The resistance is immediate and understandable. If scripture can mean many things, how can it guide, instruct, or authorise? How can it sustain doctrine, ethics, or communal identity?
And yet plural meaning is not a modern imposition. It is a structural feature of scripture itself.
Plurality Is Not an Accident
Biblical texts are layered:
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composed across centuries,
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written in multiple genres,
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redacted and recontextualised,
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received by diverse communities under changing conditions.
This is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition of possibility for scripture as scripture.
Meaning emerges at the intersection of text, language, tradition, reader, and situation. Change any of these relations and meaning shifts. There is no single meaning that precedes this relational field.
Plurality is not introduced by interpretation. It is actualised by it.
Why Plural Meaning Cannot Be Tolerated
Despite this, interpretive traditions consistently insist on singular meaning. This insistence is not irrational. It performs essential work.
Singular meaning enables:
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doctrinal coherence,
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moral clarity,
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institutional authority,
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pedagogical transmission,
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communal identity.
Plural meaning threatens these stabilisations. It reopens questions that communities depend on being closed.
The intolerance of plural meaning, then, is not primarily theological or exegetical. It is structural.
The Interpretive Cut
To function, interpretation must make a cut:
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this meaning rather than others,
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this reading as authoritative,
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this construal as faithful.
The cut produces intelligibility and stability. Without it, interpretation collapses into indeterminacy.
But the cut does not eliminate plural meaning. It suppresses it.
The Remainder That Returns
What is suppressed does not disappear. It returns as:
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anxiety about relativism,
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accusations of unfaithfulness or heresy,
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defensive appeals to tradition or inspiration,
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harmonisation that smooths over tension,
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insistence that alternative readings are “misreadings”.
These responses are often moralised. They are better understood as signals of relational excess.
Plural meaning presses back because it was never eliminated — only bracketed.
Misdiagnosing the Threat
Plural meaning is often treated as a corrosive force, eroding truth and commitment. This misdiagnoses the situation.
The real threat is not plurality. It is the refusal to acknowledge the cut.
When a singular reading is treated as the meaning of the text, rather than as a necessary stabilisation, plural meaning becomes unintelligible and intolerable. What should be recognised as remainder is instead perceived as attack.
Plural Meaning and Faithfulness
To acknowledge plural meaning is not to abandon faithfulness. It is to recognise that faithfulness is always enacted within constraint.
But it must also remain attentive to what has been excluded.
Plural meaning is not the enemy of interpretation. It is the condition that makes interpretation necessary.
Reading Intolerance Relationally
The intolerance of plural meaning marks the boundary of what interpretive authority can contain.
It tells us:
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where meaning has been fixed for good reason,
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what relations have been suppressed to achieve that fixation,
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and where pressure will inevitably reappear.
Looking Ahead
In the next post, we will examine The Intolerance of Perspective — how disputes over authorial intent, reader response, and divine meaning emerge from the same structural necessity, and why perspective itself becomes something interpretation struggles to tolerate.
For now, it is enough to recognise this:
And it is precisely this resistance that keeps interpretation alive.
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