Bible literal-cy

Went camping this weekend, so this weeks blog will be somewhat short.  I had a good friend of mine ask me recently "What percentage would you say you should take the Bible literally?"  This is an excellent question, but one you can't really answer with percentages, though to be honest it also very much depends on what you mean by "literal."  If by literal you mean "take the plain meaning from the words on the page," the answer is you should never, ever take the Bible literally.  What is plain to us living in urbanized secular 21st century America would not remotely be plain to a desert-roaming beduin tribe, as a for instance.  The ancients understood the world through lenses radically different from ours and it is those understandings that are built into Scripture.

Take an email that you sent off last week.  That email is very grounded in your cultural worldview.  We live in a civilization that has benefited from many, many years of scientific and philosophical developments.  We can talk about evolution, the 9-11 tragedy, and the Big Bang theory amongst zillions of others without any further explanation.  If I translate that email into perfect Taiwanese and show it to a farmer or rancher who has had no exposure to Western culture, that person is at best going to just hazard a guess as to what is going on.  If this email is important enough to them, they will actually manufacture the meaning using their own cultural concepts, thus replacing what the author wanted to convey.

This is what we do with Scripture.  We take our own culture and manufacture meaning.  This is why we can't read Scripture literally if we want to take Scripture seriously at all.  To give a salient example, the ancients had a very agrarian understanding of procreation.  A man had his seed and when he copulated the seed (literally sperma in Greek) would be implanted in the woman who would either be fertile or infertile.  There was no understanding that the woman contributes any genetic material because they are basically just surrogates; all the genetics comes 100% from the male.  This is why ancestry was so incredibly important, you were your ancestor.  Who you are as a person is absolutely bound up with who your ancestor was; you're basically a variation of them.  This is also why Jesus can be God's son and still be God Himself.

So you see, even something as monumentally important to Christianity like the Incarnation was still described and understood in the terms and concepts of the people at that time - in fact that's how God always works.  He works with the understandings of His children for His redemptive purposes, not against them.  Taking the birth of Christ, however, in the way we usually do manufactures a different meaning than what the author intended.  If we do that, we are creating our own Scripture and in my opinion are involved in worship of the self, not God.

Still, can I take some of the Bible and does the plain meaning then match the plain meaning now?  Yes, lots of times.  Do not murder, Love your neighbor as yourself, among numerous others.  However, these things cannot be answered with a percentage.  When to take something literally as opposed to figuratively is ultimately a question of Biblical genre...i.e. what kind of writing is it?  That question we will save for next time.