Defending Scripture. Literally. (April CT Column)
Defending Scripture. Literally.
Not everything the Bible has to say should be literally interpreted. But that doesn't make it less powerful.
Carolyn Arends | In the April, 2012 issues of Christianity Today, posted online 04/01/2012
I attended a Christian university in the long ago days of acid wash denim and Commodore 64s. One of my classmates, Ken Jacobsen, had a gift for impersonation. He was renowned for his imitation of Bono on the U2 song "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." "I have spoke with the tongue of angels," he'd croon when he got to the fourth verse. "I have held the hand of a devil." But then he'd alter the lyric and sing, "N-o-t literally. It's only a metaphor." That always got a huge laugh.
It's been decades, but I still remember the joke. I realize now it was humorous not only for its inherent silliness, but also for the way it held up a mirror to something funny about ourselves.
Most of us were earnest, sincere evangelicals. We weren't biblical studies majors, but we saw the defense of the Bible as our sworn duty. Against the onslaught of those who sought to undermine Scripture's authority, we committed ourselves to upholding it as the reliable Word of God.
One of the unintended side effects of our fervor was that we took almost everything literally, at least in spiritual matters. Generally, we weren't very good with oblique metaphors and analogies. And if, like Bono, you talked about spiritual things in a seemingly unorthodox way, well, we worried.
There was much that was good about our impulses, and maybe they were necessary in a time when the "battle for the Bible" was raging. But for me, and, I suspect, others like me, our "literalist" convictions left us confused in significant ways—not only about song lyrics, but, much more tragically, about Scripture itself.
All these years later, I'm learning that understanding the literal meaning of the Bible is a more nuanced adventure than my college friends and I imagined. We'd been blithely unaware that there is more than one genre in the Bible, or that literary context profoundly matters to meaning. We didn't understand that when we read ancient Hebrew prose poems (like Genesis 1), wisdom literature (like Proverbs), or apocalyptic literature (like Revelation) as if they were science textbooks, we were actually obscuring their meaning.
For me, the most negative consequence of all that well-intentioned literalism was the conviction that Yahweh, having given us his straightforward Word, was completely comprehensible. This paradigm both diminished my perception of God and set up my faith for crisis when I discovered aspects of God that remain stubbornly shrouded in mystery.
If you'd told me back then that the language we have for God—even (especially) much of our biblical language—must be understood analogically, I would have prayed for you and backed away slowly. I wouldn't have understood that there are no words that can be applied to God exactly the same way they are applied to creaturely things, no language that can be used "univocally."
When I say that I am "alive" and God is "alive," the word "alive" is analogical, not univocal—it does not apply to me (a temporal creature) the same way it applies to God (who is eternal). The same goes for words like "good" or "powerful." Connotations of imperfection or limitation must be deleted from any word when it is applied to God, and the notions (as best as we can conceive them) of total perfection and completion must be added.
Understanding this sooner would have helped me with biblical descriptions of God's "wrath." I can only get a glimmer of what God's wrath looks like when I divest the word of the human implications of self-centered, reactionary anger, and condition it with the unchanging goodness that must clarify all of God's attributes. Or take the word "Father." The claim that God is our heavenly "Father" can ultimately mean something wonderful, even to my friends who had terrible human dads, because the word is not used univocally when it's applied to God.
J. I. Packer likens our relationship with God to that of a two-year-old with a father who has a brain of Einsteinian proportions. To make relationship possible, the father will have to accommodate himself to the toddler he loves. The child will know her daddy, but she won't completely comprehend him. What the father reveals to the daughter will be true, as far as it goes. But there will always be more.
We shouldn't be surprised (or worried) that in his overtures to us God uses every kind of language available—straightforwar
Literally.
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Comments
Thanks
Always a good read!
not analogical or univocal, but both
I appreciate your desire to make the understanding of the Bible more intellectually palatable. But I would like encourage you, my sister, to rethink some of your presentation that appears to indicate an embarrassment for treating the miracle of creation. I may be wrong, since you carefully avoided being specific about your understanding of Genesis 1, though you intimated that a literal understanding of it was not altogether helpful.
But I would like to suggest that the Bible should be read more like a science textbook, for it is certain that our world reads its science textbooks more like the Bible! What I mean is that both are based on presuppositions,that is, in the Bible God's existence is assumed, and in most science textbooks God's non-existence must be assumed. Both declare themselves as the final authority in the matters they speak about. And both are written for the learner to get the basic meaning without resorting to "these words don't really mean what they say."
Van Til and Clark both overstated their cases, though I believe Clark was closer to honoring the meaning and understandibility of revelation in a way that gives greater glory to God. God is truly beyond our comprehension analogically speaking, but is truly comprehensible at some level univocally speaking, or the incarnation is not a reality. To love as Jesus loved and to be one as the Father is with the Son must be true univocally at some level, for Scripture commands these truths for our reality. But that there is a love and oneness between the Father and the Son that is beyond comprehension and beyond our reality, giving analogical meaning to words "love" and "oneness", is also literally obvious.
But this does not mean I need to doubt that the same Jesus who had physical life brought back into His physical body in one second was also the same Son of God who breathed life into a physical body that He had molded from physical dirt in a few seconds on a literal 24 hour day (a body that appeared mature in age from that day forward). If He could create a multitude of fish and already baked bread, or mature wine, within seconds, I need not take the Bible out of the hands of the normal reader of Genesis one, by intimating atheistic scientific theory is more believable than the literal understanding that the first Jews had when reading Genesis one, especially after they applied that meaning of six literal days to what they heard from the literal voice of God when He gave them the fourth commandment during the literal event at Mt. Sinai.
Please take my encouragement as well intentioned, with the utmost respect for your desire to serve and glorify our wonderful Savior!
Nice work Carolyn
There's a difference between what you argue and those who argue that Scripture isn't relevant in any context.
"Scripture is a river that an ant can wade in and an elephant can swim in." - Thomas More
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