Should we take the Bible literally? How did the earliest Christians take it? And how can we tell when the authors are and aren’t speaking literally?
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Welcome to Shameless Popery. I want to explore a potentially hot button issue today, the question of taking the Bible literally. So I know a lot of people pride themselves on being biblical literalists. And I know some people have a problem with Christianity because they say, “How can you take the Bible literally?” And to both those groups, I want to say, “I think you’re misreading the Bible. I think you’re demanding that the Bible, in order to be telling the truth, has to be speaking literally,” and that that’s actually a really bad way of understanding what the divine or human authors of scripture meant to say, or how they were originally understood by their Jewish and Christian audiences.
But to get there, I think it’s important that we make an important distinction, which is what do we mean by literally? And the reason this is important is there’s a technical sense of literally. Literal comes from the word letter and it means in that sense the meaning conveyed by the words of scripture and discovered by acts of Jesus following the rules of sound interpretation. In that sense, by all means, take scripture literally. Don’t only take scripture literally, but the other implications of scripture, the other senses or meanings of scripture are going to be rooted in literal in that sense. What is the author trying to communicate? What’s he trying to say?
But notice that sense of literal might mean he’s speaking metaphorically or allegorically. He might be using a figure of speech. He might be making an exaggeration. There could be any number of things, and those are all included in the literal sense in that sense, which is just what’s the author’s intent? But there may be an additional set of meanings beyond just what’s the immediate intent of the author. And let’s give you one example of that. Think about the last supper in John:13. When Judas goes out to betray Christ, John says, “And it was night.” Well, what’s the literal meaning of his words?
Well, obviously he intends to mean at the surface level, it’s nighttime. The last supper happens at night. Everybody knows that. But he also intends you to understand a second meaning to his words, that there’s something spiritually dark happening right here. Judas is about to betray his master. Satan is living in Judas. He has become an abode of the devil. There’s an incredible moment of spiritual darkness going on here. So John intends both meanings, but the literal meaning is that it’s nighttime. So again, remember, if I say “It’s raining cats and dogs,” I don’t mean this. I mean it’s raining really hard. I might be telling the truth, I might be lying, but the literal meaning of my words, based on the way someone reading 21st century English understands them is that it’s raining really hard. It’s not that cats and dogs are falling from the sky.
That would be the second sense of literal, which is using words in their usual or most basic sense without metaphor or allegory. You would say, “Well, what is a cat? What is a dog?” And then you would say, “What’s the sky? What’s raining?” And you would put those things together and you would get this pandemonium. That’s the second sense of literal. That’s actually where we usually use the word literal in English. That’s not what’s meant by the literal sense by older authors. And that’s an important detail to note. They don’t mean non-metaphorical, they don’t mean non-allegorical, and when they do mean that, we start to have problems because there is, as I started to say at the beginning of this video, this sense in which I think both evangelicals and atheists conflate the idea of literal with the idea of true.
So using the example of cats and dogs, if I say it’s running cats and dogs and it’s sunny out, I’m not telling the truth. If I say it’s running cats and dogs and it’s raining really hard, I am telling the truth. But in neither case am I speaking literally in the common usage of the word literally. Nevertheless, you’ll find this idea, again from both Christian sources and atheist sources, that if we don’t think the Bible is literal in a certain place, then we don’t think it’s true or don’t think it’s trustworthy. I want to give you three examples, two from Christians, one from an atheist. So the first Christian example, and this one, I’m not a hundred percent sure which sense of the word literally he’s using, comes from GotQuestions. At the very least, this is wildly misleading. If it’s not outright wrong because he’s going to say in response to the question, “Can or should we interpret the Bible literally?” That in fact this is the only way to interpret the Bible.
Speaker 4:
Not only can we take the Bible literally, but we must take the Bible literally. This is the only way to determine what God is trying to communicate to us. When we read…
Joe Heschmeyer:
So that is just, I think, a terrible way of understanding scripture. And I say that again without trying to be needlessly rude or hurtful or anything like that, but just to recognize that’s not accurate. The idea that God has to be speaking literally, if he’s going to communicate his truth, imposes a very strange restriction on God because even a human author can express themselves poetically. And you may have noticed there’s an entire book of the Bible called the Psalms. It’s just 150 poems. So the idea that God has chosen to express himself exclusively the way a science textbook might is demonstrably untrue if anyone’s even cracked the Bible open. But nevertheless, we see this all over the place.
So the second example I want to give you is from 2012, this is going to be Bill Maher, the atheist who kind of makes fun of religion. He made the religious documentary, trying to make Christianity look stupid to Ross Douthat, who is a Catholic, who is going to show you, “No, I think you’re actually getting Christianity wrong.” So I’m going to let them kind of say their bit and then I’m going to comment on it afterwards.
Bill Maher:
Right?
Ross Douthat:
Yeah. I mean think-
Bill Maher:
But isn’t all religion… I’m not insulting here, I’m just saying.
Ross Douthat:
No, no, you’re just describing. No, I understand.
Bill Maher:
By its very nature anti-intellectual.
Ross Douthat:
Well, let me give you an example, right? So I think a person like yourself looks at religious history and says, “Okay, once upon a time, Christians all took Genesis literally. And then science came along and said, “Well, you can’t take Genesis literally anymore.”” And so you’ve got half of Christians who are going to Ken Ham’s creation museum and sort of clinging to that. And then you’ve got the sort of moderate Christians who are doing some funny dance and not really owning up to reality. But the truth is that the idea that you take Genesis literally as six literal days of creation is pretty much a modern invention. Fundamentalism starts in the late 19th century. The idea of the rapture where everybody’s lifted out of their shoes, that’s an early 20th century innovation. If you go back and look at ancient Christian authorities, they’re looking at Genesis the same way you are and they’re saying, “Look, this obviously isn’t-”
Bill Maher:
So you’re giving your yourself license to say that some of the Bible is bullshit?
