The Uncertainties of Biblical Meaning

Let me try again...

I once had a conversation with a fellow Wesleyan in which I was talking about how our "tradition" interprets the Bible. At some point in the discussion, the person began to get frustrated and finally exclaimed, "Stop calling it our tradition. We just read the Bible and do what it says!"

We do not need to reference post-modernism to recognize the incredible diversity of biblical interpretation out there. There are over 20,000 different American denominations who claim to get their beliefs from the Bible, yet we will find that each one has its own unique understandings and "traditions" of how to interpret and apply different passages. Go to a typical Bible study within each of these churches and you will multiply the interpretations a thousandfold, perhaps a millionfold, as each individual within each of these groups brings his or her unique lenses to bear on the biblical text. "Here's what it means to me. What does it say to you?"

In my opinion, the current situation in relation to the Bible implies that Luther really lost his debate with Erasmus on the question of whether the Bible in isolation from the church is a sufficient basis for Christianity. Someone like David Koresh had the Bible and believed it to be fully inerrant in every aspect, yet apart from the church he found heinously unChristian meanings to its words. Severed from the church, the Bible in his hands became a catalyst for evil.

We might say that the Bible along with the Holy Spirit is sufficient, but how are we to know when someone is hearing the Spirit? People sometimes "hear" the Spirit giving conflicting messages. Is not the church a safer forum to test the spirits than as isolated individualists?

But these are the end points of our quest. What we want now is to find an island of order in this sea of interpretive chaos and chart a course to it.

I have personally found the thinking of several late modernist and post-modernist thinkers very helpful in conceptualizing the reason for such diverse biblical interpretations. Let me suggest some of the reasons for such incredible diversity.

1. Meaning is a function of minds.
Those of you who are acquainted with post-modern thought will immediately recognize that most thoroughbred postmodernists would not like the way I have worded this first point. For Derrida or Heidegger, I have messed up from the very beginning. For Derrida, I have invoked meaning as if it were a presence, while he would argue it is not a thing but an absence. For Heidegger and others, I have seemed to invoke the mind as if it were distinguishable from the world it contemplates, the so called distinction between I as subject and the world as object.

So goes the ongoing discussion we call the history of philosophy. My sense is that their language is laced with a good deal of irrelevant baggage from philosopher reacting to the philosopher before her, who was reacting to the philosopher before him, etc... I find useful things in all of them, but often feel the need to discard much that is the business of professional philosophical accountants.

Enough of that. All of it is to say that I am using "meaning" and "mind" in non-technical senses. I do not know what mind or meaning really might "be"--and I'm not suggesting that anyone else really does either. But they are certainly useful concepts, modern "myths," if you would, that express true mysteries. Don't be alarmed at my use of the word myth in this way, for I consider scientific equations to be very precise modern myths that express truths about the ultimately mysterious workings of nature.

Back to meaning and minds. In my journey to understand language, one late modernist thinker I have found helpful as one entry point is Ferdinand de Saussure. In particular, he argued that there is no pre-existent set of concepts that the words of a language map to. Rather, the specific meanings of words in a language depends on the culture that speaks the language. Further, the look and sound of the words in a language are pretty much arbitrary.

Take for example the word dog. This word neither looks anything nor sounds anything like a dog. The "signifier" that means "dog" in English is for all intents and purposes arbitrary. In that sense, texts (whether they be written or oral) are really cues of meaning--there is no meaning in the squiggles on a page or the sounds in the air. The meaning in my mind is cued by these sights or sounds (or in the case of brail, feelings--we could communicate by smell or taste as well). But the meaning is ultimately a matter of the mind looking at the text.

A simple illustration will suffice. The word "Gift" is a set of sounds I just uttered or if you are reading this paper, a set of marks on a screen or page. But what does it mean in your mind? If you are primarily an English speaker, you probably thought of something someone gives. But in German, the word "Gift" means poison. The meaning this word cues has nothing to do with the look or sound of the word. It completely depends on the mind reading it.

2. Meaning is a function of context.
Perhaps the most important idea of late modernism in relationship to meaning came from Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his own way, Wittgenstein helps us see that the words we use do not have some fixed meaning behind them. What the full blooded postmodernist Jacques Derrida would do in a far more flamboyant and far less helpful way, Wittgenstein gives us in a much more useful way.

