. The individuation of propositions in the 1517 theses does not require access to Luther’s private deliberations. It requires close attention to the Erfurt logical environment in which those propositions were formulated—an environment now traceable through primary sources. The interpretive claim stands on publicly accessible textual relations, not on any hypothesis about a psychological event.

Historical reconstruction therefore remains indispensable, but it no longer functions as the final court of appeal. Public assertions, logical consequence, and the reality to which those assertions refer possess an objectivity that cannot be reduced to psychological reconstruction.

The Theological Stakes

This conclusion carries direct implications for theology.

Theological truth cannot depend upon privileged access to the interior life of biblical writers, church fathers, reformers, or contemporary theologians. When Paul writes that we are justified by faith apart from works of the law, interpretation cannot content itself with asking what private conviction prompted the sentence. It must ask what follows from the proposition publicly asserted. What is ruled out by it? What is licensed by it? What consequence-chains does it permit, and which does it block? These are questions about the public inferential structure of the text, and they are in principle answerable—even if contested.

Consider what this means for biblical exegesis. When we ask whether a given reading of Romans 3 or Galatians 2 is correct, we are not asking whether it matches the neural event that occurred in Paul’s mind as he dictated. We are asking whether it makes the best sense of the publicly available sequence of propositions, the inferential commitments those propositions incur, and the theological reality to which they point. The reality—the grace of God announced in Christ—is not constituted by Paul’s psychology. It is the res to which admissible readings must answer. Historical reconstruction of Paul’s situation, his interlocutors, his linguistic conventions, his scriptural inheritance: all of this is indispensable evidence. But it functions as evidence for understanding the public logic of the text, not as a replacement for that logic.

The confessional tradition has always implicitly understood this. The Formula of Concord does not proceed by attempting to reconstruct the psychological states of Luther or Melanchthon. It proceeds by asking what follows from publicly stated propositions and which consequences are compatible with the reality the propositions intend—the grace of God in Christ. The theological question is always, at bottom, a question about what propositions warrant and what they rule out. Those are inferential questions. They are questions about Γ ⊨ φ.

None of this diminishes the importance of authors. It relocates interpretation where it has always implicitly belonged: within language, logic, and the realities to which language refers. We interpret texts because they make publicly assessable claims about the world. Those claims generate inferential commitments that can be examined, criticized, extended, or shown to be incompatible with other commitments. Authors incur those commitments by making public assertions, whether or not they consciously traced every consequence of what they said.

The real question is therefore not simply, “What did the author intend?” It is also, “What has the author publicly committed himself to by saying what he said?”

In Luther’s case, what follows from what is not merely a historical curiosity. It is the organizing question of the disputation itself—a question borrowed from the very logical grammar of his teachers and turned, with remarkable precision, against their conclusions. The measure and standard of all argumentation becomes, in the hands of the young Luther, the measure and standard by which scholastic theology is found wanting. Not by appeal to private revelation. By displaying what follows.

Dennis Bielfeldt is Chancellor and Professor of Philosophical Theology at ILT's Christ School of Theology. The argument developed here is presented in greater detail in "What Follows from What: Luther and Trutvetter," a paper to be presented at the Fifteenth International Congress for Luther Research, Aarhus, Denmark, August 2026.