The (Non-)Problem of Interpreting Revelation

June 16, 2015    By: Jeff G @ 4:40 pm   Category: Bloggernacle,Ethics,orthodox,Personal Revelation,Theology,Truth

“[After Newton t]he universe is one great harmonious order; not, as for Thomas and the Middle Ages, an ascending hierarchy of purposes, but a uniform mathematical system…

“Nature was through and through orderly and rational; hence what was natural was easily identified with what was rational, and conversely, whatever, particularly in human society, seemed to an intelligent man reasonable, was regarded as natural, as somehow rooted in the very nature of things. So Nature and the Natural easily became the ideal of man and of human society and were interpreted as Reason and the Reasonable. The great object of human endeavor was to discover what in every field was natural and reasonable, and to brush aside the accretions irrational tradition that Reason and Nature might the more easily be free to display its harmonious order.”

John Herman Randall Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind, p. 260,76

Within the scriptures we find very little, if any mention of some “problem” with interpreting (personal) revelation.  While we do find numerous example of how problems arise from interpreting scriptures (JS-History), we also find that revelation is always the clarifying solution to such problems of interpretation.  Why is it, then, that the interpretation of revelation is mentioned so often within the bloggeracle?  What assumptions and values must be in place for interpretation to be construed as a problem and what was the historical emergence of these assumptions and values?  In order to approach the “problem” of interpretation I will first draw a conceptual trichotomy and will then draw a brief historical sketch of how the problem of interpretation was invented.

I would first like to briefly contrast Naturalism, Humanism and Theism, hoping that this tripartite taxonomy will serve to highlight the logical contingency of our problem since the refutation of any one does not entail the truth of any other.  Naturalism is the view that I will associate with the Scientific Revolution in which right and wrong, truth and falsehood are based in nature and the quantitative/logical rationality that is read off of it.  The relativism of Humanism is what Naturalists often pretend is the only alternative to their own view and says that right and wrong, truth and falsehood are based in human beings and the qualitative interpretations that their different cultures and perspectives actively project onto the world.  The third view, Theism, is just as absolutist as Naturalism, but insists that right and wrong, truth and falsehood are qualitative purposes and meanings that come down from God through His representatives that have been invested with His power and authority.   (These -isms are notoriously vague terms, so I am simply describing what I will mean by them in this post.)

The purpose of drawing this taxonomy is to illustrate how interpretation is only a problem – in a straight forward sense – within Naturalism since each person has equally fallible and interpreted access to the same reason and truth.  Within Humanism, by contrast, interpretations are the pluralistic, and often times conflicting sources of truth and goodness rather than some kind of obstacle to them.  Similarly, within Theism uniquely authorized interpretations are the source of truth and goodness rather than some kind of obstacle to it (as they are in Naturalism) or merely one among many equally legitimate and mutually contradictory interpretations (as they are in Humanism).  To summarize: Naturalism and Theism are harmonious, but Humanism is not.  Naturalism sees interpretation as a problem, while Theism and Humanism do not.  Humanism and Naturalism are egalitarian and roughly modern in nature, while Theism is not.

Having established some degree of logical independence and contingency within each of these positions, I would like to briefly sketch the historically contingent emergence and transformation of interpretation within these three worldviews.  Prior to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century (from which rose Naturalism), Truth – as studied within the universities – was the qualitative purpose or meaning that was to be found within the harmonious hierarchy of purposes and meanings that was the created universe.  Whatever else an impartial description of natural facts was within this latter, Theistic context, it was not truth.  Indeed, such a claim was very close to blasphemy to such pre-modern minds.

The Scientific Revolution, however, transformed the natures of both the universe and the Truth that is found within it.  Rather than a hierarchical system of qualitative purposes and meanings, the universe was a uniformly mathematical system – VERY much like unto a machine.  Within this system, hidden purposes and meanings became demoted (they eventually became banished altogether) as intellectual virtues.  Qualitative descriptions of the world became merely “secondary qualities” that are merely derivative upon the “primary qualities” that can be quantitatively measured.  The qualitative truth found within the book of scripture came to be seen as merely “figurative”, with a “literal reading” being granted only to those parts that squared with the quantitative, and in some sense more “real” truth found within the book of nature.  The transgressable moral boundaries that define purposes and meanings were replaced with moral ideals – similar to mathematical optimizations – towards which we could only approximate.  Stephen Jay Gould’s claim that religion and science now have non-overlapping magisteria might be a tad too strong, but given the radical transformation that occurred in the concept of truth, it is very difficult to say that Theistic religion and Natural science seek after one and the same truth in any straightforward sense.