Ross Douthat:
No, I’m giving myself license to say that if you read the Bible, if you actually look at the first few books of Genesis, whoever wrote the Bible clearly didn’t mean to say, “This is a scientific account of creation.” And actually serious Christians have known that all the way back to the 1st century AD.
Bill Maher:
Okay, well, I always say the Bible is-
Ross Douthat:
I like you.
Bill Maher:
The Bible’s divided into the crazy and the wicked. You’re saying the crazy-
Ross Douthat:
I’m going to take a drink of water on that.
Bill Maher:
But the Bible does say, it’s funny, it says, “This is a hundred percent true.” The Bible says you have to take it like that. Now, if it’s not a hundred percent true, I would say the whole thing falls apart. But okay, let’s say it’s okay to say the crazy stuff, we don’t take that literally. What about the wicked stuff?
Joe Heschmeyer:
So one of the funniest things about this maybe was just the fact that after it came out, Ken Ham, who you may have noticed Ross Douthat name-checked as someone who doesn’t understand Christianity very well, then replied, “For once, I agree with Bill Maher.” But the thing is, no, it’s not for once. Your fundamental way of reading the Bible is the same way Bill Maher reads the Bible. You both read it as trying to tell a very literal, non-allegorical, non-metaphorical, non-mythological story. And then one of you laughs at it and one of you says, “Well, I think that’s right.” But everybody else is saying, “You guys are just not understanding figures of speech. You’re not understanding metaphors, you’re not understanding allegories, you’re not understanding typology, you’re not understanding any of these things.” And it’s really kind of remarkable because Ken Ham, in this piece kind of responding to this, he sides with Maher against Douthat for what he calls the inconsistency of picking and choosing which parts of the Bible can be trusted.
But notice what both Maher and Ham have done here. They’ve said there’s two categories, literal, non-metaphorical language and lies or BS. That if you believe the Bible, if you trust the Bible, you have to think it’s not a metaphor at any point, and that is demonstrably false, that is demonstrably untrue and that’s a very weird thing to impose on the Bible. Let me actually throw out one more person who does this because actually in this piece, Ken Ham quotes Richard Dawkins for support, once again showing that the New Atheists, not so new anymore, but the New Atheists and these kind of fundamentalist, Protestants, are reading the Bible in the same faulty way and Dawkins, he argues that scripture isn’t trustworthy and he says, “Christians who try to harmonize genesis and evolution are essentially saying Genesis is not trustworthy,” and by not trustworthy, he means non-literal. He’s making the same mistake.
So he quotes Richard Dawkins here. He says, “I think the Evangelical Christians have really sort of got it right in a way.” Now I want you to notice, these two groups both misunderstand the Bible in the same way, so they’re just like, “Yes, we totally understand each other, we can be in dialogue with each other,” but it’s because both of them are making the same faulty equation that the only kind of truth is scientific, non-metaphorical kind of truth. That is a bad understanding of communication. It’s a terribly limited understanding of the world, and I like to call this Drax Christianity or if you want to call it like a Drax Sermonary. This is a reference to Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s a funny scene where we see someone else who makes this same kind of conflation.
Drax:
…Parts so we can find it.
Peter:
Yeah, I’ll have to agree with the walk thesaurus on that one.
Drax:
Do not ever call me a thesaurus.
Peter:
It’s just a metaphor, dude.
Rocket:
His people are completely literal. Metaphors are going to go over his head.
Drax:
Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I love that. “Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too good, I will catch it.” That’s exactly the kind of thinking we’re dealing with in both of these cases. That’s this idea that, “Well, either you believe in the Bible in all senses is non-metaphorical or you don’t believe in it at all because there can’t be metaphors, there can’t be anything like that. Those things can’t be going over our heads because our reflexes are too good, we’ll catch them.” That’s what they’re doing in both these cases, and I think it’s just for pointing out that this is just not how the Bible works. So let me give you a couple examples. In Isaiah 12, God says, “I spoke to the prophets. It was I who multiplied visions and through the prophets gave parables.” In other words, the hallmark of the prophetic ministry, even in the Old Testament is parables.
And you see them all over. Read the Old Testament, you’ll see a bunch of examples of them. To give just one weird example, Judges 9. To give you the context here, Gideon’s sons, he’s got 70 sons plus another son born from a concubine, and these 70 sons are co-reigning and one of them decides to consolidate power and they say, “Okay, yeah, it makes sense. He’ll be the king.” Jerubbaal is the same person as Gideon, but Jotham, who is the other son, born of the concubine, he then responds to this provocation, this attempt to consolidate power and kill all the other 69 of the 70 sons, and he responds by telling a really strange story about some trees who get together and decide they want a king. And first they go to the olive tree and they say, “Reign over us.” And the olive tree basically says no.
