The Intolerances of Biblical Interpretation: 5 Scripture as a Field of Constrained Meaning

Across the preceding posts, a pattern has emerged.

Not a doctrine.

Not a method in the narrow sense.

But a recurring pressure point — a place where interpretation strains, resists, or hardens.

Perspective.

Contradiction.

Ethics.

Each provokes intolerance.

Each reveals a limit.

Together, they disclose what scripture is — and what it is not.

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Intolerance as Diagnostic, Not Failure

Interpretive intolerance is often framed as error, bias, or bad faith.

But intolerance is more revealing than neutrality.

Where interpretation becomes rigid, defensive, or absolutist, something important is happening:

• meaning is exceeding the reader’s capacity to contain it,

• identity is being threatened by implication,

• coherence is under strain.

Intolerance marks the boundary where interpretation stops being descriptive and becomes protective.

It is therefore diagnostic.

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Perspective: The Limit of Authority

The intolerance of perspective arises when scripture is no longer read from a position, but as if from nowhere.

When perspective is denied, authority must be total.

But scripture is perspectival through and through:

• prophets speak from within crisis,

• laws emerge from fragile communities,

• narratives argue with one another across generations.

The refusal of perspective is a refusal of situatedness — and thus a refusal of responsibility.

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Contradiction: The Limit of Coherence

The intolerance of contradiction emerges when unity is mistaken for consistency.

Scripture does not converge on a single voice.

It layers, contests, revises, and reframes.

Contradiction is not noise in the system.

It is the system.

Attempts to eliminate contradiction do not clarify meaning — they reduce its dimensionality.

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Ethics: The Limit of Allegiance

The intolerance of ethics arises when moral discomfort becomes unbearable.

Here interpretation no longer seeks understanding, but resolution.

Yet scripture preserves ethical struggle rather than dissolving it:

• mercy against law,

• justice against survival,

• love against fear,

• obedience against conscience.

Ethical tension is not a problem to be solved.

It is a trace of lived constraint.

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What These Intolerances Share

In each case, intolerance functions to protect a fantasy:

• that meaning can be absolute,

• that coherence can be total,

• that authority can be unambiguous,

• that morality can be settled once and for all.

Scripture persistently refuses these fantasies.

Not by accident.

By construction.

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Scripture Is Not a Repository

If scripture were a repository of settled truths, interpretation would aim at extraction.

Instead, scripture behaves like a field:

• structured,

• constrained,

• historically loaded,

• internally tense.

Meaning does not sit inside the text waiting to be retrieved.

It emerges through engagement under constraint.

This is why interpretation never ends.

And why it never stabilises.

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Constrained Meaning, Not Free Play

To call scripture a field of constrained meaning is not to endorse interpretive relativism.

Constraints are everywhere:

• language,

• history,

• community,

• power,

• survival.

But constraints do not fix meaning.

They shape its space of possibility.

Interpretation is neither free invention nor faithful repetition.

It is navigation.

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Intolerance as the Edge of Meaning

Every intolerance marks a place where interpretation could:

• close down, or

• become reflexive.

The former produces dogma.

The latter produces responsibility.

To read reflexively is to notice where one becomes intolerant — and to ask why.

That question is itself an interpretive act.

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What Faith Looks Like Here

In this frame, faith is not certainty.

It is endurance.

Endurance of:

• plurality,

• tension,

• incompleteness,

• ethical risk.

Scripture does not reward the reader with closure.

It trains the reader to live without it.

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Closing

Scripture does not offer final meanings.

It offers a long record of human communities negotiating meaning under pressure — and refusing, again and again, to resolve that pressure into simplicity.

Interpretive intolerance arises when we demand more certainty than the text can bear.

A relational reading does not eliminate that discomfort.

It stays with it.

That is where meaning continues to happen.