Why literalism makes sense

I have hinted at this throughout this book so far, and I want to make it clear as to what I mean by literal and symbolic. If you are going to read a book about history and I tell you that everything in this book is symbolic you would probably not get too far into it before you simply abandoned the reading. It would be pointless. Furthermore, if I handed you a hymnal and told you that everything in it is literal then you would probably not be too inspired by the songs to get through a few of them. Whether something is literal or symbolic changes our experience of the document, or media. A photograph of war captures a true to life moment of horror and dread. It's literalness is a good thing. A poem about the fragility of life can also capture the heights of human experience in reading it. This, too, is a good thing to read symbolically.

This is all taken from what is called the author's intent. Basically, if we look at a photograph of war and try to say how the images in it are only symbols of inner conflicts in man then we are missing the author's intent, or in this case the photographer's intent. The photographer took a real picture of real people, real tanks, and was a real event. To look at that picture and interpret its contents as symbolic would be to betray the author in a sense.

Here is where things get confusing. The Bible's inspiration is said to come from God. This creates a

subconscious conflict when it comes to interpreting the Bible. Because we can say that God's intent as the true author of the Bible was to speak through the author, thus his intent is also para-inspirational, or we can say that God's intent was to speak to me through the Bible in my own experience and narrative. Both possibilities have enormous paradigm shifts for the Christian. The reality is that there is no easy answer to this question. Was the Bible so magnificently written that God guided the authors to say exactly what he wanted them to say? Or was the Bible so magnificently written that no matter how God's truth can be plumbed from its pages it will reach us where we are at?

Many Christians might not even see the apparent conflict in these two assertions, but there is one, and most leaders might not be so kind as to point this out. The reality is that if we are going to lean on one source for Biblical interpretation it pretty much limits or shuts out the potential for the other. We either trust the Bible to speak into our lives as the Living Word of God, or we trust that God orchestrated the right meanings to exist in the authors of the Bible. One collapses into subjectivism and the other collapses into legalism. But, admittedly neither is a necessary outcome.

Literalism makes sense. The simple fact is that if I want to know what God expects of me it is so much easier to simply read a set of rules and arguments as to what this has to be. Just as the man who want to expand his knowledge of history is so much aided by literalism when it comes to writing history. There is a precision and exactness to a literal text that cannot be taken for granted, and it has to be considered seriously, because if there was a God who expects us to live up to His expectations then we would have good reasons to think that what comes from God would be a literal manifestation.

Politicians, leaders, and all kinds of rulers for all time and into the future will recognize the value of this argument. When you want people to be a certain kind of person telling them exactly and precisely what you want gets the job done more then not. Thus, it is entirely consistent with a God who wants us to follow his will. In our modern world there is perhaps a "literal bias" where the near scientific precision that can be applied to texts is best aided in literal documents. 

I personally, would love to know the will of God. I would be so elated and overjoyed to be able to have such an easy to understand document. Now it is often said how there is nothing easy about the Bible, referring to the difficulty in laying down our flesh and submitting our spirits to God, and while it may be true that in one sense, it should not be true in all senses. There is a trade off, and it is one that adds to the confusion which surrounds the Bible. If the Bible is going to be such a hard book to follow then it ought to be such an easy book to understand, and if it is going to be such a hard book to understand then it ought to be such an easy book to follow. Really, this goes back to the conflict between the two sides that I mentioned earlier. There is a dynamic and give and take between them that will be mentioned later in this book, but for now it is important to consider the either/or situation that exists between them.

The reason this is so, is because in our modern situation the experience Christians are having is that neither option is possible for them. The Bible is both difficult to understand AND difficult to follow and this is creating cognitive dissonance. The fundamentalists/literalists are free to hold to their position without cognitive dissonance if they are willing to let go of the correlating negation. Thus, they are free to believe that the Bible is easy to understand (literal) and that it is hard to follow, which seems to be their position. As long as they are willing to let go of the tenet that the Bible is hard to understand and easy to follow, with its subsequent interpretive predilections as well, such as letting the word of God speak to us in our immanent situation.

Here is the reason fundamentalists of today do not wish to abandon either position. When you claim that the Bible is trustworthy because God spoke through the authors what He wanted to say then you make the inspiration of the Bible contingent upon the academic discipline of historical criticism. Our interpretation of the Bible suddenly becomes an interpretation of history. Authorial intent is a component of history. It is not a piece of theological or spiritual information that can be assimilated on its own merits. Once, we beckon to what the author intended to say we have to submit ourselves to the authority of history as an academic discipline. 

Our Bible ceases to have its authority unto itself. Some fundamentalists get around this dilemma by only focusing on textual criticisms of the Bible. Thus, what is authoritative about the author's intent can only come from the text of the Bible itself. This seems a prudent choice, but in reality is just as flawed. It touts the air of intellectualism, but it is limited in its critical approach. The reason for this is that the Christian is not free to remove authorial intent from its critical context. If he is the one submitting that God inspired the authors of the Bible to give right meaning then he has to be willing to use every critical tool available to understand what this authorial intent is. So the fundamentalist is necessarily obliged to add to his canon of scripture an extra-biblical narrative as normative for his faith.

The sound of this is sacrilegious, and most fundamentalists are not cognizant of this reality. Why? Because they find a perfect substitution for this intellectual burden. They hunker down, become rigid and legalistic in their interpretation. Instead of defending their literalism by submitting their faith to the annuls of history, they overcompensate by becoming legalistic in what the Bible demands of them. They fall back into a "God knows best" rhetoric that insulates them from the flaws of their literalistic thinking. 

Consider such a passage as Deuteronomy 22, where it instructs rapists to marry their rape victims if they were not pledged to be married. Now in a patriarchal society where women were seen as property, such a command can be seen to have social merit, albeit its clear affront to women's rights. A "tainted" woman had no value in society, which is why families sought to pledge their daughters at such a young age, because a woman pledged who was raped could still be married or the family could be compensated. It was entirely transactional. There is simply no way we could think of this passage as representing eternal truth. The idea is abhorrent. In a free society there is no possible circumstance that could ever give light to a rape victim being forced to marry her rapist. 

Now the literalist can appeal to history, as I have done, but in doing so he must continually add appendages to his canon of scripture, which we have established is untenable as well. Or he can hunker down and claim that God knew what he was doing when he spoke through the authors and that he knew what was truly in the hearts of all women and all men. He would probably even delude himself into thinking that justice could still be and ought to be served upon the rapist and that the woman's fidelity to her new husband need not prevent or inhibit the serving of justice. Thus, his only appeal to scripture is legalism.

The other side of the coin, is that all Christians are called to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit. Even Christians who all but deny that the Holy Spirit is involved in the lives of Christians today have to admit to a small degree that the Holy Spirit guides our lives, and this means that he is able to guide our reading of the Bible, as well. To recognize this point puts all Christians on a level to agree to the fact that the Bible speaks to us where we are at, and that this is not dependent upon what an author intended.

So there is a conflict in the Church today between how the Bible is to be read, and there is great confusion over this matter. The Christian is supposed to approach the Bible as though it comes from God. This could mean one of two things, but not both at the same time, and choosing one seems to eliminate very real experiences which most Christians ought to have. There is literally confusion which abounds.