And then they go to a fig tree, same thing. Then they go to a vine, same thing. Then they go to a bramble and the bramble says, “Well, if in good faith you’re anointing me king over you, then come and take refuge in my shade. But if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon.” Now he’s going to unpack what this means. If you’ve done this in good faith, if you’ve honored Gideon, Jerubbaal, in his house, well, then great. Well, this be a day of rejoicing and otherwise, let fire come out and destroy you guys basically. But what’s striking, and the reason I point to this really kind of weird and convoluted example is because it’s a weird and convoluted example, because there’s this argument that Ken Ham, Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher and the like make that, “Well, no way could the authors of Genesis be trying to express the truth of creation in a metaphorical kind of story or a mythological sort of story because that’s not true.”
But here we give an example where a true event, this attempted consolidation of power, is retold through this strange metaphor with talking trees. Now, Protestants, Catholic alike, they’re going to read that and say, “Obviously we’re not literally dealing with talking trees here,” but for some reason in Genesis, we’re not allowed to say the same thing about talking snakes, that we are required if we’re going to believe it, to think that this is non-metaphorical in all senses. I point this out because this is not how the authors of scripture understand it. So I’ll give you an example. I mentioned Genesis 3, Ross Douthat had mentioned Genesis. In Genesis, look at Revelation chapter 12. There st. John refers to the devil as the devil, as a serpent, as a dragon, and makes it clear that this is the person spoken of in Genesis.
In other words, he makes it clear that Genesis 3 is not literally dealing with a talking snake, this one is a spiritual being. Now he may have taken the form of a snake. I do not mean to affirm or deny anything about that. I mean to say only that he’s not literally a dragon, he’s not literally a snake. And so we’re told from the New Testament that these early chapters of Genesis are not operated in the way a science textbook would if it said that there was a creature like a toucan that can talk. So that’s the first thing to say, that the biblical authors regularly and routinely use these really obviously non-literal modes of speech. And if you want to understand what’s going on, you have to be attuned to that. You cannot a priori demand that if they’re telling the truth, they have to tell without metaphor or allegory or the like because that’s a weird restriction to put on Christianity. It’s a weird restriction to put on the language. It’s a weird restriction to put on human communication in general.
Okay, that’s related to another idea, which is this idea that we need to listen to just the plain meaning of the Bible because beyond the most basic level of the Ken Ham kind of misinterpretations of Christianity, there are Protestants who are more attuned to the fact that, “Yes, of course, Christianity and Judaism, if we’re going to make any sense of them, we have to recognize the Bible regularly uses parables and allegories and figures of speech and the like,” but they’re still worried about this and they want to really restrict kind of the influence of this. So I want to give you some examples of this, and Roy Zuck is actually the person I want to use as sort of a sounding board because he is someone who I think is a pretty well respected, pretty intelligent scholar who takes a view of the Bible that I think is fundamentally incorrect.
Now he’s within the more dispensationalist version of Protestantism. So this is the idea, there’s a lot about the literal state of Israel when all of this, but this is a very popular kind of understanding of what Christianity means. It’s just a very novel misinterpretation. I’ll get into why it’s novel in a little bit, but if you were under the impression that this is how Christians have always understood scripture, it’ll be I think good to unpack this. So what do we mean by the plain meaning? Well, in the forward to his book, his book is called Basic Bible Interpretation, Donald Campbell, who’s the head of Dallas Theological Seminary, he raises a legitimate problem and we’ll get into this problem some more. He says, “It seems like almost anything can be proved by the Bible. There’s hardly a religion or a sector, a cult in Christendom that doesn’t use scripture text to “prove” its doctrine,” and prove in quotation marks there.
“In that respect, the Bible may be the most abused book in the world.” So that is true. I think a Catholic would regularly say, “Yep, bravo, you’ve found the problem of sola scriptura, that every denomination can find support for however wacky its teachings are by misusing and abusing some biblical text.” And rightly, he says, “The solution to this problem is not to be found alone in a correct view of inspiration, important as that is.” In other words, the problem is not just that some people say the Bible’s not inspired. There are plenty of people who say they believe in the inspiration of Bible and maybe do believe the inspiration of the Bible and yet nevertheless, thoroughly misunderstand it and use it to defend some horrible ideas or ideas that are just totally at odd with what the Bible actually says. They believe in something just totally heretical. So far, a hundred percent I agree with Campbell, but he’s going to propose his own solution, and that’s the theme of this entire book, Basic Bible Interpretation.
He says, “We need the correct method of biblical interpretation. We believe that to be the literal method which approaches the scripture in the normal customary way in which we talk, write, and think. It means taking the scriptures at face value in an attempt to know what God meant by what he said.” Now the first problem with that is the word we in, “The way in which we talk, write, and think,” because the way we talk, write, and think is often dramatically different from the way that people in the 1st century or before talked, wrote, and thought. And the difficulty there is that we’re imposing our own 21st century ideas heavily shaped by the theological kind of currents in which we are in onto the Bible. And so we don’t end up accurately understanding what the Bible’s saying at all.
That’s the first and biggest problem with that. But there are other problems with this as well, but I want to just highlight this. This surface level reading of the Bible is the best way is what he’s basically saying, take the scripture simply at its face value. And I’m going to argue that is very clearly wrong from scripture itself, but we’ll get to that Roy Zuck himself, when he’s talking about literal, he recognizes that there’s a sense in which the figurative versus literal isn’t really right, that you can still say something literal by something figurative. But he says in his book, literal means ordinary, literal, not figurative. He says it means normal, plain, ordinary uses and not picturesque or out of the ordinary uses. So he understands the distinction at the outset, he just says he wants to argue that we should interpret the Bible literally in meaning, not figuratively, even though there are a bunch of places in which the Bible clearly intends itself to be taken figuratively.
