Biblical texts are often treated as channels of unmediated meaning. Inspiration is invoked precisely to guarantee that the divine speaks directly, fully, and clearly.
And yet the insistence on unmediated revelation is a structural impossibility. Meaning cannot pass untouched through human constraint, history, language, or community. It is always relationally constituted.
The Desire for Immediate Meaning
Communities long for certainty:
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God speaks.
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Scripture delivers.
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Readers apprehend.
The fantasy is that meaning exists prior to human interaction, ready for extraction.
This fantasy allows readers to bypass the labour of interpretation, the risk of error, and the discomfort of negotiation.
It promises transparency.
But the promise cannot be fulfilled.
Mediation Is Inevitable
Scripture passes through countless layers of relation:
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historical circumstance,
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linguistic form,
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editorial decisions,
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ritual performance,
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communal reception.
Every stage shapes, selects, and constrains meaning. None is eliminable. None is incidental.
To deny mediation is to deny the conditions of meaning itself.
Intolerance as a Structural Response
The insistence on unmediated inspiration produces intolerance:
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human readers are distrusted,
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historical contingency is minimised,
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editorial activity is framed as corruption,
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diversity of construal is treated as threat.
This intolerance is not a moral failing. It is the defensive mechanism of a system under pressure: the interpretive field cannot bear acknowledgment of its own relationality without destabilising authority.
The Cut Between Divine and Human
Interpretive cuts are enacted to preserve intelligibility:
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meaning belongs to God, not humans,
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scripture’s authority is absolute, not negotiated,
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the human role is obedience, not authorship.
These cuts protect faith and coherence. But they bracket the relational nature of reading. Mediation is denied, rather than recognised.
The Suppressed Remainder
What is suppressed never disappears:
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readers still interpret,
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historical context still shapes understanding,
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language and genre still constrain,
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communities still negotiate meaning.
The remainder returns as anxiety, debate, and conflict — often framed as heresy, relativism, or misreading.
Faith and Relational Reading
A relational approach does not reject inspiration. It reframes it:
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divine meaning is never “raw” or untouched,
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human construal is not contamination,
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mediation is the condition of intelligibility, not a failure.
Faithful reading acknowledges the cut: inspiration must traverse human constraint. It does not vanish, but neither does it arrive complete.
Intolerance Revealed
The intolerance of mediation marks the point where scripture, tradition, and human reading intersect:
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where authority is asserted,
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where plural construal is suppressed,
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where historical and linguistic contingency are bracketed.
It signals the limit of what interpretation can bear without collapsing, and the boundary where relational awareness presses back.
Looking Ahead
In the next post, we will examine Canon — The Intolerance of Excess. Here, the cut moves from mediation to selection: which texts are included, which excluded, and how excess meaning is contained before interpretation begins.
For now, it is enough to recognise this:
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