Despite its radical departures from medieval scholarship, the rise of natural science and enlightenment thinking retained, indeed depended upon some aspects of that prior tradition.  The close relationship between nature and reason – between is and ought – within Naturalism very definitely depended upon the concept of natural law that was very much a part of Theism.  To be sure, these two traditions (Theistic Scholasticism and Naturalistic Science) each differed in how they saw the relationship between is and ought. In the case of Scholasticism, since truth just was a purpose or meaning, inasmuch as there was a continuum between is and ought, truth lay much closer to the latter.  Within the newer scientific tradition, however, truth lay more with the “is” side of that continuum.  Despite these differences, however, the early Naturalistic tradition took from the earlier Theists the idea that the observable world has purposes that are morally significant built into it, and thus claimed that the observable/natural world has morally significant reason (of a quantitative rather than qualitative nature) built into it.

Within the most straightforward versions of this Naturalistic picture, a deistic God created various aspects of the world for some moral purpose, and it is our contingent traditions and superstitions that have disguised or corrupted the goodness and reasonableness that naturally exist within nature.  As Naturalism transitioned into its more atheistic variants, however, it began to see nature itself as the original source of rather than the derived (from God) embodiment of reason and thus truth and goodness.  From this idea that nature is mathematical and the natural is reasonable, modern economic theory – especially of the non-interventionist variety of the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith – utilitarianism and cosmopolitan politics follow quite easily and “naturally”.  Even Kantian ethics in which rights and duties are willed with the universal consistency of reason is very much in this vein.  Within each of the disciplines, a unique and optimized solution to any problem is thought to follow from the interactions among various ideals within some boundary conditions.

It is against this Naturalistic standard of nature being equated with the (quantitatively) rational that the “problem” of interpretation arises.  Within this early tradition of natural science, whatever is universal must also be natural and therefore good – the way things are “naturally” since a deistic God made them that way.  The idea of “naturalness” also suggests a lack of choice in the matter such that anything more than a passive receptivity to nature and her reason constitutes a source of contingency and thus irrationality.  (The parallels here with the longing for a mechanical, non-volitional method in science where actively made choices are minimized is not accidental.)  Thus, when social scientists started describing the vast amounts of diversity and plurality that exists throughout the peoples of the world, it became clear to the Naturalists that universality could not simply be assumed or uncritically projected onto their own institutions, habits and beliefs.  It became imperative, then, to see through all the traditions and social conditioning that continued to disguise or corrupt the universality or naturalness of the world in order to get to its pure rationality and optimality.  This is the problem of interpretation.

The Naturalistic impulse finds expression within the bloggernacle today by seeing the prejudices, traditions and social conditionings of prophets as a source of epistemological fallibility – again, falling short of an optimized ideal – and thus untrustworthiness.  From this perspective, actively made decisions and contingent interpretations corrupt the purity of the natural reason that they seek to find, recognize or read off of the natural world.  These people see interpretation as a problem because they assume that all personal revelation – if it is to be true – must be universal and thus uniform in the same way that nature is across all peoples and times.  The only way in which revelations might differ or contradict each other, then, is due to the traditions and superstitions that the individual and his/her social context actively bring to and thus corrupt the otherwise pure reason of revelation.  The interpretation of revelation is thus a problem because it introduces a source of contingency and irrationality into something that is assumed to be universal, uniform and egalitarian like unto a mathematical system.

The Humanists, however, saw interpretation as a very different sort of problem than the Naturalists did.  For the Humanists, it is the traditions and passions of human beings – rather than an impersonal and mechanical nature – that are the qualitative sources of right and wrong, truth and falsehood.  From their perspective, then, it is not interpretation as such that is the problem, but the interpretation of authority figures.  More specifically, the Humanists object to how authority figures try to impose their interpretation of the world upon others in order to bend the latter to the will and passions of the former.  The orthodoxy of authoritative interpretations, then, is wrong because 1) it manufactures and reinforces a manipulative “false consciousness”, 2) it is a silencing form of domination and repression, and 3) it stifles the creative progress that comes with new perspectives.  What Humanists especially object to, then, is the attempt by authority figures to portray their own contingent, traditional, and/or culturally conditioned interpretations as if they were “natural” or in some sense less interpreted or less contingent than others.  Thus, interpretations of right and wrong, truth and falsehood are actually very good and desirable, in and of themselves, they being the only source of such values.  The real evil, however, comes from the domination and repression of one interpretation by another under the guise of hierarchical authority or non-contingent naturalness.