He’s going to try to get around those, but I want to just highlight that he acknowledges, he knows the distinction. He just is going to commit to this bad understanding of literal. And the third kind of way of understanding this is Paul Tan, he quotes in the book, who uses words like normal and customary. He says, “The literal interpretation simply means explaining the original sense of the Bible according to the normal and customary usages of its language.” That’s the best of the three kind of definitions offered here because there you’ll notice it’s not our thought or our language, but there’s at least an attempt to say, “What did this mean to people at the time?” But nevertheless, what did this mean in a non-figurative way to people at the time? What’s the normal and customer way these words would’ve been used? So it’s the best of the three, but it’s still not a good way of understanding what scripture’s saying.
So why do we know it’s not a good way of understanding? Because scripture repeatedly tells us that people did not understand Jesus’s teaching, that if you just take Jesus’ words at face value like the crowds did, you’re not getting what’s going on. The disciples come up to Jesus in Matthew 13 and say to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” The them there’s the crowds. And he says, “To you, it has been given to know the secrets of the heaven, but to them, it has not been given.” In other words, Jesus well understands that the crowds are misunderstanding what he is saying, and he’s fine with that for now because there’s a special role the apostles are going to have to play, and there’s a whole lot going on here in which their misunderstandings of him are going to lead to the cross, and the cross is going to do a whole lot of stuff.
In other words, Jesus doesn’t just say, “Oh, my teachings are so clear that an ordinary person taking what I’m saying at face value gets what’s going on,” because they clearly did not. If you read the New Testament, if you read the Teaching Ministry of Jesus, they regularly do not. And Jesus acknowledges that they do not. Luke 24, the Road to Emmaus. This is now Easter Sunday. We’ve gotten through the Teaching Ministry of Jesus. We’ve gotten through the cross, we’ve gotten through the resurrection. This is resurrection day. This is Easter Sunday.
Two disciples, people who stayed faithful this whole time, are walking down the road to Emmaus and they’re dismayed about the fact that their Messiah has died and they don’t know what to make of this. And Jesus replies to them, “O foolish men, how slow of heart to believe all the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? And beginning with Moses and the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures of things concerning himself.” What does that mean? Okay, well, it means number one, that there are a lot of these parts of the Old Testament that even the most faithful followers of Jesus didn’t get.
Aha. So the surface, plain meaning sense of the Old Testament doesn’t cut it either because there’s this whole christological dimension starting with the Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible and moving forward through the Prophets. In other words, the Old Testament is testifying to Jesus and testifying to the death of Jesus all throughout. But it doesn’t just say, “This is a part about the death of Jesus.” You have to learn how to read it in this deeper way. So just taking the normal plain meaning is not how you get there. Someone saying they’re going to just insist on taking the plain meaning of the Bible is telling you that they’re not going to understand the Bible very deeply, that there’s more to it that they’ve just decided they’re not going to get. Because we’re told in Luke 24 that there’s more that even his most faithful followers didn’t get until he opened it up to them.
Now notice Luke doesn’t tell us all of those. He doesn’t say, “Here’s how to correctly understand. These are all the pastors. Here’s an exhaustive list of Old Testament foreshadowing or prophecies about Christ.” He doesn’t do that. And so if you’re just going to insist on not digging deeper into the Old Testament and not digging deeper into the New Testament, you’re just going to insist on not ever putting those pieces together for yourself. So that leads to my conclusion, hyper literalism is modern heresy. And the word modern there matters because again, you saw the clip with Bill Maher. Ross Douthat is arguing, “No, that’s not how the Bible is meant to be read. It’s not how early Christians read the Bible at all.” And Bill Maher’s like, “No, it says it somewhere, there’s a verse somewhere that says, “This is how you’re supposed to read it,”” and he’s just making this up because that verse doesn’t exist.
And he says there’s a verse that says this is a hundred percent true, which again, that verse doesn’t even exist, but even if it did, a hundred percent true and a hundred percent literal are not the same thing. So hyper literalism, the modern heresy, it’s this modern misunderstanding. It’s really based on a lot of the ideas of the enlightenment and a lot of ideas of the scientific revolution and especially like the 19th century ideas. So there’s this idea that everything that’s true is scientific, and so true and scientific mean the same thing. And you see this a lot among atheists because it is like, “Well, we don’t have anything to learn from philosophy or from theology or from the arts or from poetry or anything like that because those things, people just go around in circles. Meanwhile, we get new iPhones every couple years. So obviously science is the way to go.” And that’s a mistake, that’s a misunderstanding. That’s a very modern misunderstanding, to reduce the world to just the hard sciences.
But what you find there is a rejection of anything connotative in favor of what’s denotative, in favor of what’s literal in this sense of non-metaphorical, because that’s that misunderstanding. So when Christians apply that lens for the Bible, they may think that this is how people have always read the Bible, but it’s not at all. Now to his credit, Zuck is going to get that. But before I get there, I want to highlight a beautiful insight CS Lewis has, attacking liberal theology and this is an essay called Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism, and I will probably reuse this quotation in a totally different context to talk about a lot of the problems with higher criticism and the like, but he really hits the nail in the head, I think, when he says that, “All theology of the liberal type involves at some point, and often throughout, the claim that the real behavior and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars.”
