Who Has the Plain Reading of Scripture?
Intro to the ‘Plain Reading’ Argument
In doctrinal debates, one often hears an appeal made to the ‘plain reading’ of Scripture. It goes something like, “Forget all this fancy argumentation, appealing to logic, history, and philosophy– if we simply take a plain reading of the text, we will see my side is clearly right.” Except every position, from Orthodox to Protestant to the Heaven’s Gate cult believe they are the ones who have the right interpretation. “Ah,” you say, “we do not even need to bring in the question of interpretations as you just did– this has nothing to do with interpretations– only the plain reading.” But a good sniff test for any fallacy is to ask if the exact same argument could with equal thrust be thrown back at the opponent. “Well, you see, it is actually me who has the plain reading.” Great. Where do we go from here?
Immediate Problems from Scripture Itself
We begin to see there are a great number of flaws with the appeal to a plain reading. What exactly is a plain reading? It turns out the meaning is not so plain. A plain reading is the clear meaning, they might say. But clear to who? A plain reading of Peter’s Second Epistle reveals that writers such as Paul are actually not plain to understand at all:
“He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”
By Scripture’s own admission, Scripture is easily misunderstood and misinterpreted to the harm of the ignorant and unstable. This would be troubling enough for our plain reading if we only considered that it seems to mean an intellectual component is necessary to understand Scripture. What is far worse is that the intellect is actually not enough on its own, and that another requirement bars us easy entry to the text’s meaning, as the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. Scripture itself posits that there are many meanings of even a single saying, as a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold In settings of silver, or in other words, there is an outer practical (silver) and a deeper spiritual (gold) sustenance to be found in a given saying. And who can say he has perceived, much less exhausted the depth of a given saying? For Scripture says Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgements and His ways past finding out! And My thoughts are not your thoughts, and Your commandment is exceedingly broad, and can you search out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limits of the Almighty?
But surely by studying very hard and becoming students of the text, we might come to an intellectual as well as a spiritual meaning, thereby unveiling the plain reading, right? Except it is said of Jews that when Moses is read, a veil lies on their hearts and also that in the Lord’s incarnation, amidst some hearers he opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures. And even upon the Lord Himself opening their understanding it is not said that they did understand, but that they might. For Scripture repeats again and again that there are those who keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive. For who is he that has understood the Scriptures except him who has rightly divided the word of truth? But if it is plain, in what necessity is there that we should rightly divide, instead of simply divide?
But let us again return to the question of what could be meant by the ‘plain’ reading. The word ‘plain’ itself suffers a variety of definitions. Do we mean obvious, clear, frank, literal, direct, undecorated, unmixed, geographical– maybe simple? Let us ask those who appeal to the simple reading– let’s call them the Simple. With what unity of voice will they answer our question, seeing their response ought to be without division on account of its simplicity. Shall we interpret Scripture simply, and only in one sense? Wouldn’t this be to corrupt some of the genres within the text? After all, history is not poetry is not epistle is not law. Wouldn’t a univocal approach to our reading be to contradict the apostolic exegesis itself given in Scripture? For it is written Abraham had two sons… which things are an allegory, for these are the two covenants… But let us not go too far, as some of the Simple do, and allegorize all of those things put forth in the histories– for if we were to do this, we would make Christ himself a fool (God forbid!) when he speaks of Adam as a real historical person, saying from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah… Knowing then that the Simple will only accept what is plainly put forth in Scripture, let them assess if what we have presented has been clear enough so far.
And so it is right not to ask “what is the plain reading of Scripture?” but rather “who has the correct reading of Scripture?” as it is clear that Scripture is by no means easy to understand, and every heretic claims he has the right understanding of what is written. St. Irenaeus says:
“When they have, by their art, taken the words of Scripture out of their order and rearranged them, and have joined them together in a way that is not according to the truth, they produce, as it were, the image of a king made out of precious stones, but which, when disassembled and reassembled, appears in the form of a dog or of some other beast.”
And so it is obvious that such an appeal to simplicity is fallacious. With that out of the way, it begins to be clear how necessary a holistic view is in order to understand Scripture. Without such a holistic view– appealing to and calculating things like genre, intent, audience, grammar, translation, history, culture, philosophy, theology, one’s own bias– one inevitably ends up practicing a self-imperceptible form of cargoism.
Cargo Cults and Semiotics
If you’ve never heard of cargo cults, you might be in one. Sola Scriptura is itself a sort of Cargo Cult Christianity, and I think upon explanation you’ll find this isn’t such an unfair comparison.
“Cargoism” was, and is, a widespread religious movement among natives of the islands of Melanesia in the South Pacific. The theology and practice of the cult centers on the worship of cargo… The cargo cult members do not know how the goods of foreigners are made. They believe that the arrival of cargo must be stimulated by some kind of religious ritual, because the gods will respond only to correctly performed ceremonies. Cult leaders and sometimes whole native communities demonstrate that they have received news about the coming of cargo by falling into ecstatic states… Some cult members believe they must imitate the foreigners. They even drill with wooden rifles and hold flag-raising ceremonies. They adopt Western dress and imitate Western behavior. They have built wharves, storehouses, airfields, “radio masts,” and lookout towers in anticipation of the arrival of good fortune. Cult leaders make contact with the deities by using “wireless telephones,” often nothing more than wooden posts or carved totem poles.”
