Unpopular Takes: You Can't Take the Bible 100% Literally

The Bible literally won't let you

One time I taught a Pilgrimage workshop called Taking the Bible Literarily. I got a few questions about that title, mostly some version of “what does that mean?” which is, of course, what the workshop was supposed to tell you. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly if I had thought about it), at least one person read the title as Taking the Bible Literally. That person (a lovely friend I would never intentionally have hurt or even disappointed) showed up hoping for a workshop that would help them and other participants see how we can be confident that all the stories in the Bible happened just as described, or something like that. That was definitely not the workshop I presented (although I do have one on the Bible’s “reliability”—just not maybe as Evangelicals and Christian Fundamentalists have typically conceived of what that means).

The premise of the “Literary” workshop is this: The entire Bible is made up of different literary genres, and without some basic knowledge of how genres in general work, the only recourse anyone has to knowing which parts of the Bible to take literally is the recourse the literalist fears most (but also unwittingly participates in)—picking and choosing for yourself.

More recently, we’ve had a bunch of newcomers to our church and I was also informed that one of our not-newcomers was really struggling to take seriously the stories I was telling from the Bible, mostly because she thought I (and everyone else at church) wanted her to swallow the details in the narratives hook, line, and sinker.

In reality, I believe that there is historicity embedded in most if not all the stories of the Bible. I believe in the supernatural—miracles, signs, wonders, visions, dreams, the unseen world, the love and omnipotence of God—all of it. I believe that God uniquely inspired the writers of this book across millennia with the intention of our getting to know God—and ourselves—through it. Those are not things that keep me from taking the narrative accounts in the Bible fully literally. It’s just that I also believe in literary forms and cultural expression, and that none of the Ancient-and-slightly-less-ancient Near Eastern texts that make up the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are written to accommodate the specific scientific or historic “fact” questions our post-Enlightenment society thinks will either prove or disprove the Bible’s authority. The Bible was not written for empirical tests. Those are only one way of measuring what’s true.

So on Sunday I reminded the congregation what I’ve periodically told them since I arrived as their pastor in 2019:

Truth and facts are not necessarily the same.

I told them that, while I will continue to recount the stories of the Bible as the Bible tells them (you would do that with a novel in a book club, too, by the way), I don’t need every single one of my listeners to believe all the details of all the stories right now. I just need them to look and listen for the truth behind the details which the biblical writers (and even more, I would argue, God) are trying to convey. And then, I urged, after they’ve started to figure out how to find the truth, they should try opening up to letting that truth change them.

What I didn’t say—which I’m not sure anyone noticed—was anything about being fine if people did choose to believe every single detail literally occurred as written in the Bible. It’s not that I mind that either, I guess—in theory. (I probably actually do.) It’s just that nobody does, even if they think they do. It’s quite literally impossible. The first two chapters of the whole book rule it right out.