If canon confines texts, and authority confines readers, hermeneutics confines the awareness of interpretation itself.
Communities prefer to read scripture as if reading were neutral, transparent, or immediate. The interpreter is expected to vanish, leaving only God, text, and reader. Reflexivity — attention to one’s own construal, one’s own cuts — is uncomfortable. It threatens the very stability that canon and authority maintain.
Reflexivity as Threat
Reflexivity exposes relational pressure:
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I am a participant in meaning, not a passive recipient.
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My perspective, history, and assumptions shape what I see.
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The cuts I enact are never neutral.
This awareness unsettles communities that depend on stable readings. It highlights the limits of containment.
Intolerance as Structural Response
The intolerance of reflexivity manifests through:
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suspicion of “theory” or critical methods,
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accusations of subjectivism, relativism, or heresy,
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preference for formulaic reading, liturgical repetition, and authoritative commentary.
These reactions are not merely defensive. They are mechanisms to maintain the interpretive cut: the boundary between permissible interpretation and uncontainable plurality.
Reflexivity and the Interpretive Cut
Where previous cuts regulated texts and readers, reflexivity challenges the interpreter as locus:
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Which of my readings counts?
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How do my biases shape what I see?
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Where does my faithfulness end and my construal begin?
The refusal of reflexivity is an intolerance that protects stability by suppressing self-awareness. But the suppressed remainder persists: interpreters always construe, always select, always navigate.
The Remainder That Presses Back
Suppressed reflexivity returns as:
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ethical discomfort with interpretation,
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anxiety about authority,
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debate over contested passages,
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frustration at conflicting perspectives,
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critical scholarship that refuses closure.
Hermeneutic intolerance marks the edge of conscious participation in meaning. Where awareness is denied, tension is displaced, not resolved.
Reflexivity as Relational Necessity
A relational reading recognises that:
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interpretation is always enacted,
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construal is inevitable,
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awareness of construal enables responsible reading.
Reflexivity does not destabilise faith. It situates it. It does not dissolve authority. It makes authority accountable to its relational effects.
Intolerance Revealed
The intolerance of reflexivity signals the boundary of interpretive safety:
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it is uncomfortable to acknowledge oneself as an actor,
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it is risky to allow meaning to press back,
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it is destabilising to admit that cuts are never neutral.
Yet this awareness is precisely what allows scripture to remain a field of constrained meaning, rather than a repository of settled truths.
Looking Ahead
In the final post of this mini-series, we will examine Ambiguity — The Intolerance of Suspension, gathering together all these pressures. Here, the field of constrained meaning is most apparent: where plurality, perspective, contradiction, ethics, mediation, canon, authority, and reflexivity meet, we see both the limits of containment and the vitality of interpretive engagement.
For now, it is enough to recognise this:
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