No. 021: I'll Give You Five Dollars.
A writer's hermeneutic of Scripture.
I’ll give you five dollars—if, without consulting other sources, you can tell me the meaning of the word meaning.
Is meaning ideological or instructional—or both, or neither?
Is meaning ontological (a thing in and of itself) or semiotic (a signifier of something other than itself)?
Must meaning be encoded linguistically, or does its essence transcend the bounds of human language?
How does meaning relate to agency and authority? (If you can answer all my questions, am I solemnly obligated to give you five dollars, or can I override the wooden reading of my statement with the claim I was only being cheeky?)
When we open the Bible, we all generally start with the same question: Is there a meaning in this text? For those of us who by faith answer yes—who contend that there is meaning in every book, chapter, verse, and word, and that this meaning should bear paramount influence on the shape of our thoughts and lives—a second question then follows: How should we go about discerning this meaning? That is, what particular methodology should we employ to interpret the meaning of Scripture? Attempts to answer this question represent the discipline of biblical hermeneutics: the science—or is it an art?—of delineating not just what Scripture means, but, first and foremost, how we can determine what it means.
You won’t get far into reading your Bible without butting up against the questions of hermeneutics. Take Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image.’” What are we to make of these first-person plurals (us/our), and what evidence should we prioritize when forming our conclusions?
If we compare the book of Genesis to its ancient Near Eastern parallels, we’ll likely conclude that the plural refers to the celestial council of spiritual beings—both God and the created angels he has selected as his chief advisers (cf. Job 1). This, after all, is most likely what the passage’s original, Hebrew audience would have understood it to mean. Or maybe the plural is an example of the “royal we”—a literary device used commonly throughout human history to emphasize the supreme majesty of a king? This explanation would make sense given the context of Genesis within the history of God’s progressive revelation through Scripture, and it’s also the reading that would probably come most naturally to the majority of humans throughout history and across the globe. Or then again, perhaps this is an early reference to the Trinity, as many (albeit not all) prominent theologians throughout church history have argued, and as a prioritization of trans-canonical theology might lead us to conclude?
These initial questions imply a host of others: Must we contend that the human author of Genesis fully understood the meaning of what they were writing? Or is it possible that the text’s divine author, God, intended a meaning greater than that of which the human author was aware? Can only those readers who now have access to the appropriate secondary sources—whether describing the Bible’s ancient Near Eastern context, or conventional forms of literature, or Nicaean trinitarian doctrine—lay claim to the sole, correct interpretation of this text? Or can the Holy Spirit reveal its meaning to anyone, regardless of their level of specialized education? Would our conclusions about the meaning of this verse change if we were fluent in biblical Hebrew and familiar with all of the ways its syntactical conventions differ from those of modern English?
Careful biblical hermeneutics are indispensable to the health of the church, and I certainly don’t question the merit of thinking critically through the methodologies we employ to mine meaning from Scripture. However, over the past fifteen years, I have taken several college and graduate courses and have read and edited numerous academic works on biblical hermeneutics, and in the process of all this study, I’ve noticed something curious: That is, I have not as of yet been able to identify a singular, agreed-upon, working definition of the word meaning—the very thing to which all the various hermeneutical theories purport to lead us. If I posed the questions listed at the beginning of this essay to a sample of influential hermeneutical theologians, I expect I would return with a diverse collection of answers, some contradicting others. It seems to me that some theorists are trying to get at apples, while others are trying to get at oranges—so no wonder we can’t agree how to peel the fruit set before us!
I’ve been producing and publicizing my own writing for just shy of a year now, and while I certainly don’t presume to know better than the many intelligent and faithful hermeneuts who have preceded me, my own literary endeavors have inevitably informed my personal understanding of the meaning of meaning, including the meaning of Scripture. I offer these thoughts not as a substitute to an articulate doctrine of Scripture, but simply as anecdotal food for thought.