Derrida argued that words have indeterminate meaning. He makes much of the Greek word pharmakon that can mean either poison or remedy. The word, he argues, has opposing meanings in and of itself. Yet while Derrida goes on to try to destabilize the meaning of any text, Wittgenstein stands ready to help us from the very beginning. After a number of migraines from reading Derrida, after the smoke clears, we are left basically with two useful conclusions: 1) that words are slippery things whose meaning can quickly unravel and escape and 2) that "context is everything" in determining the meaning of words.

Words do not have fixed meanings, to where some thing that is the meaning of the word will always or even often appear in a bubble over your head when you read or hear the word. In some cases they might in a most basic way. A two year old sees a fire and says, "dat?" The Mommy replies, "fire" and points to the fire. The two year old says, "fir."

But Wittgenstein pointed out that we often have nothing concrete to point to--in other words, there's no picture in the bubble over our heads. What concrete thing stands behind the word "is" or "righteousness"? In the end, a word needs a context for us to have any real sense of what it means.

So you can't know the meaning of the word fire unless you hear it in a context. "Well of course I can," someone might say. "I can tell you what the word fire means without a sentence. It is something that burns, has a orangish-yellow hue," etc...

But what if the sentence I have in mind is the following: "I am going to fire you." How well does the burning, orangish-yellow definition suit this sentence. Unless you have just come off of a really bad week, I doubt the definition that first came to your mind corresponds to the needed definition for the word fire in this case.

We can easily show just how complicated the situation can become. "Ready, aim, fire." "I'm all fired up for the Truth Conference." "Come on, baby, light my fire." This last phrase in particular raises an even more significant issue. A non-English speaker might put this last sentence into Google and translate it. But there's a better than average chance that they will end up with a puzzled look on their face. "Come forward, infant, ignite my" what? My match? My grill? Frankly, an American of fifty years ago might not make much sense of the sentence anymore than they might a phrase like "shock and awe," "google," or "blog."

Really to understand the sentence, "Come on, baby, light my fire," you need to know late twentieth century American slang and probably have heard a certain song by the Doors in the early 70's. Wittgenstein well put it when he suggested that we wouldn't likely understand a lion even if it spoke English, because we would not have a frame of reference from which to know what language games the lion's words were playing.

We could multiply many an amusing story at this point. At the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, the German demanding surrender from the American general found himself unable to interpret the response he received, "Nuts." What does that mean, thought the General and his translators? He'll surrender if we send them some nuts?

During my early days in England I felt the same way. I remember a night in particular I spent during my first week in England. All the words I heard around me were words I knew, but because I knew nothing of British TV or "football" culture, I really had no real idea what anyone was saying--it was similar to a feeling I would have in Germany a couple years later when everyone was speaking German all around me.

So, Wittgenstein wisely suggested, the meaning of a word derives from the "language game" you are playing in particular setting in life. A dictionary thus does not tell us what a word means--as if the word had some fixed meaning in itself. Dictionaries are lists of how words are used at any point in time, and these change all the time. The meanings are listed from most common to least. New meanings are constantly being added and old meanings constantly removed.

So what, you might ask, does any of this have to do with the Bible? The answer is that individual words, phrases, sentences, etc... can have multiple meanings and combinations of meanings. The Bible is made up of at least 66 books written in three languages over the course of at least 1000 years all over the ancient world in countless individual settings. It has many, many words. This multiplies the potential meanings of its words, especially in combination, into the billions.

The fact that the uses of words change over time also contributes to such complexity. Dictionaries are constantly adding new meanings and removing archaic ones. Indeed, this is the biggest problem with continuing to use the 1769 revision of the 1611 King James Version (most KJV advocates don't realize that the version they refuse to update is the fifth major revision to update its language with 1000's of changes from the original 1611 version). The English language has changed significantly since the late 1700's.

So when the KJV says to let your "conversation be known to every man," it does not mean talking; it means your manner of living. Even someone who has used the KJV all their life may not realize these subtle shifts in meaning.

Let us do a brief case study in the changes in meaning that we can observe with the words of the biblical text using Daniel 11:31: "They will set up the abomination that causes desolation." The phrase "abomination of desolations" provides us with a great example of Derrida's idea that words have an indeterminant meaning.