Semiotics (the study of signs, symbols, and how meaning is created and interpreted, encompassing words, images, gestures, and objects) may give us a glimpse into the seemingly bizarre (if not somewhat endearing) behavior of such cargo cults. In this sense, practices that appear materially ineffective are not necessarily meaningless within the internal logic of the system. They often function as attempts to replicate the visible “sign structure” of a more technologically advanced society, where the causal relations are inferred through symbolic association rather than empirical mechanism. From a semiotic perspective, the behavior is not simply misinformed imitation, but an effort to reconstruct meaning through the reassembly of observed signs within an unfamiliar cultural grammar. This becomes especially evident when theological controversy is read not merely as disagreement over propositions, but as divergence in the semiotic capacities of different linguistic systems. Greek theological vocabulary, with its finer distinctions in terms such as ousia and hypostasis, often operated with a higher degree of conceptual granularity than its Latin equivalents, which tended to compress multiple relational distinctions into fewer lexical categories. As a result, what appears in retrospect as doctrinal dispute frequently reflects a prior mismatch in the available semantic architecture, where each side is attempting to preserve fidelity to the same referent through structurally different symbolic instruments. How does this relate to cargo cults? Well, when a piece of cargo graffiti’d with signs born out of a technologically advanced society suddenly drops into a place without the sufficient means to interpret them, then a scenario occurs in which the recipients truly and sincerely believe they are understanding the signs comprehensively, insofar as it accords to their experience of the sign. This is fine insofar as it relates to the question of their sincerity, but in terms of argument it usually presents as “my interpretation is the plain reading, and the plain reading is my interpretation,” which carries the same weight as saying “I believe my beliefs, therefore so should you.”
This isn’t to become a pluralist and say “everyone sincerely believes their beliefs according to the context they were formed by, therefore who’s to say what’s right?” There are various methods by which one might approach semiotics and the interpretation of a text. St. Augustine gives us some insight into one Christian view of semiotics in his On the Christian Doctrine:
But when proper words make Scripture ambiguous, we must see in the first place that there is nothing wrong in our punctuation or pronunciation. Accordingly, if, when attention is given to the passage, it shall appear to be uncertain in what way it ought to be punctuated or pronounced, let the reader consult the rule of faith which he has gathered from the plainer passages [(aha! The Simple prematurely rejoice)] of Scripture, and from the authority of the Church [(deflating balloon sound)]... but if both readings, or all of them (if there are more than two), give a meaning in harmony with the faith, it remains to consult the context, both what goes before and what comes after, to see which interpretation, out of many that offer themselves, it pronounces for and permits to be dovetailed into itself.
And so now the Simple must come to terms with the fact that the ‘plain reading’ is really not so plain at all, and a question of interpretation is unavoidable, as the interpreter necessarily corrupts with his own theory-laden perspective whatever he is reading/perceiving/interpreting. Devoid of their proper context (i.e. the Church in history) the Scriptures are prematurely sucked of their marrow, and we are left like the cargo-cultists trying to reconstruct realities signified by the signs dropped from above.
Ego Development Theory, Self-Awareness
In my essay Ego Development & Religious Worldviews I discussed the connection between various religious worldviews in their ability to progress individuals and communities into varying levels of “ego awareness” (ability to consciously engage with the personality’s process of meaning making) and the tendency of certain worldviews to aggregate their acolytes and sages at varying stages. In short, certain religious programs tend to reliably produce and reproduce trends in their results (i.e., you will know them by their fruits). Individuals tend to linearly progress (if they progress at all) from what are called the pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional stages.
“At the conventional stages, people are largely unable to step outside or reflect upon the system by which they construct meaning. Their assumptions, norms, and interpretive frames are experienced as given rather than as constructed.”
The conventional stage takes for granted that their interpretation is not an interpretation, but brute fact. “The meaning-making system is taken for granted as reality.” For them, “meaning making itself is not yet an object of awareness.” At this stage, “individuals are identified with their meaning-making structure.” They are forming assumptions without realizing they are assumptions, believing things without realizing they believe them. There is no separation between their beliefs and concept of self/reality. Things are as they appear, and there is no sense that there is anything beyond this intuition. “Only at later stages does meaning-making itself become the object of awareness.” Because of this, the approach to toying with meaning and interpreting interpretations themselves found in post-conventional stages can be seen as irksome, overly-abstract, and unnecessary to those conventional stages that want to appeal to things like common sense, reality, or plain readings. At later stages however, “there is increasing dis-identification from fixed views and greater awareness of the constructed nature of all perspectives.” Now obviously I would not therefore assert that pluralism is the natural result (this would be to get snagged in the net on our way up) and I have spoken elsewhere about the contradictions inherent in pluralist views. But to say all views are constructed is not therefore to assert that the subject cannot have a perception corresponding to the objective, only that we cannot immediately assume we are in possession of truth via self-evident maxims and epistemological bootstrapping, which is what is attempted in the case of the Simple in asserting a ‘plain reading’.
Solutions for Everyone, and a Conclusion
What then are we left with? In my case, and the case of anyone against the Simple, I would say we need only present the above argument as often as we encounter the Simple and their assertion of ‘plain readings.’ Otherwise, speaking now to the Simple, I would say what is needed is a certain level of humility to admit the limitations of their own understanding. Because as it turns out, reading means interpreting and is itself a means of interpreting. How are we to trust our own interpretations, after all, when no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, and we’re to lean not on our own understanding, acknowledging that the Church is the pillar and ground of all truth? Perhaps it is possible these things we receive were received elsewhere, and our little cargo cult could benefit from some outside help in understanding not the ‘plain reading,’ but the ‘right belief.’
Citations:
Cargo Cults: https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0191cargo/
Cook-Greuter: http://onesystemonevoice.com/resources/Cook-Greuter+9+levels+paper+new+1.1$2714+97p$5B1$5D.pdf
On Christian Doctrine, St. Augustine
The Holy Bible, God
