Do you mean that literally?

One of the best insults a contemporary atheist or secularist can level against a Christian is to say that they "take the Bible literally". This seems roughly equivalent to other insults such as "thick as a plank" or "the same IQ as a bit of plankton". This attitude, I suppose, stems from the perception that there are details in the Bible which are so patently ridiculous that no intelligent person could possibly consider them to be true.

Now, this is an interesting idea, because it raises so many wonderful questions. Here's just a few of the key ones:

1) If it's stupid to take the Bible literally, does that make it smart to take it figuratively?

2) What does it mean to take the Bible literally?

3) What does it mean to take the Bible figuratively?

4) What is the purpose of the Bible?

5) What makes anything "patently ridiculous"? Common sense? If so, what makes "common sense" common?

I might just leave a few of those questions to sit and settle with you for a while, not because I'm not interested in answering them but because they get asked so rarely that I feel like the moment should be savoured somewhat. What I am most interested in looking at, however, is the second question:

What does it mean to take the Bible literally?

Now, on the surface this seems simple. Taking it literally means believing it word for word. The fact that Biblical literalists are so widely criticised suggests that this word-for-word reading is the problem. Of course, not taking it literally should not necessarily mean dismissing it wholesale, and this is a point worth considering. Certainly, taking something figuratively rather than literally is often necessary. Every student I've ever taught knows that, when a person says they have butterflies in their stomach, they don't mean it literally. Yet taking this saying figuratively is not an instantly straightforward process. Certainly, the words in that context did not mean exactly what they seem to mean. If I say that I have butterflies in my stomach, I do not mean that actual butterflies are actually in my actual stomach. So what do I mean? For many people, liberating the Bible from literal meaning seems to open up the possibility that it means, well, whatever we want it to mean - by which logic saying, "I have butterflies in my stomach" could as easily mean "I am nervous" as it does "I've got indigestion" or, to put in one from left-field, "I have a giant alien sitting on my front lawn at the moment."

Now common sense says that the third option is ridiculous, the second unlikely, and the first most logical. But this assumes that we are operating under a tightly structured system of linguistic cues and symbols, whereby "butterflies in the stomach" clearly refers to that fluttery feeling of mild nerves or anxiety, and should not be taken to mean anything else. That seems rather rigid, doesn't it? Couldn't the saying mean...well...something else to other people? No, of course it doesn't. We all know what the phrase means, and anyone who takes it to mean something else needs to learn the correct meaning to avoid further awkward confusion. All of which goes to say, I suppose, simply that a symbol, while not to be taken literally, may still have quite a clear, set meaning - one which is possibly true, in a rigid, objective sense, even if someone may hear the saying not knowing what a butterfly is or how it feels to have some inside one's stomach.

Generally, when people talk of "taking the Bible literally", it is with an understanding of "literal reading" as a sort of subtle-as-a-sledgehammer, zero-nuance reading that would, if taken to its logical extent, make a reader of "Song of Songs" wonder why the lover would feel so strongly for a girl whose breasts are gazelles and ancient architectural structures simultaneously.

Do I take the Bible literally? Yes. Does that mean I believe that the book of Leviticus provides the only necessary guidelines for how doctors should treat leprosy? No. Does this make me inconsistent in my faith? Not at all. Taking the Bible literally should not mean reading it without thought, application or interpretation. It means, for a start, being able to distinguish poetry from history, prophecy from theology, a narrative from a letter, a song from an instruction.

An interesting recent approach to reading the Bible literally came from A.J. Jacobs' "The Year of Living Biblically", a slightly satirical look at applying the Bible wholesale into one's life. I was naturally inclined to dislike the book, but this review from Bible scholar Ben Witherington has made me more open. Nevertheless, Witherington still makes the point that behind the

surveys and studies that Jacobs does in this book is the sort of flat hermeneutic applied to the Biblical text, assuming that it all applies to all God's people at all times, rather than a more covenantal approach which says that there are different regulations for differing times in the history of God's people as the covenant and its rules are changed by God.

In other words, actually applying the Bible does not mean reading every word exactly as it appears and pulling it directly out of the text without thought about what it really means. That kind of practice is not only bad Bible reading. It's bad reading. If that's what it means to take the Bible literally, then I can see why such a practice would be ridiculed.

Only, it isn't. Very few people actually read the Bible like that. At the very least, they know that "gazelles" means something other than the literal animal, and that two metaphors can be used for the one thing without contradiction. Taking the Bible literally works if we understand that literal reading is not unsubtle, ignorant reading, but a practice of reading which seeks to understand what the text meant to its original readers, in its original context, and how this applies to us today. It isn't a free-for-all process of "make of this text whatever you want". Nor is it a rigid, unthinking quest which reads a book of symbolic love poems as a textbook on biological deformity and sexual curiosity.

So, to bring this to some sort of conclusion: let's all agree to be readers of thought and subtlety, who can tell a symbol from a "fact" without losing too many hairs, and who can take as much meaning and truth from a poem as we can from a textbook. We might start to see that the Bible, contrary to popular opinion, is worth reading, worth applying, possibly even - yes, possibly even worth believing.