Consequently, the interpretation of personal revelation is a problem of a very different kind for the Humanists of the bloggernacle.  Rather than seeing biases and social conditioning merely as an epistemological shortcoming with respect to some practically unreachable ideal (as the Naturalist does), the Humanist will see such things as the reinforcement and perpetuation of unrighteous dominion – the violation of moral boundaries – and thus unworthiness.    While both groups seek to maintain a “critical distance” from the interpretations of church leaders, the Naturalist does so because it sees politics as a whole to be an obstacle to “natural” truth while the Humanist sees bad politics as dominating an otherwise authentic, inclusive and participatory truth.  The problem, in summary, is not that too many human interpretations influence us, but rather that of too few interpretations influence our views of right and wrong, truth and falsehood.  Humanists, in other words, see universality and uniformity (the very heart of a quantitative method) as vices which disguise and mask domination within the world.

Within the church, of course, we are forced to accept neither of these interpretations of the problem of interpretation – both of them being relatively late comers that were explicitly aimed to overthrowing their Theistic precursor.  Not only is another view in which interpretation is not a problem possible, but it has actually existed in various forms.  Like the Humanists, the Theists need not be convinced by the Naturalists assumptions that moral ideals are like unto the quantitative optimization of nature, reason or some other such ideal.  As such, the qualitative interpretation of nature and revelation is hardly an obstacle or problem in need of being overcome through the proper use of reason and/or method.  Within the Theistic worldview, the hierarchical nature of the universe and its qualitative Truths suggests that disagreements and contradictions at differing levels are not automatically in need of resolution as they would within a flat and mathematical worldview. Put differently, the idea of localized sub-purposes and sub-meanings does not clearly and necessarily suggest universality or uniformity of any specific kind.  Indeed, within such a system it makes perfect sense for God to anticipate the beliefs and social conditionings that a person will bring to their interpretation of any revelation and adapt His message accordingly.  In other words, within the moral boundaries set by God there might exist any number of meanings and purposes that, while appearing contradictory to the Naturalist, are equally valid.  What unifies and regulates this plurality of qualitative sub-purposes and sub-meanings are not natural facts about the world that remain constant across space and time, but higher qualitative purposes and meanings, culminating in God Himself.

Theism thus grounds the Absolutism of Truth in the purposes and meanings – aka interpretations – of authoritative persons rather than impersonal nature.  Theism does not, therefore, entail the open-ended-contradictions and anything-goes-relativism of Humanism.  On the contrary, the whole idea of setting somebody apart – the very thing that set Joseph Smith apart from the plurality of preachers within his community – is that not all perspectives and interpretations have an equal right to expression and inclusion within God’s community.  There may not be moral ideals, but there are moral boundaries that we ought not transgress.  Like the Humanist, the Theist is comfortable with a plurality of interpretations so long as they do not contradict, subvert or otherwise transgress the moral boundaries that have come down from above through the channels of God’s authority.  Indeed, the whole point of one’s ordination and reception of priesthood keys is that they become authorized to actively interpret their own personal revelation (contra Naturalism) in a way that effects other people (contra Humanism) so long as such leaders stay within the moral boundaries set for their stewardship by those above them.  In other words, neither the epistemological fallibility of a leader nor their being influenced by conservative culture/politics are, in and of themselves, justifications for seeking a “critical distance” from the prophets.

It is for reasons such as these that the interpretation of revelation is never seen as a problem within the scriptures.

14 Comments

  1. The more that is written about something the less that is know about it.

    Comment by Howard — June 16, 2015 @ 5:17 pm

  2. What term do you use for all the New Testament presentation of conflicting understanding of revelation if not “interpretation”?

    There seems to be all manner of parties trying to interpret revelation and having various problems with it. Why so many questions to Jesus if interpretation wasn’t problematic?

    Comment by Martin James — June 17, 2015 @ 7:10 am

  3. “Why so many questions to Jesus if interpretation wasn’t problematic?”

    Those questions were not about enlightenment and interpretation, but entrapment. That is how the NT contextualized them and that is the same reason questions are brought up on the bloggernacle. Jesus Christ time and again, and the Book of Mormon very specifically, taught that the Truth is easy to understand and only the wicked make it difficult.

    Comment by Jettboy — June 17, 2015 @ 8:26 am

  4. Martin, if you’re talking about different interpretations of scripture then I already addressed that in the post. I find few if any cases of trouble interpreting actual revelation within the NT except from people who either aren’t seeking revelation or haven’t had their hearts or minds opened and thus haven’t received any revelation.

