Making the implicit explicit

What I think is going on, and McClendon has articulated some of this, is what I'm going to call the algebraic assumption. This assumption is dependent on a deeper assumption about monosemy, "THE meaning of scripture," which is a product of modernism.

• Contradictions imply either error or non-truth.
  This is often expressed: "The Bible is either all true or it is false." A direct result of the unity commitment.

  Is the Bible true? That is the great issue in the world today, surpassing in importance all national and international questions. The Bible is either true or false it is either the Word of God or the work of man. If the Bible is false, it is the greatest impostor that the world has ever known. William Jennings-Bryan, “The Inspiration of the Bible,” in Seven Questions in Dispute (New York, 1924)

• When there is a contradiction in scripture then we must engage in mental gymnastics or contortions to resolve it. The only alternative is to chuck the lot in the garbage can.

Monosemy / Polysemy

• Modernism assumes there is one, right, true, correct way to interpret a text. This is usually seen as the (hypothetical) authorial intent. What the author intended it to mean is what the text really means.
• Pre-modern and post-modern interpreters (including scriptural authors such as Paul) explicitly reject this assumption; the polysemy of scripture is scriptural

The algebraic assumption

• Truth only [or primarily] comes in propositional packages:

  The term proposition has a broad use in contemporary philosophy. It is used to refer to some or all of the following: the primary bearers of truth-value, the objects of belief and other "propositional attitudes" (i.e., what is believed, doubted, etc.), the referents of that-clauses and the meanings of declarative sentences. Propositions are the sharable objects of attitudes and the primary bearers of truth and falsity. This stipulation rules out certain candidates for propositions, including thought- and utterance-tokens which are not sharable, and concrete events or facts, which cannot be false. wikipedia.org, "Proposition"

• Propositions can be treated as algebraic formulas to determine truth value; for example:
  • Scot 1:14 "A = X"
  • Heather 16:7 "B = Y"
  • Billy 2:57 "X = Y"
  • Bruce 19:3 "A ≠ B"
  • Transitive law (given Scot, Heather and Billy) says "A = B", but Bruce said "A ≠ B" ...Contradiction, chuck it!
    • Or, we could say that "plain meaning" doesn't apply to one of the passages...
    • Or, we could say that logic doesn't apply in this case...
    • Or, we could say that the Hebrew word in Heather has a special sense...
    • Or, we could say that the Greek word in Scot has a special sense...
    • Or, we could say that the text is corrupt in Billy and we can't read it with the same weight as the others...
    • Or, we could say that Bruce isn't really part of the canon (or just never read JamesBruce)...
• Given the unity commitment, any contradiction that cannot be resolved by mental gymnastics means the entire Bible is "the greatest impostor that the world has hever known." And we can't have that, so get very good at your gymanstics!

My question as we go forward

Is my proposal more gymnastics/contortionism or a chucking of the algebraic assumption? I hope a chucking of the assumption.