Uncertainty, Take 4

Okay, okay, let me try the whole sequence again.

3. The Uncertainties of Biblical Meaning
The philosophy of the twentieth century was pre-occupied with language and meaning in texts. One of the early influential thinkers in this regard was Ferdinand de Saussure, who discussed the arbitrary relationship between what he called a "signifier" and what it "signifies." 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 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.

Do words correspond neatly to things? Not really. In some cases they do 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 the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has pointed out that we often have nothing concrete to point to. 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 tell you what the word fire means without a sentence," someone might retort. "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. The English language has changed significantly since the late 1700's. So when it mentions "conversation," it does not mean just 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." 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 that causes desolation."

Perhaps these heirs of Darby are all 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.

Luke 21 interpreted the "abomination" differently. There Luke renders a prophetic word of Christ in relation to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple 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 a little earlier than Luke, both interpret the phrase "abomination that causes desolation" also in terms of the events surrounding the destruction of the temple in AD70, but their wording pushes still more in the direction of something "standing" in the temple. Their rendition of the prophecy also tends to mix words relating to the destruction of the temple in AD70 with words relating to the second coming of Christ. In contrast, 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.

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. Finally, we see in this case study the fact that even the New Testament itself sometimes reinterprets the meaning of words and phrases in the Old Testament, a microcosm of what has and will always take place in the interpretation of biblical words.