Four Good Reasons Not to Read the Bible Literally
I’ve gotten a number of questions of late about the conservative, or literal, way of reading the Bible. It’s that way of reading the Bible that’s maybe best summed up in the bumper sticker, God Said It. I Believe It. That Settles It. Most of us, it seems, have at least one friend or family member who reads the Bible this way and although we may covet their confidence, we often don’t feel like that way of reading the Bible “fits” with us or “works” for us. I use quotation marks to name these feelings because it’s often hard to describe what doesn’t seem accurate or faithful about reading the Bible literally. Sometimes it just feels like we need to check our brains at the door, rejecting all we know of evolution and the age of the earth, perhaps, or believing the story of Joshua stopping the sun in its tracks. Other times the result of such interpretation seems so harsh or judgmental that we just can’t square the mercy of Jesus with such interpretations. But apart from these strong if also somewhat vague objections, we aren’t quite sure why in our congregations we don’t read the Bible literally or, more importantly, what the alternative is.
Toward addressing this, I’m going to offer in this post offer four reasons not to read the Bible literally. Next week I’ll suggest another way to read the Bible as God’s word and truth to us in a way that engages both our heads and our hearts.
So, four good reasons not to read the Bible literally:
1) Nowhere Does the Bible Claim to be Inerrant
That’s right. At no place in its more than 30,000 verse does the Bible claim that it is factually accurate in terms of history, science, geography and all other matters (the technical definition of inerrancy). “Inerrant” itself is not a word found in the Bible or even known to Christian theologians for most of history. Rather, the word was coined in the middle of the 19th century as a defensive counter measure to the increased popularity of reading the Bible as one would other historical documents and the discovery of manifold internal inconsistencies and external inaccuracies.
The signature verse most literalists point to is 2 Timothy 3:16: “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” But one can confess that Scripture is inspired by God without resorting to claims that it contains no factual errors. We normally use the language of inspiration in just this way, describing a painting, a performance of a Bach symphony, or even a good lecture as inspired. What binds the various and sundry texts found in the Bible together may be precisely that they are all inspired by the authors’ experience of the living God. There is no hint that the authors of the Bible imagined that what they were writing was somehow supernaturally guaranteed to be factually accurate. Rather, biblical authors wrote in order to be persuasive, hoping that by reading their witness you would come to believe as they did (see John 20:30-31).
2) Reading the Bible Literally Distorts its Witness
In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus drives the moneychangers out of the Jerusalem Temple in the days immediately preceding his crucifixion. In the Gospel of John, he does this near the beginning of his ministry, two years before his death. Similarly, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the day Jesus is crucified is named as the Passover, while in John it is the Day of Preparation; that is, the day before Passover. Inconsistencies like this are part of what undermines claims to inerrancy of not just the gospels but also many other books in the Bible.
But if the primary intention of the biblical authors was not to record history – in the post-Enlightenment sense we take for granted today – but instead to confess faith, then these differences are not troubling inconsistencies to be reconciled but rather helpful clues to understanding the confession of the author. So rather than ask who got it right, we might instead wonder why John describes these events differently than the other Evangelists. As it turns out, both of these examples stem from John’s theological claim that Jesus is the new Passover lamb. For this reason, once he begins his ministry there is no need for Temple sacrifice, and he is crucified on the same day – indeed, at the exact hour – at which the Passover lambs were sacrificed on the Day of Preparation.
You can attempt to reconcile these and other discrepancies in the biblical witness, of course, and literalists have published books almost as long as the Bible attempting to do just that. In the case of the different timeframes for the cleansing of the Temple, for instance, one might suggest that Jesus did this twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and then again, for good measure, two years later. But far from “rescuing” the gospels such efforts distort their distinct confession of faith by rendering accounts of Jesus’ life that none of canonical accounts offers.
3) Most Christians Across History Have Not Read the Bible Literally
We tend to think of anything that is labeled “conservative” as being older and more traditional. Oddly enough, however, the doctrine of inerrancy that literalists aim to conserve is only about a century and a half old. Not only did many of the Christian Church’s brightest theologians not subscribe to anything like inerrancy, many adamantly opposed such a notion. St. Augustine – rarely described as a liberal – lived for many years at the margins of the church. An impediment to his conversation was precisely the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale. It was not until Ambrose, bishop of Milan, introduced Augustine to allegorical interpretation – that is, that stories can point metaphorically to spiritual realities rather than historical facts – that Augustine could contemplate taking the Bible (and those who read it) seriously.