    Comment by Jeff G — June 17, 2015 @ 9:34 am

  5. Martin,

    Two other points that I think are worth mentioning:

    1) During Jesus’ lifetime, the Holy Spirit had not yet come, in some sense.

    2) Although I didn’t make it explicit, I’m mostly addressing the problem of other people’s (leaders’) interpretation of their own revelation. I see very, very few people in the ‘nacle worrying about whether their own interpretations are accurate, since it is more atheists and anti’s that bring that issue up. Indeed, I think that my post does little, if anything to address the problems of identifying the source of personal revelation in general.

    Rather, my point is that once you accept that personal revelation does come from God, for the most part, and once you grant the relevance of priesthood keys, then there simply is no problem in how our leaders interpret their own revelation since their fallibility (in interpretation or otherwise) is totally orthogonal to their legitimacy.

    Howard,

    I’m not sure that I agree with a literal reading of that statement, but the point is well made all the same.

    Comment by Jeff G — June 17, 2015 @ 10:45 am

  6. Jettboy,

    We’re all wicked.

    Comment by Martin James — June 17, 2015 @ 12:16 pm

  7. Jeff I’m a bit sick and don’t want to reply until my brain is working a bit more.

    I do think you need be a little careful about how the universe is rational. This arises out of theology. Remember that for many God is a necessary being and necessary usually was taken as far back as the ancient era to be logically necessary. While the mechanistic worldview that developed in early modernism was one form of this it wasn’t the only form. Even today many accept God as a necessary being and creation as inherently rational.

    At the same time there always was (even within science) a countermove that reason was hidden. Parts of this could be seen in the old platonic ideas of an unconscious which were picked up at the end of the modern era by people like Freud. (I’d argue that Foucault’s analysis ends up being part of unraveling that hidden rationality) The strongest form of this can be found within negative theology – a movement often associated with platonisms of various sort. The most famous example is of course Anselm where God’s attributes and reasons are at best analogous to our understanding but not the same.

    Likewise the move to see the universe as understandable developed as the science of hermeneutics developed. There were three main thrusts in the modern era. (By modern meaning the technical term for the 17th through early 20th century) First was the development of Protestant hermeneutics with the Bible. The second was the development of more formal legal hermeneutics along very different lines from traditional Roman legal approaches. Finally was scientific hermeneutics which, as you note, was seen as treating nature as a kind of book of God analogous to reading scripture.

    While nature sees truth in nature, it ends up being complex. Especially during much of the modern period when theology and science were strongly intertwined in various ways. That is I think it erroneous to say truth is *in* nature. Rather nature is a sign *for* truth much as scripture is a sign *for* truth. The move is that sense of mediation. It’s true that as people reject theism in the modern era we have a “demythologized” hermeneutic. Since it’s no longer about God nature takes the place of God in various ways. (This is why Spinoza is so significant in the history of modernism since he makes this explicit)

    I raise this because when you talk about “representatives that have been invested with his power and authority” these are then seen as mediation. The whole move of modernism is thus seen how one moves from mediation to truth. So the book of nature, like scripture, is seen as these representatives.

    You are attempting to oppose representatives with nature. But I think that’s just a fundamental misunderstanding of the shifts in modernism. Further I think it highlights the interpretation problem you avoid, since the real issue is how to handle this issue of mediation of signs.

    Comment by Clark — June 17, 2015 @ 12:55 pm

  8. Clark,

    I find your final two paragraphs most interesting. I very much agree that the dead books of scripture and nature were very much intended to replace living authorities/representatives. It is the substitution and competition between these sources/determinants of truth that I am trying to accentuate.

    With that in mind, I was well aware than this post would not really address the issues that you have. Like I told Martin yesterday, my intuitions and thoughts are not at all clear regarding how the ways in which we socially negotiate the meaning of signs may or may not conflict with an non-egalitarian or even unilateral adjudication of truth. For this reason, I am having a difficult time seeing the contradiction that you detect.

    Where I stand now is that if we have a case where there is a morally significant difference in interpretation such that one person says X means such and such while another person says X means this and that, it is the person who has moral authority over the issue that wins out. although practical experience and the drawing of inferences are relevant, they do not decide the issue. Instead, the issue is resolved by whose practical experience and inferences are morally relevant?

    Comment by Jeff G — June 17, 2015 @ 2:43 pm

  9. In different terms that you might be able to respond to better: I think being the author of some speech act does not give you privileged authority over the meaning of that speech act… but having priesthood keys over that speech act and its context does.

