No Single Meaning
11 February 2008 - 6 אדר א' 5768 by Huw
A theme for Lent at Trinity Church, Buffalo is “No Single Meaning”. And they refer there to the Biblical text. In the sermon from Sunday (Lent 1) - for which I was not present - Cam Miller takes a very Jewish-style look at the text. I say that mindful that his conclusions would not be, necessarily, Jewish conclusions, of course. But I hear his point:
But the point is, these are very different interpretations with very different meanings and they are both right there in the Bible and they’re both right here in front of us. One is not right and the other wrong. Stories, even sacred stories, are not mathematical equations with answers that are either right or wrong. Stories are mined for meaning and often multiple meanings, and how we interpret tells us as much about the interpreter as the story.
I hear Cam speaking in personal context created by Rabbi Dan’s senior sermon and the comment that heads up this page over at Chabad (both of these links were blogged earlier in these pages).
Cam is reacting to the Western Church’s fascination with Augustine’s invention of Original Sin, but I rather like the Eastern Church’s ideas on this topic (which also seem more Jewish than, eg, Augustine)… and I think it would be fun to hold them all together in conversation. To be certain - I’m not sure if I’ve made up this “Jewish Context” but it seems to me that Christianity, generally, has made a fetish of finding the “one right meaning”.