The point isn’t that pre-modern Christians approached the Bible with the same historically conscious skepticism of the Bible’s factual and scientific veracity that modern interpreters possess. Earlier Christians – along with almost everyone else who lived prior to the advent of modernity – simply didn’t imagine that for something to be true it had to be factually accurate, a concern only advanced after the Enlightenment. Hence, four gospels that diverged at different points, far from troubling earlier Christians, was instead seen as a faithful and fitting recognition that God’s truth as revealed in Jesus was too large to be contained by only one perspective. Flattening the biblical witness to conform to a reductionist understanding of truth only limits the power of Scripture. As Karl Barth, arguably the twentieth century’s greatest theologian, once said, “I take the Bible too seriously to read it literally.”
4) Reading the Bible Literally Undermines a Chief Confession of the Bible About God
Read the Bible even for a little while and you’ll soon realize that most of the major characters are, shall we say, less than ideal. Abraham passes his wife off as his sister – twice! – in order to save his skin. Moses is a murderer. David sleeps around. Peter denies Jesus three times. Whatever their accomplishments, most of the “heroes of the faith” are complicated persons with feet of clay. And that’s the point: the God of the Bible regularly uses ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.
Why, then, treat the Bible itself differently? Rather than imagine that the Bible was also written by ordinary, fallible people, inerrantists have made the Bible an other-wordly, supernatural document that runs contrary to the biblical affirmation that God chooses ordinary vessels – “jars of clay,” the Apostle Paul calls them – to bear an extraordinary message. In fact, literalists unwittingly ascribe to the Bible the status of being “fully human and fully divine” that is normally reserved only for Jesus.
So rather than read the Bible literally because of our own, post-Enlightenment concerns about truth and its relationship to historical or factual veracity, we need instead to embrace Scripture as possessing – and confessing! – a bigger kind of truth, the kind of truth that can actually change your life. We’ll turn to that next week.
Note: Much of the content of this post originally appeared in the Huffington Post.
I appreciate your insight into these matters. As a layperson, I struggle to understand the various theories and approaches to the bible. I find your blog and the material on Working Preacher to be most helpful.
I understand the problems of literalisim (I think), but the question is: ok, maybe the sun did not stop, but don’t I need to believe that God could stop the sun if He wanted to. It seems to me that if I start compromising on what God could do that I need to start compromising on all things including the resurrection.
Thank you again for your insight.
Great question, David.
I don’t think a non-literal reading means that we are limiting what God can do. I do think it respects some of God’s own self-limiting – that is, setting up rules of nature, etc., but also in choosing and working through fallible human beings and, most especially, in coming in the person of Jesus and dying on a cross. In this sense, I don’t think how we read the Bible has anything to do with what God can do in some theoretical sense but instead respects what God actually did throughout Scripture and in Jesus.
Thanks for your comments!
So if all Scripture is inspired by God but Scripture contains errors…What does that say about God?
I’d say that it says God loves fallible human beings and delights to work through the weak and foolish things of the world to reveal God’s grace and mercy. At least I think I read something like that somewhere. 🙂
That’s a pretty slippery slope if your taking the position that the bible is with error. A better translation of the term “inspired” would be “God breathed”. Coming from the Greek theopneustos. “all” scripture is God breathed. All means all. All scripture is the very breath of God. There’s no doubt you’ve heard this before. God is without error. Please rethink your position. This type of philosophy could lead someone who is new to the faith, or searching right into confusion and doubt about whether or not they should be believing scripture.
Thanks for your comment, Dave.
I’d be more inclined to say that the slippery slope is having to believe that only if the Bible is factually accurate can it be trusted. While I value “facts” as much as the next person, my experience is that the most important truths of life are too big to be proved in a laboratory. Our beliefs about freedom, about love, and I’d say about God, can’t be reduced to mere facts. I think people both new and old to the faith can be encouraged that God works in and through them, even though they are not perfect, just as God worked in and through people of faith in the past, even though they – and the things they wrote – were not perfect either.
As far as I can tell, the Scriptures themselves call us to put our faith in God, not Scripture itself: saying something is “useful” is different than saying it is “inerrant” or “perfect.” Further, the only thing the Church has declared as “fully God and fully human” is Jesus. I’d be a little cautious about claiming the same thing for the Bible.
One of the problems of literal interpretation is right here in these comments.Saying that Joshua stopped the sun in its tracks would assume that the sun does, in fact, circle the earth. While we now know the ‘truth’ of the earth’s rotation, we also have to realize that scripture was written according to the common knowledge of the day.
