Accepting a text on authority and faith implies that the listener or reader suspend the universal constraints on ordinary communication . . .
In ordinary communication, the listener or reader “automatically” attempts to fill the gap in understanding between what is merely said or written and what the communicator intends the listener or reader to think or do as a result.
Atran illustrates. Normal communication works like this:
Someone says to you, “That’s just fine.” You immediately try to figure out from the previous conversation or immediate environment what “that” means, what is “fine” about it, and why it is “just” fine.
Tone and inflection in the way “That’s just fine” will be taken into account. You will recall that previously you had asked to taste your dinner host’s special reserve. You will have noticed since then the broken wine bottle on the dining room floor. You will draw upon your background information to understand that your host is ironic when angry.
You will, further, believe that the speaker understands all of these factors, too, and that he knows you also grasp them.
You will stop processing all these factors (intonation, recent memory, background knowledge, surrounding environment, theory of mind, etc)
the moment the communication, “That’s just fine”,
makes sense.
That’s significant. You stop processing and working out the right interpretation of the communication once its function is clear.
That’s not how one interprets a religious authoritative text, however. Such normal rules of communication — called “relevance criteria” — are bypassed.
Believers generally assume that the words in a sacred text are authorless, timeless and true. As a result, people do not apply ordinary relevance criteria to religious communications. (p. 92)
Authorless
Since the divine text is essentially “authorless” — the author is thought to be a channel for the mind and wisdom of God — there is no thought or need to try to infer the intent from the way the words are spoken or the context in which they are heard, etc. (The preacher’s gesticulations and intonation are his own, not the deity’s.)
Interpreting what the speaker (preacher) intends by uttering the passage is one thing; interpreting what the deity intends can be indefinitely many things (expressed, in part, by indefinitely many speakers and interpreters).
Timeless
Timelessness implies that cues from the surrounding environment, background knowledge, and memory are all irrelevant — or equipotentially relevant, which amounts to irrelevance.
And that is why God’s message can apply to any and all contexts in an indefinite number of different ways. Certainly believers do interpret God’s word in specific ways for specific contexts, but
they have no reason to ever stop interpreting.
True
Unlike normal communication that context, memory, surroundings, intonation, etc may lead you to understand as metaphor, satire, or lighthearted nonsense, etc. communication from God that is accepted as true on faith can never be false, deceptive or merely figurative.
(Of course the Gospels do have Jesus speaking figuratively, but the meaning or doctrine itself is always seriously literal.)
Ordinary preoccupation with lying and false belief in communication therefore plays no role in interpretation (or at least no consistent role). Neither can failed attempts at verification or confirmation of this or that aspect of the information represented in a religious statement, or inferred from it, undermine the audience’s belief in the statement’s truth. (p. 92)
This is not how ordinary communication works. It is a special type of communication reserved for religious faith.