    Comment by Jeff G — June 17, 2015 @ 2:47 pm

  10. Still sick so I don’t want to get too specific. I think the question is the question of mediation and how that affects your unique type of fideism.

    Comment by Clark — June 18, 2015 @ 9:03 am

  11. Feeling better. As you noted in (8) this really doesn’t address the issues I think are at hand. The fact an authority could weigh in tells us nothing if they choose not to weigh in. And the evidence is that contemporary apostles seem to go out of their way to avoid saying much on many topics. In your system it’s then not quite clear how to take the statements of earlier authorities who did weigh in but likely in error.

    My guess is you’d just discount them but it’s not quite clear on what basis you would do this given your commitments.

    The second more fundamental issue is how to interpret our own personal revelation (and even when or if it has happened) as well as authoritative texts. Again this might be moot in your system if a contemporary authority weighs in. But if they don’t weigh in in a manner where we can figure out we’re talking about the same thing and understand one an other, then we’re left with a lot of ambiguity and no clear way to deal with the ambiguity.

    Now I may be wrong, but my sense is that you think none of this matters because fundamentally you’re espousing a type of fideism where it’s the commitment that matters and not the content of beliefs or even actions. I’ll not repeat the reasons why I’m deeply distrustful of fideism.

    Anyway, it seems that at best your system depends upon a dialog with authority that simply rarely happens leaving us in a very ambiguous place.

    Comment by Clark — June 29, 2015 @ 1:34 pm

  12. “And the evidence is that contemporary apostles seem to go out of their way to avoid saying much on many topics.”

    I agree, and I think this is exactly what follows from my model. I think they intentionally leave a lot of room for interpretation of their words, since laying down a specific ideal for a wide range of people is the exact opposite of a hierarchy of stewardships and continuing revelation adapted to each specific stewardship.

    “In your system it’s then not quite clear how to take the statements of earlier authorities who did weigh in but likely in error.

    In my system, earlier authorities are not authorities at all – unless a living authority says so. I never sustained them and they never had stewardship over me. Why would I ever assume that their words were adapted or intended for me and my circumstance unless a living prophet said so?

    I assume what the above was aimed at interpreting scriptures… I agree that many people interpret them in different ways, but this is only a problem when two people have the same authority to interpret them for the same stewardship…. But this never (rarely?) happens. Thus, the problem of interpreting personal revelation is the only place where a problem could exist… but this is exactly where the scripture never mention any problem existing.

    “But if they don’t weigh in in a manner where we can figure out we’re talking about the same thing and understand one an other”

    I still don’t understand why this is a problem for me, but nobody else. If anything, my rejection of moral ideals in favor of moral boundaries seems to make thing easier. In my model it is not necessarily the job of a priesthood leader to insist upon a specific meaning or practice. Rather, they simply need mark out boundaries within which we are fully authorized to decide for ourselves. I think that I must still be misunderstanding the objection though.

    “you’re espousing a type of fideism where it’s the commitment that matters and not the content of beliefs or even actions”

    I’m not sure this is an accurate depiction. My approach to the issue is VERY much based in pragmatism, so saying that actions don’t matter is way off. What my model does insist upon is commitment to the right people rather than the right abstract principles or propositions – especially if such things are timeless and unresponsive to context. Who we choose to believe and follow is far more important and fundamental than what “propositions” we choose to believe and follow.

    “your system depends upon a dialog with authority that simply rarely happens”

    I don’t know why. As long as the authority and those within his stewardship share the same language in the most mundane sense of the word, then unilateral, one way communication has usually done the job well enough in most historical contexts. Again, I think I’m still not understanding why interpretation is more of a problem for my model than for any other.

    Comment by Jeff G — June 29, 2015 @ 2:48 pm

  13. In my system, earlier authorities are not authorities at all – unless a living authority says so. I never sustained them and they never had stewardship over me. Why would I ever assume that their words were adapted or intended for me and my circumstance unless a living prophet said so?

    What do you mean unless a living authority says so? Not really following you. It seems to me that many dead GAs are treated as authorities in general conference including the ones whose statements often have the most controversy like Elder McConkie.

    As you saying individual statements or the people themselves?

    And does this apply to scripture? What about other texts? So the King Follet Discourse is of equal authority (i.e. none) to Joseph Fielding Smith making incorrect claims about science?

    I assume what the above was aimed at interpreting scriptures… I agree that many people interpret them in different ways, but this is only a problem when two people have the same authority to interpret them for the same stewardship….