Each of the many hundreds of Christian denominations started with a new and improved interpretation of the Truth, and even strict literalists fail to agree on meaning. I think the sensible approach is to look at how Jesus taught using parables in order that people could easily understand the message. It would be safe to assume that some of the old stories in the Bible, the O.T. in particular, would have been parables as well; illustrations in order to clarify meaning. With today’s knowledge of science, arguing the veracity of Biblical stories is counterproductive, serving only to create divisions between the faithful. In this particular case, the medium IS the message.
Your blog makes some good points, but it is too generalist. It is as erroneous to say that we should not read the Bible literally as it is to say that we should read the Bible literally, as if the whole Bible was all metaphor or else a big compendium of facts for us to believe. It is neither, and so neither view is tenable.
Understanding what the Bible is would help to dispel a lot of confusion. You have gone some ways towards that end in this blog. The Bible is an inspired compendium of different books containing various kinds of literature written by various authors at various times. While the Bible does contain books of poetry and episodes of exalted prose meant to convey meaning more than fact, it is hardly disagreeable that it also contains passages (many of them) that are meant to convey facts. It would be just as silly to say that we ought to read these factual passages as metaphor as it is to say that we should read the poetic passages literally.
I don’t think many people would disagree with this point so far. The problem arises in determining what is meant to be taken as fact and what is not. And here there is a vast array of disagreement. It’s not as if the people “in the know” read it one way and the inerrantists read it the other. In fact, you wrongly confuse the ideas of inerrancy and reading the Bible literally. They are not the same issue. There are inerrantists who read as metaphor or parable parts of the Bible usually taken as literal in conservative circles.
The issue, as I mentioned, is determining what is to be taken as fact and what is not, and this is not always easy since there is not a ton of agreement in this area. Appealing to the early church is not always illuminating since there was not as much consensus as either side of this debate wishes to imagine there was. That doesn’t mean we should ignore what the early church has to say. On the contrary, I encourage everyone to do the hard work of looking into the Scriptures and consulting the knowledgable, godly, faithful interpreters (both past and present) that have gone before us to lead us into the truth of the matter – as much as we are able to grasp at it this side of heaven. If all is still lost on us, it will have done us immeasurably good just to be soaked in the Word of God and of Christ’s faithful followers.
I decided that since we shouldn’t read the Bible literally, then I figured you wouldn’t want me read your article literally. Therefore, I came up with some conclusions that were probably way off base. If only I had read it literally, I may have understood what you were saying. The Bible is like any other book – you interpret it according to whatever sort of literature is being used. Sometimes, it’s historical narrative, and we should interpret it literally. Sometimes, it uses metaphors, sometimes it uses poetic language and apocalyptic language. You would give that courtesy to any other book, and you should the Bible as well.
it seems to me as a non-christian and non-westerner (i study white people; im writing my thesis on social control and religion is a major feature) that much of the “controversy” around the literal truth of the bible is the unaccountable (so it would first seem) weight and authority given to the written word. this is entirely a cultural construct. literacy was fundamental (as were roads) to the efficient administration of increasingly complex and populous collectives. the weight given to the written word (which was essentially seen as the literal proxy of the king/emperor and required obeisance to be effective) was an absolute necessity. im sure there were many fascinating early experiments in social control that we will never know about, but the bible and its precepts are definite examples of such. many early languages were deeply metaphorical, non-literal and symbolic. the use of metaphor to express concepts is present in many (if not all) indigenous languages. for example, there are languages from the north american indian culture groups that are entirely metaphorical. judaism is a tribal/indigenous religion that developed out of a direct relationship with the land. its transformation over time has resulted in many versions/configurations. without a doubt the interpretations from hebrew and aramaic into old and middle english, german, french etc lost huge chunks of meaning, context, metaphor, symbolism, layers. combine that with the profoundly hierarchical nature of early european societies in which social control was crudely practiced with extreme violence, punishment, and lack of tolerance for deviance (described as “extreme boundary drawing behavior” in sociology) and the thing called “the bible” comes out as the primary victim of compounded distortions and misuses. as a scholar of religions as tools for social control, it has become apparent to me that true understanding of such documents as the bible can only truly be understood through an interdisciplinary historical sociological approach that allows for the possibility (probability) that the bible of today is not at all being studied interpreted or understood in the way that it was originally intended.
But why are Adam and Seth included in Jesus’s genealogy?