Misrepresenting concepts to which are attached Divine Meanings, a.k.a. God's Truth, is the stuff of history. It occurs whenever a society decides to replace a Divine Meaning attached to a form held in common with a meaning derived from SOCIAL EXISTENCE in a particular environment. The effect? The meaning now "belongs to the people" rather than God.

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Now if all meanings are a social construct as proposed by every contextualizer, then there  could be no misrepresentations of the God's Truth.  SOCIAL EXISTENCE alone determines what  is appropriate to think.

 

For example, when Jesus said: "This is what the parable means...", was he, as the "Son of God" expressing a Divine Perspective, a.k.a. God's Truth, or a perspective put into his head by living out his cultural existence as a Jew in Roman controlled Palestine? For the contextualizers who deny the existence of concepts having inherent  meaning, all meanings are a social construct.

 

But when linguist Kenneth Pike wrote: “A person may distort innate positive universals into negative particular actions,” in effect he, as a theist, was saying:  "Academia, Be Alert!  Man and society have the capacity to create misrepresentations of inherent meanings and diverge from the representations of God's Truth  structured in the unconscious mind."  

 

Sadly, DIVERGENCE from God's Truth has an effect on human performance because of the way a society structures itself.   "Because thou hast rejected knowledge [epignosis], I will also reject thee, that thou shalt not minister as priest to me" (Hosea 4:6}/  For the Chácobo, such a DIVERGENCE from God's Truth "written on the heart," produced a dying culture of 133 living members in 1955. 

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Around 1960, I finally concluded they were a dying society because they had restructured the nuclear family. They had replaced an Ideal Structural Form with a misrepresentation, an internal structure environmentally shaped to "fit" the Amazonian Rainforest. They were guilty of replacing a Divine Ideal Structure of the family with an internal structure shaped by CONTEXTUAL SOCIAL EXISTENCE in the Amazonian Rainforest.  Their DIVERGENCE from the spiritual IDEAL had social consequences. They were a dying culture. If they were to exist as a viable society, it meant a return to God's Truth, the covenantal "one-flesh" principle  of husband and wife.

 

Unfortunately, academia is filled with anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and even missiologists who deny the existence of a transcendent Narrative "written on the heart"  from which man and society can turn away.  For them, man and society determine what the dominant dyad of the nuclear family should be.

 

Keeping Form and Meaning Tied Together

For the concept-innatist,  forms and their inherent meaning-content were "tied together" when "God breathed the breath of life into him. And the man became a living person" (Genesis 2:7).  What God had created would have lacked personhood and language if the two were not "tied together" at creation.

In fact,  the stuff of history is all about man and society, for existential reasons, separating Divine Meanings from Forms or Concepts common to all and attaching their own "truth" to the forms.   And  it all began in the garden.

 

When Eve was tempted, she was tempted to distrust the meaning of "You will die" attached to the warning, "You must not eat it or even touch it; if you do, ...."  And this war over meanings has not ended.   Today the temptation is to blindly accept the meanings people attach to concepts c  ommonn to all. 

For example, Americans are asking: Why should marriage be limited to male and female? Tribes of the Vaupés area of Colombia declare: There is nothing wrong with a marriage rule  which declares: You are prohibited to marry someone who speaks your language.  Or, just because you 'fathered' a child doesn't give you the right to discipline the child.  

 

What has socially existed since Adam has been the contextualizing of meaning.  There exists no transcendent Universal Lexicon containing concepts containing Divine meanings. In the postmodern world,  a male can be a "wife," a cousin, a "brother," a bribe a "gift," and a son-in-law a "food provider for the household-of-five."  

 

Consequently, whenever cultural forms and their inherent meanings are separated, there ceases to exist fixed, unchanging, transcendent Truths.  What presently reigns in the postmodern era is the contextualizing of meaning. By separating inherent meaning-content from forms held in common by all people, contextualizers are guilty of replacing a meaning which belongs to God for a meaning which belongs to the people.

 

The Constituents of Culture: Representations and Misrepresentation of the Truth

From a top-down, inside-out perspective, human culture consists of the total sum of coexisting representations and misrepresentations of innate positive universals.  The misrepresentations are derived from CONTEXTUAL SOCIAL EXISTENCE.  They are "learned." All meanings "belong to the people." In contrast, meanings linked to representations of God's Truth are not learned. Such meanings are "acquired" when "triggered" and brought to consciousness within a socio-linguistic environment.  

 

Figuratively, this means the "wheat" and "tares" exist together. Whereas the wheat represents a perspective which is culture-free, the tares represent the native's perspective. Social scientists refer to the particulars of the native's perspective as "emic data." From a top-down, inside-out mentalist's perspective, it means the task of every cultural analyst, if he or she wants to discover what the Greeks called "essence," should be that of gleaning the wheat from the tares, the representations of God's Truth from the field of misrepresentations of God's Truth. Emic data  contains both wheat and tares (weeds), God's Truth and the people's truth which is relative.   

 

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Convictions: 

1. Separating and gleaning the wheat from the tares is not an easy task. It is done by examining the verbal and cultural behavior of a society. The methodology is grounded in the apostle Paul's assumption that "their actions give visible proof of commandments written not on stone but upon the tables of the heart” (Rom. 2:15). 

2. A careful examination of human behavior, verbal and nonverbal, can uncover not only those inherent meanings attached to universal forms, but the material and spiritual forces of the environment that created the tares, the misrepresentations of the Ideal.

3. The idea that there exists in the mind of man a Universal Lexicon and misrepresentations of Divine Meanings is totally rejected by contextualizers and materialists of every kind. 

4. The task of every Bible translator is to make sure that form and meaning are "packaged right."  An accurate translation of God's Word depends on it. 

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