In other words, the characteristic of liberal theology is the idea that followers of Jesus Christ in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd century didn’t know what Jesus Christ really taught or meant, but people today in the 21st century or the 20th century totally get what Jesus meant. And Lewis, who is not just a very brilliant theologian and Christian author, he’s also a brilliant English professor who taught at Oxford and understands literature inside and out, realizes that’s ridiculous and he points out that he sees this kind of thing all over the place in literature. People are constantly rediscovering what Shakespeare really meant and it’s terrible. And so he dismisses both this move in literature and this move in theology within one fell swoop.
He says, “The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those of us who have none of those advantages is, in my opinion, preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance.” Again, this is not just a claim about how we read the Bible, this is just a claim about how we read any text.
If I say, “Oh, here’s this 8th century BC Chinese text. No one in the 8th century understood what it meant, but now I see the true meaning of it,” you would rightly say, “That’s extremely unlikely. You don’t speak that language natively. You don’t understand the nuances of the way they may be using language that is lost in even a dictionary or an etymology or anything of the sort of concordance. You are not attuned to the cultural things. You don’t know the kind of things that are weighing on the men’s souls of that day and age. All of that stuff is lost to you. So what are the odds that you correctly understand it and the original listeners didn’t?” And Lewis is going to say, “It’s preposterous to think you’ve got it. It’s just arrogance to think that you alone have cracked this or that we moderns have figured out what this ancient author was saying to an ancient audience.” That’s true of Jesus Christ as it would be of Shakespeare, as it would be of any figure, fill in the blank.
Roy Zuck, for his credit, kind of gets us. He recognizes what he calls these gaps that when we try to read scripture, we’re facing a chronological time gap, a geographic space gap, a cultural customs gap, a linguistic language gap, a literary writing gap, and a supernatural spiritual gap. That’s what he calls it. We’re not reading in the same time and place or culture as the person that we’re hearing from or the evangelist recording it. And they’re all sorts of things that can be going on in the text that we’re oblivious to. And one of those things that he highlights is, well, we seldom speak in proverbs or parables and a good portion of the Bible is proverbial or parabolic.
That is, I think, the most important line in the entire book because what it reveals is that in insisting the Bible work literally, we’re taking our modern prejudices in favor of non-parabolic, non-proverbial modes of speech in demanding that ancient Jewish and ancient Christian cultures which were heavily proverbial and heavily parabolic, that they had to comport to our standards of how we would write the Bible if we wrote it today, and that’s obviously a disaster. It would be as much of a disaster as insisting that God write the Old Testament in English so we can understand it better. It’s not going to happen. So either you learn how they think or just throw up your hands, but don’t demand that they comport to the way you think and the way you would kind of frame thoughts or express an idea.
And then he goes on and he says, “Figurative language is frequently used in the Bible, that is someone poses problems for our understanding.” Amen. Right? He says, “For instance, Jesus said, “I’m the door and I’m the shepherd.” Obviously he did not mean he is literally made of wood with hinges, nor that he actually owns sheep which he cares for in a field.” So Zuck, in this book arguing that we should be literalists, tells us why literalism does not work because we can’t take Jesus literally without absurdity and because the culture in which the Bible is written, people didn’t speak literally as often as we insist on doing. These are the gaps again. That’s just one of the six gaps that he highlights. Nevertheless, he insists on the literal interpretation and he argues that the true antithesis isn’t between literal and figurative so much as between literal, which is also called the historical or the grammatical interpretation and allegorical interpretation.
And he uses the usual Protestant boogeyman that this was common throughout the Middle Ages, which regarded portions of scriptures as having secret and mystical meanings. Now, I wouldn’t say secret, I would say mystical. I think he misunderstands it. This isn’t gnosticism. Understanding scripture as having non-literal, allegorical meanings, often it’s just a matter of reading scripture with the same kind of sensitivity in which the New Testament authors read the Old Testament, but as you’ll see, they don’t think there’s some hidden meaning that another person wouldn’t have known about, but you may have to draw something that isn’t super obvious. That’s a difference. That’s different than saying, “There’s a secret set of teachings that aren’t recorded or something like that.”
But notice he’s already highlighting that this is Reformation era, that we’re looking at the last 500 years of creation history. We’re not looking at the last 2000 because before the reformers started insisting on the literal, you had these allegorical interpretations. Now Luther, he points out, denounced the allegorical as empty speculations and the scum of holy scripture and Zuck says that Luther’s rejection of the allegorizing method of scripture was revolutionary because it had a stronghold on the church for centuries, but in Zuck’s own tracing of church history, it goes way back before the Middle Ages, we’ll get to that, because he again points out that Luther rejects the four sense of scripture, which I’m going to show you is the right way to interpret the scripture, which were dominant through the Middle Ages and stressed just the literal sense.
Now going back to early church history, Zuck is going to say… In the 2nd century, he’s going to look at three apologists, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian, and he says three things about them, that, “Allegorizing became apologetic, just as it had served that purpose for the Greek philosophers and the Alexandrian Jews. The problems of the Old Testament were readily solved, these men felt, by allegorization. Two, topology easily slipped into allegorizing. And three, church authority became a tool for opposing heresy.” Now, nevermind that he’s not really treating them fairly, what he is pointing out is that when we find Christians of the 2nd century, they regularly don’t read scripture literally. They regularly read it allegorically and they regularly read it as having all of these meanings, maybe in addition to the literal one as well. But even before that, he just says, “Well, little is known about the hermeneutics of the earliest church fathers, those who lived in the 1st century AD.”
