This framing already conceals what is most important. Scripture is not first a set of propositions awaiting extraction. It is a field of meaning, relationally constituted and historically sustained, within which interpretation must always operate by constraint.
To read scripture is not to recover an unconstrained meaning. It is to make a cut.
Meaning Does Not Precede Interpretation
Scripture does not arrive with meaning intact and waiting. Meaning emerges only through relation:
-
text and language,
-
tradition and community,
-
historical context and present concern,
-
ethical pressure and lived experience,
-
authority and resistance.
There is no meaning of scripture independent of these relations. What exists instead is a field of constrained meaning — a structured potential within which interpretations are actualised.
Every reading stabilises something. Every stabilisation excludes something else.
Interpretive Cuts
Interpretation requires constraint in order to function. Different traditions stabilise different elements:
-
Literal–historical readings stabilise referential meaning and event.
-
Doctrinal readings stabilise theological coherence.
-
Moral readings stabilise ethical instruction.
-
Allegorical or spiritual readings stabilise symbolic depth.
-
Critical-historical readings stabilise authorship, redaction, and context.
Each of these cuts produces intelligibility, authority, and transmissibility. None is accidental. None is optional.
But none is total.
The Suppressed Remainder
What every interpretive cut must suppress is equally consistent:
-
ambiguity,
-
contradiction,
-
plurality of voice,
-
historical contingency,
-
reader perspective,
-
ethical discomfort.
These are not marginal defects. They are structural remainders — the relational excess that cannot be stabilised without undoing the cut itself.
Attempts to eliminate the remainder do not succeed. They only displace it.
Intolerance as Structural Signal
Where the remainder presses back, intolerance emerges:
-
accusations of heresy or relativism,
-
anxiety about loss of authority,
-
insistence on singular meaning,
-
defensive harmonisation,
-
rejection of “dangerous” readings.
These responses are often moralised or psychologised. They are better understood structurally.
Intolerance is not a failure of faith or interpretation. It is a signal: the relational field exceeds the stabilisation imposed upon it.
Scripture and the Cost of Meaning
Unlike many scientific domains, biblical interpretation cannot deny meaning altogether. Scripture is read because meaning matters — ethically, communally, existentially.
This makes the cost of constraint unavoidable:
-
To preserve authority is to risk suppressing lived experience.
-
To preserve coherence is to risk flattening plurality.
-
To preserve historicity is to risk misreading genre.
-
To preserve morality is to risk instrumentalising text.
Every interpretive success carries a remainder.
Reading Relationally
To read scripture relationally is not to abandon commitment, tradition, or seriousness. It is to recognise that:
-
interpretation is an act of actualisation within a field of possibility,
-
meaning is constituted by relation, not recovered from isolation,
-
intolerance marks the boundary of what an interpretive cut can contain.
This does not resolve interpretive conflict. It makes it intelligible.
The Work Ahead
In the posts that follow, we will examine specific intolerances of biblical interpretation:
-
intolerance of plural meaning,
-
intolerance of perspective,
-
intolerance of contradiction,
-
intolerance of ethical remainder,
-
intolerance of non-authority.
Each will be treated not as an error to correct, but as a pressure point where the field of constrained meaning presses back against its own stabilisations.
And it is precisely there — at the edge of constraint — that its enduring power and danger reside.
No comments:
Post a Comment