12. Literalism was Killing Me
The problem with the Bible is in the beginning. Genesis: that masterful piece of writing, that somehow causes so much confusion. Throughout college and young adulthood, my interactions with Christians that read the Bible literally caused me to turn away. Typically the extreme views of the inerrant word bothered me, and here I’m referring to ostrich-head-in-the-sand type of claims like that of the Universe being only 6,000 years old or people co-existing with dinosaurs. Unfortunately, at that time I deemed those extreme views as default positions of religion, as I spun further away from any and all religion.
I felt exactly like St. Augustine, who said some 1600 years ago: “I was being killed by the Old Testament passages when I took them literally.” (Confessions p109, p414) This ability of ancient writers, from Augustine to St. Paul to Homer, to nail the exact feeling I have often surprises me, although it shouldn’t. There is a massive trove of wisdom from our ancestors, from all cultures.
In college I had taken New Testament and Old Testament classes, thumbing over much of the Bible. What I found enjoyable as a child were the stories, such as the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, the fascinating stories of the lineage of Jacob and Joseph. But in college I began to read closer and find the discrepancies with modernity, such as the rainbow being a sign of a covenant with Noah as opposed to refracted light exposing the spectrum to our eyes. Another example that had me laughing was the reference to mathematical Pi in First Kings. This error of Pi = 3 instead of Pi = 3.14… blew my mind, as the infallible book had mistaken one of the most common facts that every school child knows.
Then he made the molten sea; it was made with a circular rim, and measured ten cubits across, five in height, and thirty in circumference. (1 Kings 7:23)
Pi equals 3? No, no, stop right there: Rainbows and Pi had known answers, they were not signs and approximations. The teacher explained away the difference, the glaring error, but I could see the wizard behind the curtain now, nobody was fooling me any longer! About the same time the movement surrounding the “Historical Jesus” became known to me and I fortified my doubt with books and materials from the “Jesus Seminar” effort, which I now find to be aptly described as"Hot-Tub Religion" -- a Christanity with all of the pleasures and none of the pains -- the theological equivalent of Diet Coke.
Thus, in college and for years afterward, I read the Bible literally and drained it of magic and miracle, much like Thomas Jefferson did with his Bible using a razor to carve out all miracles.
The funny thing was that I had become the literalist. Fundamentalists and atheists read the Bible literally in every book. As time has passed and I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed that extremists, religious or non-religious, from the political left or the political right - these people are almost identical mirrors of each other.
Well, my teacher attempted to explain the problem of Biblical literalism to me, but I had no interest in listening by that time. Both professors that I had on religious topics, I rejected, despite their knowledge far exceeding my own on the subject. On my term papers, the teacher would mark up my smart-ass comments and suggest that the rainbow could be a symbol, or that Pi need not be precise to the decimal in order to get the basic shape of a circle.
Sometimes you have to read a book three times to get the point. Actually, reading a book at different phases of the journey can provide new takeaways, as I know this from reading and re-reading Moby Dick and 1984 and The Brothers Karamazov and other masterpieces as I cruise through the five acts of my own life’s play. The problem with reading the Bible literally as a fundamentalist does is that it becomes robotic and feels spoon-fed. The problem with reading the Bible literally from the modern scientific view, as if the books were peer-reviewed academic papers, is that the context of the culture and the genre becomes lost in minor details that miss the entire purpose.
The change and awareness about literalism happened for me through a video, not a book. A short moment of teaching, of hearing something that I had heard many years before, shattered my cynicism in a moment.
I caught a video series called “Symbolon” that spelled out the difference between “literally” and “literarily.” One syllable. A few letters. It makes all the difference in the world to me.
The Catholic approach to Scripture is different from the fundamentalist view, which reads Scripture in a literalistic way. To discern the truth God put in Scripture, we must interpret the Bible literarily, remembering that God speaks to us in a human way, through the human writers of Scripture. That means that we examine the context and intent of the author for any given passage.
-From Symbolon (session 3)
The power of one syllable is stunning. Literally vs literarily makes a world of difference, and was a huge stepping stone to faith. In fact, as far as the power of one syllable goes, consider this: superlative and superlaxative are also only one syllable of difference, but what a difference in meaning.
I guess the problem was always this: I felt gullible and stupid swallowing the “literal” pill. Honestly, I think that was always the problem, from when an adult first told me to “Just believe and not ask questions,” that response knocked me back so far that I couldn’t get over it.
