BioLogos: The Problem with Biblical Literalism
As the issue of Biblical literalism seems to be a recurring theme in conversations on this blog, I’ve decided to highlight a couple of pieces which to my mind expose some of the problems endemic within the literalistic approach:
First from BioLogos:
For some Christians, it is very important to read the Bible literally unless it is impossible to do otherwise. In fact, some hold that reading the Bible literally is the only way to read it as God’s authoritative word for the church. As the logic goes, once you start down the road of not taking the Bible literally, there is no telling where that road will end. Individual Christians will be free to pick and choose what parts of the Bible are binding and which parts aren’t. At that point, the Bible ceases being the authority, and we become the authority. That would mean chaos for Christian doctrine.
Literalism is seen as the safest way to maintain the doctrinal health of the church. That is why some consider it to be the default position of faithful readers of the Bible.
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Some Christians apply this line of thought is applied to the creation stories in Genesis. It is thought that, since there is no announcement or any other indication to the contrary, we have no option other than to accept this as a literal account of history.
Literalism is designed to insure that Christians not go down the slippery slope to relativism. Literalism builds a fence around the Bible. Occasionally it is necessary to take some things non-literally, but by and large all biblical interpretation is well inside the literalist fence.
As compelling as this logic may be, it runs up against some significant problems. Those problems are generated by the Bible itself. That doesn’t mean a totally literal interpretation of the Bible is always wrong. Not at all. But it does mean that literalism is not the default position that Christians should take.
Ed Stetzer has just posted a blog article entitled; Calling for Contextualization Part 6: Loving and Hating the World and although he’s not explicitly tackling the issue of Biblical liberalism, his very first paragraph highlights to me the problems that can arise if a person always adopts this approach and never contextualises:
The Scripture has a lot to say on the subject of “the world” that, on a cursory reading, can seem contradictory. Consider, for example, what the Apostle John says. In John 3:16 he wrote: “For God so loved the world…” But then in 1 John 2:15 he wrote: “Do not love the world or the things that belong to the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in Him.” He records Jesus’ words in John 12:47, “For I did not come to judge the world but to save the world,” but relates Jesus’ admonition in 15:19, “If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”
It seems like poor John can’t seem to make up his mind about “the world,” and whether we should love it or hate it.
Taken literally are we supposed to love the world as God did, or hate it, or neither?
Another example that jumps to mind is Luke 14:26:
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters–yes, even his own life–he cannot be my disciple”
So, even though I’m exhorted to love as God loves, in the literalist world view presumably I’m to hate my family?
Any thoughts?
August 31st, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Nobody is a true biblical literalist, even if they claim to be.
For example, “this is my body”. Really? Do protestant fundamentalists really believe this? Presumably not. Also the Authorised Version includes Unicorns and I don’t think anyone believes they actually existed.
The fact is that everyone chooses which bits are literal and which bits aren’t and the choice is usually made based on the tradition of the Christian community they belong to.
August 31st, 2010 at 4:37 pm
I know of some folks on a forum who do claim to be literalist’s, but as you rightly say nobody in their right mind can be in reality…
They especially hold to a literalist account of creation, which is more widespread than you might imagine nowadays. They believe that if they question Genesis then the entire Gospel account breaks down and that’s why they fight so vigorously.
Unicorns…I can be quite gullible at times, surely you jest?
Of course there are some who would hold to a literal “This is my body”
August 31st, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Unfortunately the unicorn thing is a live issue for biblical literalists:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v2/n1/unicorns-in-bible
August 31st, 2010 at 5:09 pm
Oh my goodness Gordon, I had no idea.
This is absolutely morbidly fascinating, thanks so much for mentioning it….
August 31st, 2010 at 5:27 pm
From that web page:
“The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). Eighteenth century reports from southern Africa described rock drawings and eyewitness accounts of fierce, single-horned, equine-like animals. ”
Now let me quote Pope Benedict XVI
“From the beginning, Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the Logos, as the religion according to reason…It has always defined men, all men without distinction, as creatures and images of God, proclaiming for them…the same dignity. In this connection, the Enlightenment is of Christian origin and it is no accident that it was born precisely and exclusively in the realm of the Christian faith….It was and is the merit of the Enlightenment to have again proposed these original values of Christianity and of having given back to reason its own voice.”
August 31st, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Thank God for reason, and PBXVI.
August 31st, 2010 at 5:42 pm
This is fun!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re%E2%80%99em
August 31st, 2010 at 6:10 pm
St Augustine of Hippo once wrote a long work entitled ‘On the literal meaning of Genesis’. It should be born in mind that he belonged to a tradition which believed that every passage of Scripture had a ‘literal’ meaning, in the sense of a correspondence to an outward reality, but every passage also had a spiritual meaning, which operated at various levels, including also allegory.