Over the course the past year, there have been a handful of times when readers have reached out in response to my writing in order to offer some friendly push-back. The title of my Substack, “I’m Still Learning,” reflects my genuine attitude toward my writing; I don’t suppose I have everything figured out, and I have no doubt I’ve gotten some things wrong. Therefore, I sincerely value constructive push-back from readers.
However, here’s the thing: In each of the particular cases mentioned above, the reader did not actually object to my beliefs. To the contrary, when they have read me arguing Point A, they have inferred, perhaps even without noticing their minds making the leap, that I also believed Point B, and it has been Point B to which they have objected.
I don’t blame them for doing so: Our world is a polarizing one, and such leaps are easy to make when we’ve only ever heard Points A and B preached in tandem. Furthermore, I’m still an amateur writer, and I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes struggle to articulate points with perfect precision, nuance, or clarity. Again, I’m grateful for the push-back, as it encourages me to write more carefully in the future. These instances have, however, led me to mull over a couple observations.
First, they have demonstrated to me the natural (and good) human instinct to construe diverse truths not as rogue units of ideology, but instead as components of a unified and cohesive system. This, of course, is why we value systematic theology; it serves as a testament that God’s truth is one truth—a truth that cannot contradict itself, and a truth that, when understood correctly, can make sense.
Our rational instinct reflects the mind of God whose image we bear, and it empowers our own, human minds to navigate the barrage of input they receive moment by every moment. However, the rational mind is by no means immune to the effects of sin and the fall: In our pride and in our fear, we grow anxious for certainty in the coherence of our convictions. We are quick to generalize and over-simplify—to show preference to the ideological connections that feel most convenient, and to emphasize certain points of truth at the expense of others. We flock to sit under the yokes of rhetoricians who offer us easily digestible, neatly packaged analyses of who in our current milieu has got everything right (spoiler alert: it’s us!), and who has got everything wrong (spoiler alert: it’s them!). We charge into arguments with guns blazing, full of forceful confidence in whatever point we’re arguing.
But if the exercise of writing has taught me anything, it’s that the more confidently I lean into any one particular point, the more likely my argument is to become simply ridiculous.
Recently, I took note of the marked prevalence of floral motifs displayed upon the textiles, artwork, and ceramics with which I’ve chosen to decorate my home. “I suppose,” I thought to myself, “someone could write a humiliating critique of my décor choices, arguing that since a flower is the sexual organ of a plant, my pronounced use of floral motifs therefore must represent a latent, quasi-Freudian fixation on sex.” Such an argument would be fully rational and coherent, and it could be presented with an air of forceful certainty. I reckon one could even find a handful of peer-reviewed journal articles to cite in support of it. Even so, it would be incorrect, because, well, I simply think flowers are pretty, and that really is the end of that.
As I’ve brainstormed ideas for essays over the past year, I’ve often thought up thesis statements for arguments that initially strike me as punchy and innovative, only to realize after a bit more thinking that the argument I’m trying to make really can’t be made without moderating my original thesis with a significant amount of nuance. By the time I’ve finished writing, my essays are typically filled with a generous share of “nevertheless-es” and “on-the-other-hands.”
I’ve been lucky in life to have friends, including Christian friends, representing a vast array of backgrounds and perspectives. These friendships have taught me that everyone is generally trying their best with the information they have at their disposal—trying their best to make sense of the experiences that have formed their individual lives. They have taught me that truth—although it is, ultimately, just one truth—can nevertheless manifest itself along different contours to different people, depending on the questions their lives lead them to ask and the challenges their lives lead them to face. God meets people where they are through a diversity of avenues, and he guides them down a diversity of paths.
The same is true for me. My life has played out differently than yours, and I am working with and trying to make sense of a different set of data than the one before you. But this leads me to my second observation: That is, my writing is less likely to be misinterpreted by readers who have lived their lives in close proximity to me—who are familiar with the way I think, who know about the experiences that have shaped me, and who understand where I’m coming from convictionally when I argue various points. My writing is an extension of myself. Therefore, the better you know me, the better you’ll understand what I’ve written.
With this in mind, I’ll now pose the question: What is the meaning of Scripture?
