literally

I am a Biblical literalist. I’m convinced the Bible is an account of actual historical events and actual truths that apply to our lives.

Of course that makes me a nincompoop. I’m well aware of the low regard the world has for a position like mine, even equating me with al Queda (!). Many a Christian has a ready accusation for me too.

But recently someone asked me a respectful question: How can I take the Bible literally when it contradicts itself? It’s a great opportunity to question and explore my thoughts – so here we go.

I should start with this: Being a literalist doesn’t mean I accept pat Sunday school answers to life’s curveballs. Nor do I walk around with a plastic rejoice-in-the-Lord-always smile. Life is difficult, truth is profound, and we are complex. If taking the Bible literally means I can’t be sincere about who I am and how I struggle, what’s the use?

My writing reflects this, particularly two of my pieces. I’ve been told Deep Black Sea reads like a Buddhist meditation. It was my best effort at creating an honest map of my mind, and if that means sounding like a Buddhist, so be it – I maintain that it still honors God. For You, Bean, which describes how my wife and I grieved when we lost our first child to miscarriage, begins with an accusation: if Jesus, who calls us His friends, knew our child had died in the womb, why didn’t He tell us? Would a friend make us wait two weeks to learn the news? God’s not threatened by our difficult questions, nor does He expect us simply to snap out of it and tow the Christian line. We can be ourselves, think for ourselves, freely and fully. Taking the Bible literally doesn’t mean being artificial or flat.

Also I should explain that I’m a skeptic at heart – and it’s skepticism that drives me to Biblical literalism. How? First, I know I didn’t make myself, and refuse to believe that purely naturalistic processes can result in awareness, in human consciousness. My mind must have been created by a greater mind; nothing else is sufficient. Second, I refuse to accept death as simply a part of the circle of life. Death is horrible, and it is horrifying. I reject humanist psychologists who say we should embrace death as natural, because it’s the most unnatural thing I’ve ever seen.

So if a greater mind gave me life, and if my life will come to a tragic end in death – wouldn’t that greater mind have something to say about it?

I wasn’t raised as a believer, but in 9th grade I asked God, whoever He was, to reveal Himself to me. Four years later, in college, I began reading the Bible for the first time and became convinced that God was responding to my request. And then came skepticism number three: If God had chosen to communicate through the Bible’s writers, would He allow His message to be corrupted? Aside from a few clerical errors, which I address in High Fidelity, what would be the point?

The trick is, God’s slippery. He’s invisible, which means that anyone can say anything about Him and sound credible – that I can think anything I want about Him and be none the wiser. Yet there is a factual God beyond my invention, a God who in fact invented me. And in my possession is a collection of writings that detail His dealings over thousands of years, writings that have been corroborated by archaeology and that ring true. Why then would I revert to believing Deepak Chopra or Alanis Morissette or that homeless man on the corner, or even Michael Hobson? Everything else is baseless. Utterly. So if God uses the Bible to give me a foundation of belief, I have a hard time accepting that the foundation would be faulty.

That brings us to the contradictions.

Actually I’m struck by how few there are.  For a book written in various modes (poetry, history, law, dialogue, proverb, letter) by dozens of writers of different professions (royalty, prophet, fisherman, politician, doctor) over thousands of years, the Bible is astoundingly consistent. Certainly some contradictions exist, but any claim that the Bible is characterized by them fails to take into account its unexpected consistency given its composition process.

Like the adage of the three blind men and the elephant, different writers emphasized different aspects of God’s nature. What comes across then is not so much disjointed as it is dimensional. The elephant really does have a coarse hide, and a tufted tail, and a large snakelike trunk; just so, over thousands of years writers described encounters with a God both jealous and merciful, both transcendent and emotional, yet who comes across throughout as essentially the same God. When we stop our loud objections, we begin to notice a subtler, more comprehensive picture.

And so arises this principle: Interpret Scripture with Scripture. If the Bible was authored through the inspiration of one God through the ages, it should be consistent. Verses shouldn’t be taken out of context, then, but understood in the full scope of one another – especially between Old and New Testament, as Jesus freed us from the Mosaic law’s requirements by fulfilling them on the cross. “Everything is meaningless!” declares the writer of Ecclesiastes, which might prompt some to shut the book: “If the Bible says life is meaningless, what’s the point of reading it?” or “Here the Bible says life is meaningless, there it says we’re created for God’s glory – how dumb is that?” But slowing down and pondering these contradictions allows us to gain a deeper glimpse. Yes, life is meaningless. Yes, our lives glorify God. Taken together they convey something more profound than what flat black print on flat white paper can manage.

Still, the Bible has other contradictions, more glaring contradictions. Which is it, predestination or free will? What about science – the sun doesn’t actually rise or set, and the mustard seed isn’t actually the smallest seed. And where in the world did Cain get his wife?