From a close reading of Genesis 1-3, however, Augustine concluded that the world was, as we would put it, ‘literally’ made instantly, in its entirety, and that the ‘seven days’ was a manner of speaking, not a description of a time frame.
I mention this partly just to show that before the nineteenth century there were other options than ‘six day creationism’ (Augustine wrote his work in the early fifth century AD), but also to point out that we can all, in a sense, be ‘literalists’, but this doesn’t always commit us to foregone conclusions about Genesis 1-11.
I also love these words from Augustine’s commentary, which are worth quoting at length:
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?”
August 31st, 2010 at 6:26 pm
Thanks John. I have added that to my quote file. Its actually quite disheartening to see the church descend into this sort of theological mire regardless of my own faith or lack of it.
August 31st, 2010 at 7:18 pm
Gordon, if you’re quoting it, the full reference is St Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Volume 1, Tr John Hammond Taylor, (New York: Paulist Press, 1982) 42-43
August 31st, 2010 at 7:41 pm
Thanks John. I have added that to my notes.
August 31st, 2010 at 7:46 pm
Thanks Gordon for the AiG link. I can never leave that site without a little dig into some other articles. I was looking at one of Behe’s and was struck by the blatant quote mining. Tellingly, whenever he referred to an author who supported creationism the link to the article was included, but Dawkins’ works from which he so blatantly quote mined were not linked. That rather confirms that the out of context or clipped quotes do not stand up to scrutiny.
I am staggered by the deception and self deception in which these people indulge. How can they justify this?
August 31st, 2010 at 8:02 pm
I used to be a creationist. Its a bit like “I do, I do, I do believe in fairies”.
I think people get trapped into feeling that its necessary to believe all of that to be a Christian or to be a proper_christian. Its cult like in that if all your friends believe it then you feel obliged to.
I am not sure if I believe or not. The only thing I am sure about is that parts of the New Testament are very early and attest to a belief that there was something special about Jesus and that the last supper was very important (its the earliest record of Jesus in 1 Corinthians). Beyond that I don’t know, but to me doubt is a necessary part of faith. Its not something that should be brushed under the carpet. I think the disciples generally had doubts or didn’t know everything, not just Thomas.
August 31st, 2010 at 10:06 pm
That’s exactly right Gordon, in that if we think we have everything in tight little bundles of absolutely “right” knowledge, with all the loose ends tied up, then what need for faith?
And the irony is that our “faith” element seems to be so highly valued by God.
I used to be one of those who knew all there was to know in regards to the toughies like pre-destination vs free-will, the problem of evil, so forth and so on.
Nowadays I recognise how much I don’t know, and how much I have, and do, get things wrong, and my faith is all the richer for it….ironic really….
September 1st, 2010 at 8:50 am
@ John Richardson: Thank you for that quote.
One of my sons has a theory that Biblical literalism goes with the modern trend for mystic conspiracies in film and games.
I was bemoaning literalism in the kitchen. He pointed out, very matter of fact, that just as idiots glorified Raoul Moat because they’d played too much Grand Theft Auto, so he guessed people who’d watched the Da Vinci Code and its ilk (he included the Lord of the Rings trilogy) were drawn to a magical theory that removed the need for science or complexity, providing all the answers in a single all-powerful tome. The book, he added, would naturally have to be written by angels. Probably in letters of gold.
When I stopped laughing, I decided he had a point.
September 1st, 2010 at 8:56 am
Is that not the book of Mormon?
September 1st, 2010 at 9:13 am
@ Gordon: Very likely.
September 1st, 2010 at 10:01 am
Now that I’ve got involved in this, there are a couple of points I’d like to make. I’m sticking my neck out here, but I think it is worth the risk.
1. All Christians are ‘creationists’, as we declare in the historic creeds. We differ on the ‘how’ not the ‘whether’.
2. I think Augustine was actually as much of a victim as we are of an hermeneutical framework which is already missing the main point of the text.
3. What I mean is that our (and his) ‘scientific’ questions have focussed attention on features of the text of Genesis 1-3 which were not central for the original readers. To oversimplify somewhat, we (and Augustine’s culture) are very concerned with ‘how’ questions. The cultural context of the early chapters of Genesis reflects ‘why’ questions which are alien to our thinking.
4. Thus to create (on this basis) an antithesis between reading the text ‘literally’ or otherwise is forcing us into a framework controlled by the wrong (‘how’) questions. In other words, the person who thinks that the ‘right’ answer to reading Genesis is not to take it ‘literally’ may be just as wrong in their actual reading of the text as the ‘literalist’.
5. The test question is this: how does our reading of Genesis bring us to Paul’s conclusion (in Ephesians 5) that it is about Christ and the Church? If our hermeneutic doesn’t lead us there, it is, I suggest, not a Christian hermeneutic.