In other words, he doesn’t know anyone’s method who lived in the 1st century. In the 2nd century, they have a method he finds objectionable. So it’s not that he just rejects the Middle Ages, he rejects all of known Christian history and the way Christians had interpreted the Bible until the Reformation. This is a big point. This is the point the Douthat made that Maher totally misses. This modern fundamentalist interpretation is really 16th century at the earliest, but much more than 19th and 20th century. This idea that if we’re really going to understand scripture, we have to understand it in a literal, non-metaphorical, non-allegorical way would’ve been totally alien to the earliest followers of Jesus Christ, which also means totally alien to the earliest readers of this text.
I’m going to give you one more example. This one coming from Galatians 4, in which St. Paul reads Genesis and he looks at the bit about Abraham and he’s got one son, Isaac by Sarah and another son Ishmael by Hagar, and he says in Galatians 4, that this is an allegory. These women are two covenants, so he’s going to draw a whole allegorical meaning out of the literal text of Genesis. In other words, this is not some new thing that was invented in the Middle Ages or was a response to Darwin or anything. This is just reading the Old Testament the way the New Testament authors read the Old Testament. So St. Paul is really clear that he’s using allegory here. Zuck acknowledges this but says, “Well, there’s a difference between interpreting allegories so designated in the Bible and allegorizing much of scripture.”
In other words, this is an exception he thinks because Paul acknowledges he’s speaking in an allegory and he thinks other biblical writers who use allegory to do that also, they clearly indicate what they’re doing and we notice this is just special pleading. He’s taking these unambiguously allegorical things and saying, “Well, sure, those are unambiguously allegorical, but everything that’s not unambiguously allegorical must not be allegorical.” But there’s no reason to believe that. He doesn’t give any kind of explanation that when an author doesn’t say, “I’m using an allegory,” therefore he’s not allowed to use allegory. It is just a burden he’s imposing on scripture, it’s not one that he’s finding there. But notice, even though that’s there, he’s still going to argue that the Bible only uses a literal interpretation, which we’ve already seen is flawed. Nevertheless, he says the Bible itself follows the normal or literal method of interpretation, and he gives a few examples.
Christ is born in Bethlehem. Yeah, literally he is. He literally rode on a donkey. And these ideas are almost laughable in the sense that he just seems oblivious to the fact there are a lot of other christological messianic prophecies that weren’t literal. In fact, Origen, early on in the Deuteronomistic history and On the First Principles points out one of the reasons the Jews weren’t believing Christianity was because some of the Christological prophecies hadn’t been fulfilled literally, that he didn’t literally go and preach deliverance to the captives. We don’t have an account of him going and preaching in jail. He didn’t literally build the city of God, some physical city out there. He didn’t literally cause the lion to lay down with the lamb or the wolf to feed with lambs, those kind of things. All of that stuff didn’t happen literally at the visible physical level.
And so one of the objections to Christianity was built on that literalism and Origen, he says, “Well, according to history, we don’t find him accomplishing any of those things predicted of him in that literal sense,” but he says that, “That kind of reading is counter to the principles of human and divine law and counter to the faith of prophecy, that if you know anything about biblical prophecy, you know it regularly is speaking in this non-literal way.” So that’s why it’s really striking that Zuck, trying to prove the Bible always speaks literally, points to messianic prophecies, which are one of the most obvious examples of a place where a lot of the prophecies were not filled literally, and the early Christians knew that and were fine with that because they understood that’s not what was meant by these Old Testament prophecies.
Instead, we find the early Christians very quickly refer to four senses of scripture, and even before they have them kind of categorized as four, we find all four of these being used. I already mentioned the first one, literal sense. Literal sense, remember this true meaning of literal is just, “What does the author mean?” And we find that through sound exegesis, but there’s also these spiritual senses. These may be things that are meant by the divine author that the human author doesn’t even realize or foreshadowing. And so we can see three of these spiritual senses. The most obvious is the allegorical. For instance, the Red Seas, prefiguring baptism. This is not some later crazy interpretation. St. Paul points to it in 1 Corinthians 10. He says, “I want you to know brethren that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea.” What’s he saying there? He’s saying when they went through the Red Sea, they’re following the cloud that is the Holy Spirit leading them and so they were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.
So you’ve got water and spirit, which is what Jesus says we need for baptism in John 3. Paul looks at the Old Testament and says, “Look at that. The Israelites are led out of slavery into freedom by water in the spirit, probably not a coincidence.” That’s the allegorical method. There’s also the moral sense in St. Paul again in 1 Corinthians 10 shows how even after they receive all these spiritual benefits, water in the spirit, they have supernatural food and drink in the desert, nevertheless, many of them put the Lord to the test and were killed. And he said, “Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction.” In other words, there’s one reason why they happened to them, there’s another reason why these events were written down. It is not enough to say a biblical event was written down because it happened because a lot of things happened that weren’t written down.
Why were these ones written down? And the answer in part is so that we’ll learn something from this and that what we’ll learn from this is the moral sense. There’s what happened and then here’s the lesson. Maybe it’s do this, maybe it’s don’t do this. Maybe it’s something else entirely. That’s the moral sense. It’s the spiritual sense. The third spiritual sense, which is the fourth sense total is what’s called the anagogical sense. This is the one that people find the most confusing, which is this idea of, “What does this mean about the kind of the future or destiny?” So in the case of this journey from the place of slavery, Egypt to the place promised land, what does it have to say about us on our current journey towards the promised land, heaven, the new heavens in the new earth? And we get some clear examples of that in scripture as well.
