A common judgment made by some of my students in religion courses when they discuss a religious tradition different from their own is, "Why don't they just follow the plain meaning of the text?"  The problem with that statement is that it assumes that there is a plain meaning that can be understood by everyone in every place and in every time -- with no variation for culture, history, geography, political circumstances, language, level of technological development, social status, etc.  A uniform meaning of words and symbols is not true in any other situation in human life, so why would we expect it to be with sacred texts?

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The process of social construction described by sociologists Berger and Luckmann explains that things we accept as "real" and "meaningful" in the human world come about through an ongoing three-stage process:

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1. Externalization:  At some point, someone creates a new word, a new idea, a new symbol, etc.  If that person shares that new thing at all, he or she externalizes it – that is, he or she engages in some activity that conveys this new word, idea, or whatever to another person(s).

2. Objectivation:  Having done that, the new idea or whatever is out there. Now anyone can use it or even change it because it exists as an object outside of its creator. The more people who subscribe to it or the longer its usage, the more powerful it becomes as its own reality.

3. Internalization:  As it catches on, people encounter that thing (word, symbol, etc.) as an already-established reality.  It exists, so they must learn its meaning.  It becomes part of them and part of the categories of their thinking. Even if they dislike or disagree with that idea, that word, or whatever, they can’t just wish it away.  For better and for worse, it must be lived out and dealt with.  In so doing, this living out becomes a new externalization and the cycle repeats itself indefinitely.

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Religious scholars speak about processes of tradition and interpretation -- but such processes are very much like the sociologists' idea of social construction.  As a religious scholar or a sociologist examines the beginning of a tradition, it starts with someone sharing a new concept.  For the religious believer, that originator was God -- giving the Torah, the Gospel, the Qur'an, etc.  But whether the religious idea began with a human or divine originator, the process is the same:  it is shared, it is interpreted, and it is lived out (obeyed, disobeyed, worked around, rebelled against, etc.).

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Sacred traditions begin in the realm of things that are oral and/or symbolic.  Written scriptures develop later as those oral and symbolic meanings have been around for some time.  By the time a sacred narrative is put into writing, it may exist in several forms; thus, the community must engage in an interpretative process to get the text "right" to begin with.  In cases such as the Bible, there may also be an interpretive process that directs the community about which texts to count as sacred.  But even once the traditions are written in the right form and the proper documents are selected as sacred, traditions and interpretations never cease.  New generations build upon the "chain of memory" -- sometimes even without realizing that they are doing so (choosing one interpretation based on what they already believe they know while not even realizing that another interpretation was even possible).

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As with other socially constructed realities, there are occasionally times when movements arise to reconstruct or reinterpret the meaning of the sacred thing.  This happened, for instance, when Karaite Jews rejected the rabbinic interpretations and when Protestants rejected Catholic interpretations.  In such cases, there is often a claim that they are "returning" to a plain meaning that existed long before but that had been forgotten because of the layers of interpretations and traditions that had built up over the centuries.  The problem with that is that it is impossible to return fully to the mindset, culture, language, etc., that had existed at some previous point in history as if all the events of the intervening years had never happened.  Instead, a new lens is applied -- a lens that consciously rejects certain things and substitutes other meanings in their place, but which also unconsciously accepts some things that perhaps people did not realize are somehow "other" than what the original text assumed.  In other words, there is never a true "return" to what was so much as there is a substitution of one tradition/interpretation schema for another.

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The point is that all religious communities are both products of and producers of their sacred texts, traditions, and interpretations -- that is, through the process of social construction.  Christian tradition and interpretation up until at least the Protestant Reformation (and certainly beyond, as well) was based largely upon Origen's admonition that the Bible had to be understood and interpreted at a level beyond the "narrative meaning" of the text.  Likewise, the Jewish Kabbalists sought to understand the Torah at multiple levels of interpretation.  Martin Luther ranked the order of importance of the books of the Christian Testament, seeing some as the guide to interpreting others (and some as practically useless altogether).  These examples demonstrate that the act of interpretation inevitably adds or subtracts something beyond what had been meant by the authors of these texts way back when.  Interpreting sacred texts and traditions, then, is not a matter of discovering the plain meaning of a text as if one is an observer who exists outside of history and culture, but of experiencing embeddedness within a community of interpretation.