Alongside that, I failed to remember and realize that the people from two thousand and three thousand years ago also were not stupid. They survived and withstood hardships that my generation could not fathom. Their grasp of knowledge had a depth far beyond our own in seeing the world without the knowledge that has been revealed through science over the past two hundred years. I suspect if you threw the people from today back into the era of Moses, we would have gladly remained in Egypt unless he would have promised Netflix and porn on the other side of the Red Sea. Furthermore, the average person today, who so cleverly knows how to use appliances and technology, would be utterly useless in the ancient times and have no clue how to teach and apply any modern knowledge to their world, since we are all specialized and sharpened to very specific tasks today.
The difference between literally and literarily is but a single syllable, but the alteration in understanding leaps forward. I feel that this point of Catholic teaching has been buried for a long time and should be trumpeted from the Pope himself. Of course, it has been, I just wasn’t listening. If I could be so turned off by the literal readers turning the Bible into a square peg for a round hole, surely many others also felt that way. I think that’s why books like Moby Dick became so fascinating to me, because those were meant to be read for the deeper meaning, not the superficial “whiteness of the whale” that Ahab was so angry about. Reading Moby Dick literally would ruin the story. The book would be complete garbage if read literally instead of literarily.
I love books and literature, and I do believe that the many years of literal, fundamentalist voices claiming Biblical authority led to the demise of many individual faiths like mine. I could be wrong, and I often am, but I don’t think I’m alone.
I mentioned Bishop Barron earlier, because he is articulating the thoughts that I failed to muster. Seeds of ideas about faith that I had, he has brought to full bloom. In the Word on Fire Bible, an introduction discusses how to approach to the Bible. I used to laugh about this question, as I recall a college professor talking about “How should we approach William Blake?” As I can’t resist crudeness, I always thought this sounded like we might be going to kidnap him. I guess we should approach William Blake from behind, at night, with a dark van.
Sorry, another digression. Brevity is the soul of wit, and vigorous writing is concise. I’ll try to remember that.
Barron discusses in “How to approach the Bible” the solution to my inability to appreciate the book with five strategies. In my post-college years I did pick up the Bible once and decide that I would just read the whole thing again, as a piece of literature rather than revelation, as I had wanted it to be literature, but felt that dogma disallowed that type of reading. Well, reading Genesis is fun, and Exodus, but once I reached the laws of Leviticus I stopped. I couldn’t do it. I moved on to some science fiction and stayed there for a few years.
My approach to the Bible as a single book does not work. The idea that the Bible should be taken literally is a pointless question, because every book is a different genre. The Bible is not one book, but many books, and you have to read each book wearing the proper hat. Is it poetry or history? Is it a prophet speaking or a third-person narrator? When Genesis is read literarily, it truly is a magnificent piece of literature and speaks with great meaning, the deepest thoughts, and answers the questions of the hungry heart.
Too bad I didn’t know this long ago, but the Catechism spells it out pretty plainly, that Catholics read the Bible both literally and literarily. There is a literal and a spiritual reading that must be done. This is a both/and reading, not an either/or.
The account of the fall in Genesis uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents. (CCC 390)
In addition to that, the Catechism points this out rather bluntly, I just never bothered to read it.
In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words. In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current. (CCC 109-110)
So that’s kind of embarrassing, for me anyway, when I think of my past editorials at parties and comments to tear down religion. I knew everything, but somehow didn’t know this. Weird. I wonder what else I didn’t know.
That distinction of how to read the Bible really was the largest block on my ability to proceed. If I could understand the “First Cause” and know that God had to exist, and allow myself an honest and intellectual look at the Bible versus a rote-learning pill-swallowing reading, this could be the start of something great.
The other four point of approaches to the Bible from Barron also knocked over some problematic things for me. Here’s the whole list of five things that demolished a wall between me and faith:
Be attentive to the genre of each book. For example, Psalms is not a history book, so don’t read it like one.
The Bible is a one book but it is a library, and it tells one story, the unfolding of a great drama.
“Any interpretation of a biblical passage that militates against the love of God and neighbor is necessarily a bad interpretation.” St. Augustine said that love of God and neighbor is “the ultimate criterion for correct biblical reading.”
Distinguish between what “is in the Bible and what the Bible teaches” for there is an “awful lot of cultural baggage from the ancient world.” Look for the overarching themes and meaning as a whole.
The ultimate purpose of all books is the dying and rising of Jesus Christ and to “draw all people into communion” with Him.
The third item struck home because so often the “love” appears lost in modern arguments, especially in the online world of vitriolic commentary between those with and without faith, and even between those with different flavors of faith. In many cases the faithful seem to struggle with that point as badly or even worse than those who doubt. Once again, I wonder how many people have fallen away from faith because of bad interpretations? If you read the Bible literally instead of literarily you can get off-track and forget to take the love potion. The fact that anyone could reference the Bible for pro-slavery arguments sums up the problem of “literal” readings, because there is much talk of slavery in the Bible from the culture and setting - but the entire purpose of the overarching story is to love God and your neighbor.