Hebrews 9, for instance, talks about how Christ goes not into a sanctuary made with hands, which was just a copy of the true one but into heaven itself. What that tells us is that the temple on earth was a prefigurement of the heavenly temple. So there’s something future-oriented. In other words, when we’re reading scripture, we see in it these things that prefigure Christ, these things that have something to say about our modern moral life in 2022 or whatever year you’re watching this video and then things about our eternal kind of destiny. Those are the three spiritual senses in addition to the literal sense. This is not just a history book about the pre-history or the pre-1st century history of the Jewish people or the 1st century history of the church. You could find any of those written from a totally secular perspective. What inspired scripture is doing is more than that and the more than that that it’s doing are what are called the spiritual senses of scripture.
None of those are a denial of the literal thing happened. None of those are denying that, “Yeah, also there’s history here,” but they’re saying, “Yeah, but why were these of instant history highlighted and pointed out? Well, to tell us something about God, about us, about this, that, and the other thing. And so there’s something for me in scripture, that scripture is still being written for me even though it wasn’t written to me.” Hopefully, that distinction makes sense. In the Middle Ages, they had a helpful maybe couplet, the letter speaks of deeds, allegory to faith, the moral, how to act, anagogy, our destiny. So we’re looking at those four things. What were the events that happened? That’s the literal sense. Again, maybe they’re using metaphor to talk about those events just as Judges 9 uses metaphor to talk about the historical events by telling us the story about talking trees.
But whatever that literal level is, that’s the deeds. But then we can also see something maybe about Christ or about faith in general, about how to act and about our eternal destiny. Those are the four senses of scripture. That’s what Zuck and before him Martin Luther are arguing against. But you’ll notice those are the ways that scripture treats scripture. And so this modern sense of insisting that we only look at the deeds and ignore the faith, actions, destiny part is a very strange kind of reaction to the enlightenment, very strange reaction inside of revolution in a way that it is totally unfaithful to how the early Christians read scripture. The last question I want to ask is, “Does hyper literalism work?” And the answer is going to be, as you might expect, no. Zuck makes his own test for how do you know if an expression is figurative or literal?
Because as I said, he acknowledges there are parts that you just cannot take literally. There are no such thing as biblical literalists in the sense that no one can take all the parts of the Bible literally because some parts say they’re not literal, but he says, “Well, number one, always take a passage in its literal sense unless there’s good reason for doing otherwise.” And he gives us an example. Well, John says in Revelation that, “144,000 will be sealed, 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel. There’s no reason not to take those numbers in a normal literal sense.” Remember that. “The second rule, the figurative sense is intended if the literal would involve an impossibility.” Now this part really should be a bigger issue for Protestants because someone could say, “Well, I think a six day creation is an impossibility and therefore Genesis can’t be taken literally,” that this exception clause basically just means, “Yeah, if it doesn’t seem plausible to you, then don’t take it literally.”
You’ve introduced a huge element of the subjectivity that they’re trying to get rid of. But third, they say the figurative is intended of the literal meaning is an absurdity. And he gives the examples of trees clapping their hands, which obviously he couldn’t take it literally, right? But God could create a world in which trees had hands that clapped. He didn’t, but he could have. Likewise, God could create a world in six days. The question isn’t what God can do, the question is what God did do. And so to demand that someone else believed things that they find to be absurd or impossible, while you give yourself an out to reject whatever you think is absurd or impossible, is a very strange biblical set of double standards. And then the fourth of his rules is to take the figurative sense if the literal would demand immoral action. He gives the example of the Eucharist. He says, “Since it would be cannibalistic to eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood, he obviously was speaking figuratively.”
All I want to point out here is that Zuck’s rules, what things he thinks are obvious, that we take the 144,000, literally, it’s about 144,000 individuals from 12 tribes of Israel that don’t exist anymore and we take the, “Eat my flesh and drink my blood,” figuratively, it’s not really about Jesus’ body and blood, his gut sense is 180 degrees opposed to the gut sense of the early Christians. JND Kelly in Early Christian Doctrines points out that in general Eucharistic teaching was unquestioningly realist. Everybody just understood the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be and were designated and treated as the savior’s body and blood. This is not just like one or two early Christians. Overwhelmingly when you read the early Christians, it’s undeniable they believe that Eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus Christ. That seems to have been the universal belief of anyone who would be remotely considered Christian by either Catholic or Protestant standards.
DA Carson points out that even the Apostle John’s disciple, Saint Ignatius of Antioch, very clearly is a Sacramentarian. He reads John 6 as meaning that the Eucharist actually is medicine of immortality, and this is a guy who studied under the Apostle John seemingly for decades. So the people closest to John read John 6 as actually about the Eucharist and they didn’t take it to be obviously figurative in the way that Zuck, writing 2000 years later, takes it to be obviously figurative. On the other hand, they did take the 144,000 to be obviously figurative. Origen, for instance, in his Commentary on John says, “Well, it’s clear that the 144,000 who’ve not defiled themselves are those who are following the divine word coming out of the gentile world,” and he points out that the passage itself talks about them following the lamb, that it’s following Christ, that they’re not ethnically and religiously Jewish in the sense of being not Christian.
But moreover, he says, “Well, no doubt admits of a mystical interpretation,” but he says it’s unnecessary at this point to compare it with those other passages that talk about this with the Gentiles. So he just kind of takes it for granted. “Yeah, of course. Obviously the 144,000 isn’t literal.” And Zuck is like, “Obviously, it is.” Well, how do we know who’s right? Well, here’s just one place to look. The Bible, Matthew 18, Peter says to Jesus, “How often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him?” “As many as seven times,” Jesus says. “Not seven times, but 70 times seven.” Now almost nobody thinks that Jesus is saying this is how many times to forgive him and no more. Rather he’s doing this Jewish thing where he’s using numbers in a particular way. He’s taking a Jewish number, he’s taking seven and saying, “Not seven, but seven times, seven times 10, seven times 70.”