Anyone who has followed the Left Behind series or its Late Great Planet Earth predecessor will know the popular interpretation of this verse. The Antichrist will rebuild the Jerusalem temple and reinstitute the daily sacrifice. But at some point in the Great Tribulation, the Antichrist will set himself up as God in that temple: thus, the "abomination of desolations." Perhaps these heirs of John Darby (1800's) are correct about the end of time. But if they are, it is because the Holy Spirit has given them this perspective on these words in the Bible. As most in this room will know, the Darby approach to prophecy is an ingenious (and pre-modern) interweaving of biblical texts together that originally had little to do with each other.

Here is our first example of the flexibility of the meaning of words. The tendency of every generation of Bible users is to read the words of Scripture in the light of their own culture, situations, and contexts. The interpretations of biblical prophecy are only an extreme example. The tendency is to do this with every part of Scripture, ranging from what we might think it specifically means to "love your neighbor" to the specifics and connotations of what it means to "commit adultery." The greatest cause behind the myriad of biblical interpretations is the tendency of all interpreters to define the words in the light of their own dictionaries, their own "language games" and "forms of life."

Luke 21 interpreted the "abomination" of Daniel 11 differently from Darby, Lindsay, or LaHaye. There Luke renders a prophetic word of Christ in relation to the destruction of the Jerusalem in AD70: "When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, know that its desolation is near." Luke takes the abomination as the destruction of Jerusalem as a whole, not specifically in terms of anything placed or done in the Jerusalem temple.

Matthew and Mark, just slightly earlier than Luke, give us a more ambiguous and slightly different impression of the phrase "abomination of desolations." On the one hand, the context of the prophecy leads us to see it also in terms of the events surrounding the destruction of the temple in AD70. But their wording pushes more in the direction of something "standing" in the temple. Also, their wording of the prophecy tends to mix words relating to the destruction of the temple in AD70 with words relating to the second coming of Christ. LaHaye would not use Luke to argue that these prophecies are about the end times. Luke teases out almost all the elements of the prophecy relating to the second coming and focuses the words on the destruction of the temple in AD70.

From where we sit today, 2 Thessalonians 2 is a case study in biblical ambiguity. Paul probably had Daniel 11 in mind when he said that a "man of lawnessness" would set himself up in the temple as God. But what temple did he have in mind? Did he mean the church, since he tells the Corinthians, "You are the temple of the Lord"? Did he mean the temple in Jerusalem? It was of course standing when Paul wrote these words. But it is now gone and Paul says nothing of its destruction, let alone its later reconstruction. Should we hear an event in AD39 in the back of Paul's mind as he wrote these words? In that year, the emperor Caligula tried to set up a statue of himself in the temple, thinking himself a god. Was Paul speaking of a similar event in the near future? At the end of time? Was it a reference to the destruction of the temple in AD70? Did he expect Nero to try something like this?

This is again an extreme example of ambiguity, but it demonstrates the fact that even the original meaning of Scripture is capable of great ambiguity even when we know how to search for the original meaning. 2 Thessalonians 2 is filled with ambiguous comments that remind us that we are not the original audience, that we are not the original "you" of this text. Paul tells the ancient Thessalonians, "Don't you remember I told you about these things when I was with you?" They may have known--we weren't there.

It is universally agreed that the original referent of Daniel 11:31 was the desecration of the temple in Jerusalem in 167BC by Antiochus Epiphanes. The series of events throughout Daniel 11 read like a history book of the early second century at least up until 11:40.

So we see in this case study an example of how the same words can and have come to take on quite a variety of meanings depending on the context against which they are read. Not only is this phenomenon true of those unequipped to ask after the original meaning, but it is true among those who are so equipped. As a side note, this case study shows that the biblical text itself swims in the ambiguity of its own texts. When Biblical books interact with other biblical books, they frequently reinterpret the meaning of words and phrases, providing us with a microcosm of what has and will always take place in the interpretation of biblical words.

In the light of these realities, it is naive to suggest that the text of the Bible alone can serve as the authority for Christianity. The text itself is capable of taking on almost limitless different meanings. The only safe path is to define carefully which meaning of the Bible is authoritative for Christians. To say that the Bible is the authority without specifying a context against which to read its words is to open the door for any individual reader to define the words and, thus, to allow that individual's mind to have the authority of God. The quest for biblical authority is a quest for the appropriate context against which to read the biblical texts.