DAY 31
CHALLENGE
“If you admit non-literal accounts into the Bible, how do you know that it isn’t all non-literal?”
DEFENSE
Just because the Bible contains one kind of material doesn’t mean it can’t contain other kinds, or that we can’t tell the difference.
It would be the fallacy of hasty generalization to conclude that just because some passages are non-literal, they all must be. We don’t make this kind of mistake with other literature. For example, if you walk into a library and notice that it has fiction shelves, you don’t thereby conclude that all the books in the library must be fiction. Typical libraries have both fiction and nonfiction.
This analogy is closer to the Bible than may at first be obvious. Although the Bible is printed in a single volume today, it is a library of books that were written over a period of more than a thousand years. Like a modern library, the Bible has books of different types. Some are historical, some poetic, some prophetic, and some fall into other categories.
The different types of books do not prevent us from being able to distinguish them. In a modern library, a biography does not read like a novel, and in the Bible a poetic book does not read like a historical one. It is even possible to identify which passages of a book belong to which genres, as when the Gospels switch between biographical material about Jesus and his parables or his prophecies.
Sometimes the genre of a biblical book is not immediately obvious because of cultural differences between then and today. We have a native faculty for identifying the genres of books written in our own culture because we are used to reading them and we understand their cultural references. We have less of a faculty for identifying the genres of biblical books because they were written in a different culture, do not always follow the same conventions, and contain unfamiliar references.
However, a close study of the books and the culture they were written in can compensate for this. That is a major function of biblical scholarship. It is thus possible to identify the clues in a text that told the original audience what kind of literature they were reading (see Days 181, 196).