    Again not following. Are you saying the scriptures have no meaning and no authority unless quoted by an authority and then only within their stewardship?

    In my model it is not necessarily the job of a priesthood leader to insist upon a specific meaning or practice. Rather, they simply need mark out boundaries within which we are fully authorized to decide for ourselves. I think that I must still be misunderstanding the objection though.

    It’s almost as if you are saying the content doesn’t matter. I guess I’m just not following you here at all. Surely the meaning of what they say matters. It’s your dismissing that which seems so confusing to me. It’s like you want to advocate a fideism where the content of the authority is irrelevant. But as I pointed out earlier, that seems to let me make authorities say whatever I want.

    Who we choose to believe and follow is far more important and fundamental than what “propositions” we choose to believe and follow.

    I just don’t see how you can separate them. If an authority tells me to do something surely it matters what they tell me in which case the propositions in hand we choose to believe and follow most explicitly do matter.

    I don’t know why. As long as the authority and those within his stewardship share the same language in the most mundane sense of the word, then unilateral, one way communication has usually done the job well enough in most historical contexts.

    The errors of misinterpretation seem so common to me that I just keep being boggled when you say things like this. Have you honestly never misinterpreted an other person?

    Comment by Clark — June 29, 2015 @ 3:13 pm

  14. “It seems to me that many dead GAs are treated as authorities in general conference including the ones whose statements often have the most controversy like Elder McConkie.”

    Exactly! Living authorities are bringing their own authority and stewardship over us to bear on past statements. When Elder Holland quotes Pres. McKay, it is the former’s stewardship over me that makes it binding. Your proposed counterexample is exactly how the living authorities legitimate the words of dead prophets for us who are still living. Furthermore, the Holland is fully authorized to read or reinterpret the quoted statement however he feels inspired to do so. This is the entire rationale behind the NT reinterpretation and supplantation of the OT.

    “So the King Follet Discourse is of equal authority (i.e. none) to Joseph Fielding Smith making incorrect claims about science?”

    I don’t think so at all. Living authorities seem to quote and otherwise legitimate the King Follett discourse far more often than they do JFS’s feelings about science. This is the strength of my model in that we are no longer bound to believe and defend all past statements equally. BRM’s counsel to forget everything that had been said by way of justifying the Priesthood ban comes to mind. Living authorities are fully authorized to de-legitimize past teachings.

    “Are you saying the scriptures have no meaning and no authority unless quoted by an authority and then only within their stewardship?”

    Of course they have meaning. Regarding authority, however, so long as you’re granting that we all have stewardship over our own lives, then yes. People are fully authorized to privately interpret their scriptures however the spirit prompts them. This does not, however, authorize them to publicly do so for any audience over which they do not have stewardship.

    “Surely the meaning of what they say matters. It’s your dismissing that which seems so confusing to me”

    I don’t know where you’re getting this. I’m saying that I see no reason why interpretation is any more a problem for me than anybody else. This hardly amounts to a dismissal of meaning. This is where I get totally lost. I simply have no clue why meaning is supposed to be an issue in any sense. I have no clue why asymmetries in authority entail any with regards to meaning.

    “It’s like you want to advocate a fideism where the content of the authority is irrelevant.”

    Again, I don’t know where this is coming from. I’m saying that content and meaning from those who do not have stewardship over us is not morally binding upon us. This is a long ways from calling it irrelevant though. Basically, I’m saying that we are completely free to take a cafeteria approach of picking and choosing according to our preferences with regards to people and statements who do not have stewardship over us (this is my approach to science). When a righteous living authority speaks, however, we are morally bound regardless of what our preferences might be.

    “If an authority tells me to do something surely it matters what they tell me in which case the propositions in hand we choose to believe and follow most explicitly do matter.”

    Of course, but there is a huge difference between believing what is said because of who is speaking and believing who is speaking because of what is said. Intellectualism is fully committed to the latter (no person has any (de)legitimizing power), while the scriptures lean pretty hard toward the former (some people most definitely have (de)legitimizing power).

    “Have you honestly never misinterpreted an other person?”

    Of course I have. The same as all the authors of the scriptures, but they apparently never saw that as a deep problem. Nor do I. Indeed, any model that does not allow for such things to happen every now and then simply doesn’t match reality very well and should be ignored. This is exactly why I don’t see how interpretation is more of a problem for my model than it is for any other realistic model.

    Comment by Jeff G — June 30, 2015 @ 12:12 pm