The problem is an obvious one for Protestant Christians, who place such a high value on translating the Scriptures from the original Hebrew and Greek into the vernacular. What does it mean to translate something? What does it mean to translate something that has divine authority? And doesn’t this require a propositional meaning distinct and separate from the languages in which that meaning might appear? And does not this give us “propositions” that are distinct from the sentences in which we usually encase them? No, not necessarily.
According to historic Reformed distinctions, Scripture carries two levels of authority. The first is authoritas verborum, authority in the words themselves. The second is authoritas rerum, authority of the substance. The Scripture in the original languages has both kinds of authoriry — substantive and verbal. A good translation has substantive authority, but not verbal authority. In other words, it is not the orthodox position to claim verbal inspiration for a Bible translation. A translation has authoritas rerum.
This naturally leads us to theorize about how the meaning of a sentence can get from one language to another, and we commonly think of the languages as shells and the meaning (the proposition) scurrying from one language to another like a little hermit crab. And once we do that, we think we can trap that little critter in between languages, haul him off to a philosophy department where he will be displayed in a cage and shown at conferences. We ask questions about how this is done, expecting to be able to do the math. We want to dissect the hermit crab.
Scripture just tells us that it is done — not how. And the Bible does not require such metaphors of us. In numerous places, the Bible helpfully translates words or phrases for us, and so we know on divine authority for example that Golgotha means place of the skull. But we want to bring a particular set of metaphysical assumptions to the process and say that that step one is to extract the proposition from the sentence, step two is to carry the proposition (usually with tongs) over to the receiving sentence, and step three consists of dropping it in. And we clearly have three “things” there, not counting the tongs — two carcass sentences and one living soul of meaning. But this is just one model for understanding the result, a result which no one who affirms objective truth disputes. That result is that the same meaning can and does show up in many different places. This does not require us to adopt any particular model of how the transfer occurs, or even to affirm it is a “transfer” at all.
Now whenever we invest ourselves heavily in a particular model of understanding absolute truth (e.g. foundationalism), when problems are found with that model, some will think they have found problems with absolute truth. It is the same kind of thing here. When propositions are forced to “live” outside their native habitat (which would be sentences, usually found with nouns, verbs, and a few ums), they don’t live there, but rather die. As a result, we think the trouble is more extensive than it actually is. We take the propositions outside and kill them, and then conclude that they must have been dead before we killed them.
So here is one answer to the probing question: “Then how does the same meaning show up in different sentences?” The first response is, “How would I know something like that?” I don’t have a blessed notion, at least nothing that I would be willing to be dogmatic about. When I was a philosophy student, lo these many years ago, I remember being astounded by the things that men, who breathed in their oxygen through their noses, would be willing to say, like they knew or something. One of my personal favorites was Leibniz and his monads, which were all identical and nondescript (except for location) and they all combined to make up the universe. I remember formulating Wilson’s Corollary to this tremendous insight, which enabled (heretofore baffled) philosophers to tell one monad from another. All they needed to do was check the serial numbers on the bottom. If pressed, I would acknowledge that I didn’t really know this, but just kind of made it up. So how would I know how the same meaning shows up in different places? Well, was I supposed to know? Does the Bible talk about it anywhere?
On subjects like this, we should be careful to reason within the boundaries established by Scripture. That means reasoning like Trinitarian Christians. And this does not mean a speculative theology of propositional meaning instead of a speculative philosophy. But it does mean that we can point some things out about the nature of God as He has revealed Himself to us, and this means in turn that such perichoretic mysteries when it comes to our use of language cannot be ruled out. I am suggesting here, not asserting.
God the Father reveals Himself in the God the Son, and they both reveal themselves in the Spirit who proceeds from both. This means that the Son is the exact image of the invisible Father. The Father speaks, the Son is perfectly spoken, and the Spirit perfectly understands. Now if the Father speaks, is there a separate “propositional” Son before the propositional “meaning” of what the Father speaks shows up in the actual Son? Is there any “distance” between the Speaker and the Word? If we have adopted the transfer model of translation, as though a proposition can be carried from one cardboard box of a sentence to another, is there a similar transfer of God’s meaning? Is the Word of God God’s proposition or God’s sentence? Is the “meaning” of the Son separable from the Son Himself? Obviously not. And if we echo the nature of God at all in our speaking (which, given the great and staggering metaphor of Word, seems likely), we ought not to rule out this same kind of thing (on a created level) when it comes to our sentences. Put simply (yeah, right), can sentences indwell one another?
When I say Jesus is Lord in English, and another man says it in Greek, and yet another in Spanish, we are all saying the same thing, and all these gloriously different sentences are the same truth. Why? The Spirit indwells them all, and He is the Spirit of truth. One Lord, one faith, one baptism.