Living Words

Reading is exhausting. That is because all good writing – indeed, all good art – is, to quote Jeanette Winterson, “conscious, and its effect on its audience is to stimulate consciousness”. In other words, the writer as artist seeks to bring a certain dissonance into the consciousness of the reader. Wrestling with the discomfort that art births is tiring. As is our unconscious attempt to re-establish stability by ignoring the troublesome thoughts. So it is unsurprising that the Evangelical response to challenges to the authority of the Bible is typically along the lines of “‘God said it, I believe it, that settles it.’ This dismissive mantra, posing as a statement of faith, is intended to restore a sense of comfort and certainty. It feels so simple, so solid—Scripture as a clear, fixed message directly from God. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.

If Jesus is the true Word of God, as we explored in the last post, then Scripture doesn’t ‘settle’ anything in the way we might like it to. Jesus’s life and ministry showed us that truth isn’t something rigid or final—it’s relational, dynamic, and alive. The value of reading Scripture is less about uncovering God’s message and more about participating in an ongoing conversation.

So while the idea that words hold fixed meanings is comforting, because it promises a stable world where language is a tool for precise communication, that stability is an illusion. Every word, every text, even sacred Scripture is inherently fluid, shaped as much by the reader as by the writer.

A century ago, Ferdinand de Saussure observed something that has profound implications for our conversation: the relationship between words (what Saussure called “signifiers”) and the realities to which those words refer (the “signified”) is completely arbitrary. The only reason that certain marks on a page assembled in a particular way – words – carry any sort of meaning at all is because we all agree that they do.

What this means is that any act of engaging with a word is an act of interpretation. These  interpretations, as Jacques Derrida would subsequently elaborate, reflect the fact that language is not stable. Words do not carry fixed, universal meanings; instead, they derive meaning from their relationship to other words, contexts and readers.

Imagine that you are from another planet, arriving on Earth. You land at a deserted road, alongside  a pole in the ground with an octagonal plate that reads “STOP”. How would you make sense of this? Even assuming you could understand English, you would need to decide whether ‘stop’ was intended to mean causing an action to cease, preventing an action from happening or plugging a hole. In order to decode “stop”, you would need to do far more than simply employ linguistic tools. You would also access your own experience – are there similar constructions to roads on your planet? How are they regulated? What does transportation look like? Are there constructions that resemble roads but perform different functions?  You would, additionally, consider other contextual information – the colour and location of the sign, for example: what do the colours and shapes symbolise where you come from? What do the surroundings suggest they might symbolise here?  The presence or absence of Earth vehicles (however you might understand their function) and their responses to the sign would certainly shape your interpretation. The meaning of a word like “stop” is never fixed, but always shaped by its relationship to other concepts and contexts.

German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, explains that every act of interpretation is shaped by the “horizon” of the reader: their cultural assumptions, personal experiences, and historical contexts. Similarly, every text exists within its own horizon, shaped by the cultural, linguistic, and historical context in which it was written. So when we engage with a text, we don’t simply “uncover” its meaning. Instead, our horizon interacts with the text’s horizon, creating a fusion. This interplay is where meaning is born. Importantly, this fusion is always relational and dynamic; it shifts as we bring new experiences and understandings to the text.

This reality challenges the modern Western obsession with objectivity. Gadamer calls this tendency our “prejudice against prejudices”—a refusal to acknowledge that all knowledge, including the interpretation of texts, is mediated by subjective experiences. There is no objectivity, for language mediates our relationship with the world around us and language is slippery and deceptive.

Jean-Paul Sartre introduces a provocative twist to this discussion: the idea that texts “read” us even as we read them. He suggests that every act of reading is also an act of self-revelation. As we interpret a text, we project our own values, assumptions, and desires onto it—often without realising it. The text, in turn, reflects these back to us, exposing our biases and shaping our self-understanding.

How we read Scripture reveals as much about us as it does about the text. When we approach the Bible with a focus on judgment and wrath we may reveal not only our own internalised fears or authoritarian tendencies, but the violence inherent in the sociological forces that shape us. Conversely, if we prioritise grace and reconciliation, it may highlight our own longing for healing and restoration, and an alternative response to those same violent sociological forces. Scripture is never a neutral, self-contained document; the act of interpretation is profoundly shaped by the reader’s own existential reality.

“God said it, I believe it, that settles it” denies the role of the reader in meaning-making, ignoring not only that interpretation is always relational, but that it happens at all. By doing so, this approach presents the reader’s interpretation as God’s clear will, thus offering divine sanction for human prejudices, putting interpretations beyond critique and often paving the way for Scripture’s misuse. From justifying slavery to condemning entire groups of people, history shows the dangers of a rigid, self-serving relationship with the Bible.

Only when we relinquish the need to control the Bible by imposing certainty and inerrancy on it will it be possible to enter into transformative dialogue with it. We need not regard accepting the relational nature of meaning as an intellectual flaw. On the contrary, it invites humility and openness, recognising that every interpretation is partial and shaped by human limitations. Indeed, this perspective aligns remarkably well with how Jews in Jesus’s time approached their sacred texts, as we’ll explore in the next post. Their emphasis on dialogue, interpretation, and oral tradition may offer us a richer way to engage with the Bible.