The Becoming of Possibility: 12/29/25

Monday, 29 December 2025

The Intolerances of Biblical Interpretation: 2 The Intolerance of Perspective

If plural meaning unsettles biblical interpretation, perspective destabilises it even more profoundly.

Whose perspective matters?

The author’s?

The community’s?

The reader’s?

God’s?

The history of biblical interpretation can be read as a prolonged effort to contain perspective — to stabilise meaning by fixing its point of origin.

Perspective Is Unavoidable

Every act of interpretation is perspectival:

texts are written from particular historical positions,
languages encode culturally situated distinctions,
readers encounter scripture from within lives, bodies, and commitments,
communities shape interpretive habits through tradition and authority.

There is no view from nowhere. Meaning does not float free of relation. Perspective is not added to interpretation; it constitutes it.

The Desire to Fix Meaning’s Location

Despite this, interpretive traditions repeatedly attempt to anchor meaning in a single privileged perspective:

Authorial intent: meaning belongs to the original author.
Divine intention: meaning belongs to God, unmediated.
Ecclesial authority: meaning belongs to the church.
Textual autonomy: meaning belongs to the text itself.

Each of these moves performs stabilising work. Each is an interpretive cut.

But none eliminates perspective. They merely conceal the perspectival decision behind the cut.

Why Perspective Is Intolerable

Perspective is troubling because it introduces contingency:

If meaning depends on perspective, it might have been otherwise.
If interpretation is situated, authority appears fragile.
If readers matter, control is dispersed.

The intolerance of perspective arises precisely where interpretation seeks certainty, finality, or unassailable legitimacy.

Perspective threatens closure.

The Interpretive Cut Revisited

To interpret, one must decide:

which perspective counts,
whose voice authorises meaning,
which relations are excluded.

This cut is necessary. Without it, interpretation cannot function.

But when the cut is mistaken for the elimination of perspective rather than its stabilisation, perspective reappears as a problem to be suppressed rather than a condition to be acknowledged.

The Return of the Remainder

Suppressed perspectives return as:

marginalised readings,
accusations of subjectivism,
fear of relativism,
resistance from excluded communities,
anxiety about loss of authority.

These are not pathologies of interpretation. They are relational signals — evidence that perspective has not vanished, only been bracketed.

Perspective and Divine Meaning

Appeals to divine perspective often aim to transcend this problem. But even here, interpretation cannot escape relation.

Claims about what God intends are themselves articulated:

in language,
through tradition,
by interpreters situated in history.

Invoking divine perspective does not remove human construal. It intensifies the stakes of whose construal is authorised.

Reading Perspective Relationally

A relational approach does not deny commitment or authority. It insists on clarity about their conditions.

Perspective does not undermine interpretation. It makes it possible.

The problem is not that interpretation is perspectival.

The problem is the intolerance of that fact.

What Intolerance Reveals

The intolerance of perspective marks the point where interpretive authority feels most vulnerable.

It reveals:

how meaning has been stabilised,
which voices have been privileged,
which relations have been excluded,
where pressure will re-emerge.

Perspective cannot be removed without destroying interpretation. It can only be denied — and denial produces resistance.

Looking Ahead

In the next post, we will examine The Intolerance of Contradiction — why scriptural tension and inconsistency provoke harmonisation, and how the refusal of contradiction mirrors the same structural anxiety about closure, authority, and control.

For now, it is enough to recognise this:

Scripture does not demand a single perspective.

Interpretation demands the management of many.

And it is at that point — where perspective presses back against stabilisation — that intolerance becomes visible.

The Intolerances of Biblical Interpretation: 1 The Intolerance of Plural Meaning

Few claims provoke more anxiety in biblical interpretation than this one:

Scripture admits of more than one meaning.

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:

composed across centuries,
written in multiple genres,
redacted and recontextualised,
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:

doctrinal coherence,
moral clarity,
institutional authority,
pedagogical transmission,
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:

this meaning rather than others,
this reading as authoritative,
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:

anxiety about relativism,
accusations of unfaithfulness or heresy,
defensive appeals to tradition or inspiration,
harmonisation that smooths over tension,
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.

Interpretation must choose.

It must commit.

It must stabilise.

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:

where meaning has been fixed for good reason,
what relations have been suppressed to achieve that fixation,
and where pressure will inevitably reappear.

Plural meaning does not need to be solved.

It needs to be read.

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:

Scripture does not resist meaning.

It resists singularity.

And it is precisely this resistance that keeps interpretation alive.

Scripture as a Field of Constrained Meaning

Biblical interpretation is often presented as a problem of correctness:

Which reading is true? Which method is faithful? Which interpretation preserves authority, coherence, or belief?

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.

Scripture does not resist interpretation.

It resists closure.

And it is precisely there — at the edge of constraint — that its enduring power and danger reside.