A short polemic on linguistic trickery

Against traditionalist bludgeoning approaches to scripture

Feb 13, 2025

Today, I stumbled upon something in the corpus of a liberal theologian worth considering (a humbling realisation for one as opposed to liberalising tendencies within the church outright, I must add, my reader). Concerning the intersection of S. K., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Harvey Gallagher Cox, Jr., Morgan writes:

Cox and Bonhoeffer join together in working from the Kierkegaardian conviction that the language people use to speak about things is usually not their own, but given to them by others—namely, religious authorities and clergy; this is particularly problematic for Cox because it is only bound to result in mass confusion. Citing Kierkegaard’s parable of the clowns and the circus fire as an example of the slippage between the communication of assigned meaning and the role of the communicator in the exchange, Cox challenged the “meaning-world” currently offered by the clergy, suggesting instead that the secular city serves to alter the social context in which “God” is named, addressing specifically the metaphysical system employed by most academics—very far from the experiences of ordinary people who are trying rightly to understand God for themselves.1

In particular, the first idea here is tantalisingly dangerous for fundamentalist exegetes and others who would hide behind the alienating and distant language of a world that we no longer live in. For the sake of completeness, see S. K.’s (or, rather, A’s) parable of the clown:

In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed—amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.2

It is quite clear then, even when in times of mortal peril, that the speaker and the audience, the preacher and the congregation, the teacher (James 3:1) and those with ears to hear (Matthew 11:15) are not in a stale relationship wherein they share disinterested facts and objective wisdom with one another—they are both participants and audience at one, both active and passive in their giving and receiving; they are interested, subjectively-engaged, and involved.

Here, something should be made clear—there are two great dangers for biblical exegesis:

Language and meaning

In communication, we find ourselves separated from the other in that our subjectivities, distinct and separate, cannot be readily expressed in full. This is clear when we encounter the other, even the ones we love, in a state of feeling—it is not certain that they are another mind, so we are left with our judgment call (often a reasonable judgment call, of course, but still not certain). Now, this problem is very much a problem for minor and contingent matters such as a child who cries when they fall or an expression of joyous celebration in the other when they do something or other that pleases them. As with all things, these moments and memories will fade away to the remorseless march of time, as ashes to ashes and dust to dust; as such, we might enjoy the levity that comes with willingly accepting such things as judgement calls that do not weigh on our soul and, as such, we are prepared to become supererogatarily loving for fear of misunderstanding the other in their time of suffering or joy.

But what does it mean to have this distance when the words come from the Lord, from the mouth of the prophet? What matters when our eternal soul is on the line, when the soul of the other is potentially at risk? Do we dare to be so light and so carefree in the freedom of faith when it comes to matters of teaching (James 3:1)? Is it responsible, responsible to God, to the other, and to the self, to play with the texts with such certainty—as if a simple “common sense” reading or a simple “historical context” analysis could provide us the detached objectivity we would like to wield in order to do away with this concern over the subjective nature of God Himself? Dare we reduce God to a list of laws, a logical puzzle, or a transcendent Other that we can know in the way that I can know the dimensions of a chair or the texture of an apple? What’s more, even if I could so readily declare God’s will to be totally and unmistakably captured within the confines of the words of a rather long book3, how would I share these insights that I have taken from this essentialist image of God? How do I share the texture of an apple without reference to the subjective feel of the apple that I can only presume the other also knows? How can I share the sensation of being “born again” with those who are only born once? Again and again, James 3:1 should weigh on our soul—can we truly bear the responsibility to teach when we do not know the subject matter?

Here is where we come to the terrifying, gut-wrenching aspect of Christianity that stands against the Present Age we currently live in: there is nothing about having faith that requires the proclamation of faith to the other. Despite the obviously communal aspects of baptism, communion, and marriage, their communal and visible aspect is not the part which demonstrates faith to God—if anything, it is an inessential side-effect of the faith that is a free expression of joy, not a ritualistic servility to the God Who will judge. There is nothing about the “meaning-world” of the fundamentalist pastor which elucidates an essentially Christian language, much in the same way that there is no essentially Christian language that can only be expressed through a Catholic or Mennonite mode of speaking. Faith is not something which we assent to and then we gain, but rather something in us, something primordial, some holy faculty that moves in the life of the believer4 and, as such, is not something that will necessarily be captured by the use of language. It is possible that, much like the qualia of the texture of an apple, unmistakably an apple in the hand, faith is outside the confines of language, beyond the “horizon” of the sayable and only expressible as the showable. The “meaning-world” that the preacher would want to impose upon faith is separated, necessarily immanent despite its transcendent object; we can only ever know faith by analogy, never express it cleanly or distinctly as an object of science. Trapped at the fusion of horizons5, the “70,000 fathoms deep”6 where we hand ourselves to the other in the hope that they might hold us above the surface.

