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Literalism Doesn’t Exist



There’s a post over at American Coprophagia about Christianity, Fundamentalism, Literalism and Fascism that’s getting a lot of circulation in our corner of the blogosphere - and with good reason. It’s a very interesting piece that really puts the smack-down on a lot of hypocritical “Christianity.” I’m kind of in the opposite of a smack-down mood though (and honestly am damned tired of people using Fundamentalists as a rhetorical punching bag), so I thought it might be nice to just grab one core element from this otherwise interesting rant and run with it.

The most interesting part, from my perspective is this short line, way down at the end:

There is no literalism. All interpretation is figurative. So-called “literalism” is just a particularly stupid and ignorant mode of interpretation that disavows its own interpretive character by calling itself “literal.”

Myself, I would excise the words “stupid and ignorant” since the concept itself is really intriguing, without the need to resort to further baiting and argumentation with Fundamentalist Christians. (I mean, God, hasn’t 5 years of this feud been enough for anybody else?)

I rather like Jeremy’s addendum to this point, where he writes:

Really, though, a true Christian Biblical Literalists would behave like St. Francis: sell everything one owns and give it away, live a life of prayer and contemplation and caring for those too sick to care for themselves.

It strikes me though that even there, somebody like St. Francis wasn’t being 100% a Biblical literalist. He was modeling himself closely after the character of Christ, for sure - but did Francis claim to be the Son of God? Was Francis born in a manger of the Virgin Mary? Was he baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan? Did he rise on the third day to blah blah blah? I think you see where I’m going with this.

The only way to *BE* a Christian literalist is to literally be Christ himself! Isn’t there a Nietzsche quote (or somebody) where he says something to the effect of “The only True Christian died on the Cross two thousand years ago”?

We could even argue one step further than that, and ask whether the events described in the Bible are 100% historically accurate? This is an easy question to answer since, luckily, we have Four (canonical) Gospels. Each is told in a slightly different styles and with some differences even in detail. So we could make a very good argument for the possibility that even the historical Christ (if there was one) was himself not a Biblical literalist.

So maybe that means we should amend our earlier assertion to be: the only way to be a Biblical literalist is to actually BE a Bible! But, you can’t even be “Bibles” in general, because then you might not agree with yourself in terms of varying translations - you have to really be one specific copy of a Bible.

Now that we’ve reduced this to absurdity, what are we left with? I think it’s probably safe to say that none of us are actually Bibles. So we can’t be Biblical literalists - not literally anyway. In fact, the only thing we can literally be is ourselves, but only in this one moment, in the present. And that’s going to have to be enough.

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5 Reader Responses

  1. James Russell Says:
    December 13th, 2005 at 7:29 am

    A Biblical literalist would also have to be Jewish to start with. If you’re going to be literal, you can’t really ignore the fact that most of the Bible is made up of the holy writings of Judaism and only a relatively small part is “Christian”.

  2. Error 404 Says:
    December 13th, 2005 at 11:07 am

    He wasn’t concerned with whether the number of creatures on the Ark was precisely what it said in Genesis, or how a circular part could be ten cubits across and thirty around. He probably didn’t think that the Good Samaritan episode was something that should have been on a police report, if there had been police. He was deeply attuned to the message of Jesus, not how you get there.

    Literalism is the idea that every event in the Bible occured in the historical, scientific sense. It has roots in the nature of Christianity: a key feature is that Jesus did the mythic things, things ascribed to, among others, the Egyptian gods, but Jesus was not in the time of legend or in a mythic place like Mount Olympus. The the killed and resurected god is a fairly common theme - the innovation is that it was at a particular time and place, with non-mystic human witnesses and he was an actual flesh-and-blood human being. Literalism becomes idolatry is when that idea is expanded to the mythic parts of the Old Testament. When you insist the Adam was a particular human being without parents, who had a cloned mate. I doubt that the divinely inspired author thought that Adam existed in the same sense as Uncle Charlie.

    There is nothing in the Bible that says you have to be exactly like Jesus. Literalism is not impossible, just very difficult and ultimately unchristian. And you have to be careful not to think about certain combinations of sections at the same time.

    Biblical inerrancy and divine authorship are related, but distinct, idolatries.

    Francis of Assisi (there are lots of Saint Francis’es, including Francis Borgia, who was about as unlike the one you are thinking of as you can get. Fairly low body count for a Borgia, but rather high for a saint.) wasn’t a literalist. He was a mystic prophet. You can’t be a literalist and a mystic prophet at the same time, because your vision will not match the Bible, and you will inevitably go with your vision. He may have made a serious effort to literaly do everything that the New Testament asks, but he took his instructions directly from God.

  3. jp Says:
    December 13th, 2005 at 1:09 pm

    well yeah, i meant that biblical literalists would *look* more like saint francis (yeah, of assisi, sheesh, useless nitpicking!), not that they’d *be* like saint francis.

  4. Tim Boucher Says:
    December 13th, 2005 at 2:00 pm

    Error 404 - your point is well taken. Realize though that my intention was to perform a mental exercise around a controversial term, rather than create a 100% theologically accurate portrayal of it

  5. Error 404 Says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 11:52 am

    Well, yeah - the Bible is self-contradictory enough that in a formal sense you can’t beleive it all literaly. Except that people are quite capable of beleiving multiple contradictory things.

    WWJD taken literaly, on the other hand, would lead to somebody looking a lot like SF of A. And in pretty much any situation, the answer is “Go outside and talk to the crowd, heal a sick person or two, then have dinner with somebody that everybody hates and skip town.” And, of course, practice his faith as a devout Jew. Practicing any form of Christianity, obviously, is out of the question.

    Pretty funny, when you think about it. “Follow me” != “Copy me”.



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