Some of these have been answered so easily as to expose our own failures as readers. For example: Cain married his sister. Duh. Adam and Eve were supposed to populate the earth, weren’t they? Where else would their children find spouses, if not among each other? Every reader tends to impose assumptions on a text that may block understanding (such as brothers and sisters not marrying, a moral principle that didn’t appear until Leviticus chapter 18, and a biological issue God would have accounted for). So a text that doesn’t make sense isn’t necessarily wrong. As English teachers say, “When a book and a brain collide and a hollow sound results, is the fault always with the book?”

Other contradictions appear only if we throw out common sense. Any passage ripped out of context or stripped of intent can sound idiotic. Psalm 14 says “There is no God,” which sounds pretty peculiar when taken out of context: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” According to Jesus it’s better for me to cut off my hand than allow it to cause me to sin, but that doesn’t mean I grab the kitchen knife – a dramatic illustration should be understood as such. Several of the Bible’s psalms express disappointment with God, but they’re earnest and emotional pleas, not authoritative teachings about His nature. And look at the Book of Job — chapter after chapter of men debating sin and righteousness. Does that mean I believe five bearded dudes each took turns talking for hours at a stretch? No. Like Inherit the Wind or Amadeus or A Man for All Seasons, Job is a play written in dramatic form, using historical events to develop a literary theme. I take the Bible literally, but that doesn’t mean I ignore contextual cues or disregard literary mode.

The limitations of language need to be taken into consideration as well, as language describes nothing perfectly (the premise behind my piece Deep Black Sea). A simple fact such as “George W. Bush was elected president in 2000” leaves out the crucial Florida recount and the Supreme Court ruling. Further, consider it alongside another fact: “George W. Bush became president 2001.” Anyone unfamiliar with American presidential inaugurations might well argue the two statements contradict one another, yet they’re both perfectly true.

Some people describe my head as large, others small. None of them are nitwits – I’ve got a narrow face and a skull that’s rather longish toward the back. Ask any ten people to write a physical description of me and more contradictions will surface, though each writes as accurately as possible.

That principle, applied to the Bible, bears directly on how we understand God. Take the episode of Jesus turning over the money tables, which is recorded in varying levels of detail in all four gospels and is a striking contradiction of His generally peaceable demeanor elsewhere. No account conveys exactly how Jesus carried out this act. Was He resolute? Filled with grief? Driven by rage? Did He strike the merchants only until they fled, or did He chase them down the street, flogging all the way? What happened to the spilled money – did He give it to the poor, to his disciples, to the priests? Or did He demand that the merchants take it with them, unwilling that such worldly corruption should have any part in His Kingdom?

We don’t know. The Scriptures don’t tell us. More information would help us resolve the contradiction in Jesus’ character, in turn helping us understand God, but the Scriptures don’t give it to us. Perhaps there’s a measure of wisdom in that, a recognition that no amount of words would ever be enough. This seems to be on the Apostle John’s mind as he closes his narrative: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” Words are not enough – and yet they are, in that the Bible does give us an accurate depiction of history and of truth. It may not be as complete as we’d like, but since complete is impossible, accurate will have to do.

And then, of course, there are a few contradictions that fly in the face of all reason.

John’s gospel, for example, has Jesus clearing the Temple at the beginning of His ministry, whereas the other three gospels place this event during the last week of His life. Clearly it’s the same event; why the error? The first chapter of Genesis has plants created before mankind; the next chapter has them created afterward. How can this be? One genealogy lists 42 generations between Abraham and Jesus; another counts more. Why the discrepancy?

In these cases I suspend judgment. Simply because I don’t understand something now doesn’t mean it can’t be understood (what hubris!), or that I won’t understand it later. In life I’m often struck by Neitherism and Bothism: the humbling realization that although I see only two mutually exclusive possibilities, often both eventually prove true, reconciled in some way I didn’t anticipate (note the best explanations of predestination/free will), or I’m surprised by the materialization of a third possibility. Consider the driving directions a friend recently gave me. Head east on a highway, get off at an exit ramp, take a left to go under the overpass, then … another left onto the ramp headed west? Contradiction – I’d be headed right back home! But unless I followed his directions I never would’ve seen the next right turn, which was off that homeward-bound ramp. Never before had I seen a road accessible only from an entrance ramp, but there it was.

I suspect that many of the Bible’s contradictions are like those driving directions – not clear to me, but also not wrong. Did John narrate events out of chronological order? Did God create plants in different stages? Did Jews track genealogies using different methods? I don’t know – I wasn’t there. But that doesn’t mean I need to toss out the Bible as problematic, nor demote it to metaphor status only so that I pick and choose what to believe. I still take it literally – it’s the only foundation I’ve got.

Any clunks in my understanding of the Bible I ascribe to myself before I ascribe to God. In this way I hope to avoid something akin to the error of Job, who in his uncertainty reserved more respect for his own understanding than he did for God.