Well, the same thing is happening in Revelation. When we have 144,000, 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes, you have 12 times, 12 times a thousand. It’s an amplifier. It’s a number squared and then amplified by a base 10 number. The exact same thing is going on, and neither of these are intended to be literal. Saint Augustine points this out in On Christian Doctrine where he talks about how scripture uses certain numbers in this way, 7, 10, and 12, and that they mean universally, so that when scripture says, “Seven times a day, I praise you,” means the same thing as saying, “His praise shall continually be in my mouth.” It’s not saying literally, “I pray no more than seven times in the day.” Seven is just a number that means all the time.
“And likewise,” he says, “12 into 12 gives 144, which is used to signify the whole body of the saints.” God is not saying, “I’m only going to save 144,000 out of the billion plus Christians alive right now and 144,000 out of all the people who lived ever.” No, that obviously we’re using a number here in this way to just mean a lot or the full number. That’s what’s going on. That’s the actual Christian way of interpreting it. And so again, I’d point out this is where we see this as a very modern heresy. The whole point of where liberal theology goes wrong is imagining that we in the 20th or 21st century can better understand the 1st century than people of that day could understand their own speakers and thinkers.
And that kind of arrogance is why I don’t buy liberal theology. That kind of arrogance is why don’t buy fundamentalism as well because it’s doing the exact same thing, you’re ignoring the people who shared the same culture, language, habitual imagery, and unconscious assumption, and assuming you who don’t have access to any of that interior life of the culture have somehow got a better understanding of what’s going on because it seems to you like the 144,000 should be literal and the Eucharist should be figurative even though very clearly the original audience understood the exact opposite.
Okay, the last thing I want to do is go back to this question from GotQuestions and highlight another part of this because I think there’s just something that I think is kind of a funny note to end on.
Speaker 4:
… Verse 31, “Just as the disciples took Jesus’ words literally so must we. How else can we be sure of our salvation if we do not believe him when he says he came to seek and save the lost?” Luke chapter 19 verse 10. “Pay the penalty for our sin,” Matthew chapter 26, verse 28. “And provide eternal life,” John chapter 6, verse 54.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I just think this part is funny, unintentionally funny because he says, “Well, how can we be assured of our salvation if we don’t take Jesus literally?” And then he highlights three verses we need to take Jesus literally, Luke 19:10, Matthew 26:28, John 6:54. What do those say? Well, Luke 19:10 says, “The son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.” Absolutely Catholics and Protestants think that literally Jesus does come to save the lost. Seek maybe is more of an expression than literally true. As the omniscient God, He’s not looking around, trying to figure out where the lost are. But nevertheless, basically, literally. Matthew 26:28 though is the Eucharist. It’s the institution of the Eucharist in Matthew. It’s when our Lord lifts the chalice and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
And the remarkable thing is Protestants typically don’t take that literally. They don’t think this is the blood of the covenant. They think it represents or it’s an image of, it’s a figure of. In other words, they take Jesus very figuratively there, quite unlike the way the early Christians took him. And then the final one he gives is John 6, verse 54, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I’ll raise him up the last day.” I really end on this note for two reasons. Number one, to show that I think this standard of taking the Bible literally is absurd because Protestants don’t take the Bible literally. They don’t take these Eucharistic passages literally even though Jesus’s earliest followers did. And number two, it shows how arbitrarily this is being sort of enforced.
You’ve got people saying, “Oh, how dare you not take Genesis one through three literally here?” Or, “How dare you take this part of Genesis or this part of the Old Testament or whatever it is, how dare you take that part figuratively or allegorically or in this non-literal kind of way?” While just totally picking and choosing. And as you saw, he chose three verses and doesn’t take two of those three literally. So that’s I think at the heart of where this problem is. So what’s the proper way to interpret it? We should take the literal parts literally, we should take the figurative parts figuratively. If you want to know which parts are literal and which parts are figurative, your best bet is to look at how the earliest followers of Jesus Christ understood them.
Now, you might remember one thing that was in one of the New Testament passages. In Matthew 13, the apostles are told, “Even these things the crowds aren’t going to get, they’re going to get,” which shows that from the earliest days, there was this entrustment that the leadership of the church, that the apostles would be able to interpret what’s the meaning of this part that’s really hard to understand. And so there’s this role for the church in kind of the understanding of the biblical text. So those are the two things, tradition and the church that help us figure out when should we take the Bible literally, when should we take the Bible figuratively. But whether we take the Bible figuratively or literally at a particular place, we should always take it truthfully. That is there’s a difference between someone using a figure of speech and someone lying to you.
And so hopefully that’s been cleared throughout this. But that’s the important thing. Don’t think the biblical authors don’t know what they’re talking about. Don’t think the biblical authors are lying to you. They may just be saying something different than you thought they were saying because you were coming with one set of assumptions and that’s not the world they live or operate in. I hope this helps. I hope this helps explain like why we’re not biblical literalists in the sense most people use that term and why they’re not biblical if you really understand what they’re saying and why you shouldn’t be a biblical literalist, but you should be a faithful follower of the biblical message instead. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.
Speaker 1:
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