One wonders how we might read Deuteronomy 6:167 in this context.

The sophistry of the fundamentalist

While those with liberal and postmodern tendencies might find themselves swimming in the sea of the incommunicable, attempting to say the very thing which cannot be said8, the mind bereft of hope, love, and faith might instead stage a readiness to draw upon that which is objective to them, the received wisdom of the blind man, by electing itself as the mock Martin Luther of a play constructed within the fantastic subjectivity of the one whose disobedience extends even further than the abject sinner—they plead “here I read, I can do no other”, stealing the role of the leading man.

Here, we find our would-be teacher (James 3:1) has not learned the lesson of the German Idealists. Dressing up their trapped subjectivity in the clothes of objectivism, they encounter scripture as if they were not a living, breathing being with thoughts, ideas, wants, and cares about this world—the trickery is found in the faux-simplicity of a “common sense” reading of the text, obvious in the exegeses of both fundamentalists and liberal Biblical critics9. Of course, reading or listening to fundamentalist musings is often enough to believe that these people are correct in saying that they have no thoughts, ideas, wants, or cares that influence their work, but their existence as subjective agents is all the evidence we need to show this is not the case. Their temporal existence, providing their bias against which they find themselves irreparably alienated from their desired sub specie aeternitatis condition, is dressed up in the language of the divine.

It is in this condition where the trickery begins—with language. Possibly from ignorance but presumably not always, the fundamentalist points at the text as God Himself and offers their “unbiased”, “common sense”, “objective” analysis: look, here is where it says we should throw the gays in prison; look again, here is where it says we should murder women who have abortions; thrice, look! here is where it says who I do not need to love. So staggeringly straightforward, this person has somehow done what no other person in the history of the church had thought to—simply read the words without the bias of competing interests10 and exactly as God would deliver it to us11. What originality and genius this dialectical unity of opposites presents us with! Having dismissed the problems of temporality and translation as mere liberal philandering or conservative wrecking12, the subjectivity of the would-be teacher (James 3:1) is hidden under the dead words of a text without spirit, through a language alien from the life of those who speak, in the contingency of a being dressed in the clothes of the eternal—of course it makes sense to imprison the “disfavourable” guilty, of course it makes sense to stone the “disfavourable” sinner, of course it makes sense to turn the needy away from our door… just read this here exactly as I tell you to!

While the postliberal or postmodern approach might come across as stuffy, obscurantist, or simply difficult, I will offer one obvious benefit that comes with this ridiculous approach to writing that you, my reader, and I have come to appreciate: we are certain that our language is not a guise to merely impose our subjectivities onto the other under the cover of nightfall. We are subjectively engaged and aim to make that clear; it is, after all, a matter in which “I can do not other”.

Share Kierkegaardian Reflections

The polemic in question

I raise the charge, as has been raised again and again, that the fundamentalist readings of the fundamentalist, the liberal biblical scholar, and the “Reddit atheist” are insufficient at best and proudly ignorant at worst. I will leave their judgement to another, but their preference for “common sense” readings and irresponsible wielding of their particular subjectivities against the other is indeed a preference, a choice amongst choices, a bias amongst biases. Like the individual necessarily divided from the other—even when in their direct presence—the fundamentalist is divided from the Apostles and Christ in their interpreting.

As Cox puts it, “the language people use to speak about things is usually not their own, but given to them by others—namely, religious authorities and clergy”13; when we find that an “aesthetic” or an “ethical” interpretation of the Bible (dressed up as the interpretation or as not-an-interpretation at all!) cuts off the path to the Spirit, we find that Paul’s haunting words hang over us all over again:

…for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (2 Corinthians 3:6b)

And, in that context, where the fundamentalist is at the peril of being killed, we think again:

My brethren, let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment. (James 3:1)

Kierkegaardian Reflections

A short polemic on linguistic trickery

Against traditionalist bludgeoning approaches to scripture

Language and meaning

The sophistry of the fundamentalist

The polemic in question

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