In the postmodern era meanings attached to universal concepts like male and female, husband and wife, marriage, and family are under attack.  They are slowly being eroded and replaced with new meanings;  thereby leading existentialists to claim: There exists no concept which has a meaning which is fixed and constant.

 

Reflecting this sentiment was Jean-Paul Sartre, who proposed: "EXISTENCE PRECEDES and RULES ESSENCE."  For Sartre, the engine for creating meaning was SOCIAL EXISTENCE.  If true, then according to the late communication theorist David Berlo at Michigan State, all meanings are "personal, and our own property." 

 

Berlo then adds: ...If they have no similarities between them, they cannot communicate."   Without "similarities" in meaning, cross-cultural communication would be impossible. And therein lies the problem. The very existence of the United Nations implies that languages of the world share concepts having the same meanings.

 

But how can we explain its existence if all meanings are "personal" and belong to the people?  

Possession of these shared meaning implies the existence of a Universal Lexicon structured  in the unconscious mind  which makes cross-cultural communication possible. Without this shared knowledge, there could be no United Nations.  Also, because of this shared semantic knowledge I was able to translate the Greek New Testament into the Chácobo language.

 

Bible translation is possible only because there exists in the unconscious mind  a Universal Lexicon having meanings which are shared by all people. 

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Rejecting the empirical evidence that such a Universal Lexicon actually exists in the unconscious mind is former student of Berlo, missiologist-anthropologist Charles Kraft.  Whereas all meanings, according to Berlo, are "our own property,"  Kraft states:  "Meanings belong to the people. They are not inherent in the forms themselves."  

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Now if there existed forms common to all to which there were attached inherent-meanings, then those meaning must be interpreted as being meanings which have a Divine origin, meanings which were essential for communicating with the One who created humans in his own "image." 

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In other words, Sartre was mistaken.  ESSENCE or BEING PRECEDES EXISTENCE. In the words of theologian Colin Guntonn, "Social existence is not essential to our being as humans."   For the existentialist, it is. 

 

Convictions:

1. If shared Divine Meanings between cultures did not exist, then neither cross-cultural communication nor Bible translation would be possible.  We would be like birds of the air, each language group singing it own tune, being completely incapable of communicating with the other birds of the air.

2. When Kraft claims:  “There is no such thing as an absolute set of cultural forms....that would imply the existence of some sort of absolute cultural structure are so misleading that they must be abandoned,”   he is taking the existential position that EXISTENCE PRECEDES AND RULES ESSENCE rather than the Biblical position that ESSENCE and being created "in the image and likeness of God" PRECEDES EXISTENCE. 

3. Man and society have both the freedom and capacity to reject and replace Divine Meanings with meaning which "belong to the people." 

4. The rejection and replacement of Divine Meanings with meanings derived from SOCIAL EXISTENCE is real. Such a rejection and divergence from the “law of God in our inner being” was acknowledged by the prophet Isaiah who wrote: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way" (Is. 53:6).

5. Spiritual DIVERGENCE from Divine Meanings which are fixed and constant explains why we have cultural diversity and chaos in the world.

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