And this is my attempt at an answer: The chief meaning of Scripture is neither an idea about God nor an instruction from God, although it often is followed by one or both of these. Rather, the chief meaning of Scripture is God himself—the being of whom the Word of God is an extension.
I don’t think I’m the first to make this argument: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1; emphasis added). Returning to Genesis 1—“And God said, ‘Let their be light,’ and there was light” (v. 3)—we see clearly that the voice of God is one and the same as his will at work. His Word is who he is.
Many of us, I’d submit, understand Scripture to be a portrait of God, and therefore understand the task of interpretation as an exercise of art restoration. The portrait appears to us smudged or chipped in places—hard to understand from our contemporary perspective—and so we bring along our paints and brushes, attempting to make our best educated guess as to what the original colors and lines looked like, so that we can touch them up precisely.
However, we grow anxious when we consider the diversity of English translations of the Bible we have at our disposal, each one attempting to communicate the Word of God through a unique permutation of English words. We grow more anxious when we learn that archaeologists have discovered no original autographs of the biblical text, and that, in reality, paleographers are simply doing their best to piece together various ancient copies of biblical excerpts, whose wordings and spellings often contradict one another. And we grow still more anxious when we learn that the ancient Hebrew text did not include any vowels, and that our translation of various Old Testament words and verses might change depending on the vowels we choose to insert. In light of all of this, how are we even to know what words are the right words from which we are to extract meaning? How are we to know exactly which hues to mix with our paints and exactly where to draw our lines so that we end up with an accurate portrait of God? Some efforts of art restoration are better than others, but in our anxious longing for certainty, we inevitably end up exaggerating certain features and glossing over others. Our portrait of God quickly becomes a caricature.
But what if Scripture is not a portrait? What if, instead, it is a window—a window through which we encounter a God who, though he does not change, is nevertheless alive, speaking to us and working through us today just as he was when the ink of Scripture was wet on the paper (cf. Hebrews 4:12). This God is not limited by the time-space continuum, nor is he limited by our frail, rational minds or our incomplete hermeneutics. Sometimes it’s hard to see through the window, and so we must do our best to clean off the dust and peer inside; but God is on the other side, illuminating himself through the power of the Holy Spirit, and drawing near to the face of the glass so that we may get a better view. He wants to be seen; he wants to be known.
I realize my argument might strike some as unsettling. We would prefer that biblical interpretation worked like algebra: simply plug a verse or passage into the place of x, then run through the formula, and you’ll end up with y (the meaning) on the other side. This way, our ability to discern the correct meaning of Scripture would fall within the scope of our control.
But, I ask you to consider, perhaps it is for the best that the meaning of Scripture cannot be neatly packaged? If the church had required certainty in the whole of its systematic-theological analysis of the Bible in order to grow and serve the family God, God would have given it to us by now.
Instead, he gives us himself. He bids us not to comprehend him under the the banner of various -isms, but instead to follow him in the obedience of faith upon the unique path he has laid out for each of us. He is a God who plays in paradoxes and dances through dogma, and he calls us neither to the right, nor to the left, but rather onto a narrow path—a high road that leads, ultimately, to his Incarnation in the person of Christ. Substack poet Michaela Fox articulates this point beautifully:
Right and wrong, black and white, Jesus was nailed in the middle of the cross —not on one side. All of Truth is held in tension, where mystery becomes the revelation.
I say all of this, again, not in an effort to minimize the value of systematic theology or the usefulness of the various creeds and confessions upon which the church has agreed throughout its long history. These are all part and parcel of how God uses his church collectively in order to spur its members on toward truth.
Rather, I say it to encourage you: God has given his people the Scriptures so that he can meet us where we are and draw us toward himself. He is faithful, and he will never lead you astray. Immerse yourself in his Word prayerfully, and in the context of the fellowship of the saints, and he will reveal himself to you in grace and truth. Listen to it, believe it, and obey it. The reward, I promise you, will be much more valuable than a measly five dollars.