But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.
- Romans 7:6

…The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.
- 2 Corinthians 3:6

Just found an interesting essay by Conrad Hyers called “Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance.”

It doesn’t take any great leap in understanding to point out that Biblical and religious literalists are often missing the symbolic point of the material. But this essay even goes beyond that. The most compelling argument they make is that literalism isn’t so much a symptom of modern religion, as it is a symptom of how people think about everything nowadays. In their words, it is modernist instead of conservative, it takes part in the “reductionist and literalist spirit of the age.”

A literalist imagination — or lack of imagination — pervades contemporary culture.

[…] Not only is imagination a strain; even to imagine what a symbolic world is like is difficult. Poetry is turned into prose, truth into statistics, understanding into facts, education into note-taking, art into criticism, symbols into signs, faith into beliefs. That which cannot be listed, out-lined, dated, keypunched, reduced to a formula, fed into a computer, or sold through commercials cannot be thought or experienced.

[…] The literal imagination is univocal. Words mean one thing, and one thing only. They don’t bristle with meanings and possibilities; they are bald, clean-shaven. Literal clarity and simplicity, to be sure, offer a kind of security in a world (or Bible) where otherwise issues seem incorrigibly complex, ambiguous and muddy. But it is a false security, a temporary bastion, maintained by dogmatism and misguided loyalty. Literalism pays a high price for the hope of having firm and unbreakable handles attached to reality. The result is to move in the opposite direction from religious symbolism, emptying symbols of their amplitude of meaning and power, reducing the cosmic dance to a calibrated discussion.

This is the sort of thing I’ve been trying to articulate for a while, but haven’t seen quite so plainly laid out. This whole notion that Fundamentalist Literalists are actually not reactionary but completely engaged in the spirit of the times really opens my eyes up to a whole bunch of new possibilities.

It reminds me too of a discussion that recently happened on Fantastic Planet. A reader there asked him why ancient religious texts (specifically gnostic) seemed to be “written in code.” Why couldn’t these authors just say what they meant? In fact, the writers of these religious texts were actually speaking quite plainly in language and imagery which people of the time would have been familiar with. It only seems “coded” to modern eyes, who have not been trained and submerged in a world of symbolist thinking.

People are too used to X = Y types of information, where one thing has one meaning, case closed. I got an email this morning that is also very useful as an illustration of this. It was a reference to an older post about the supposed Eucharistic Miracle at Lanciano. The visitor wrote:

you don’t really address whether or not the miracle in Lanciano is actually a miracle. your response is theological, thus, disappointing…have you invetigated the miracle per se? Is there bread and heart flesh present in this thing?

This person seems interesting in solving some kind of simple equation: “Miracle = Yes|No”. And as such, the answer I gave in that post frustrated them, because looked at multivalent symbolic understandings of what happened, rather than a binary Yes|No solution.

How to reconnect people with the natural symbolic faculties of their heart and minds should be the key to reinvigorating religion for a modern age. Unfortunately, I see very little interest in such things from any camp, Christian or otherwise. Even “open-minded” groups like neo-pagans and wiccans seem more interested in squabbling on message boards about non-sensical details of “magick” than in overcoming the crushing literalism, reductionism and “one-right-answer-ism” so common in our world today.