Literalism vs. Everything Else

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A fissure runs through communities that take the Bible seriously, especially within American Protestantism. “Literalism” marks the divide between the two camps, the two spiritual regions, the two political forces. Listen to the two factions fighting for the spoils within a single denomination—as in the recent case of the Southern Baptist Convention¹ or the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod—and you will hear them fighting over biblical inerrancy and a literal approach to Scripture. As battle lines are drawn between the “evangelical” and the “mainline” churches, no concept is used more frequently as the divider than literalism, by whatever term it is called.

Literalism almost always comes up whenever the New Christian Right starts quoting the Bible during political forays on subjects like abortion 039and homosexuality. Benumbed non-literalists are reduced to arguing that the Bible has no role in politics or that the cited texts are few and ambiguous or that the Scriptures should not be taken literally because they come from different cultural contexts than those we share today. Debate the wisdom or propriety of teaching “the Bible as literature” in the local high school: One side insists that as God’s literal truth, it must be taught as the truth about life, the basis for moral conduct and values. The other side sees the Bible as culturally important, to be made available to young people who can take whatever attitude they wish toward it.

Interview teachers in religious studies departments, especially in parts of the country or in the kinds of schools where inerrancy and literalism are favored. They will tell you of the great divide that runs down the middle of the classroom. On one side are those who are respectful and even reverent of the text, but who find it open to many interpretations. On the other side are those who, often shaped more by church and parental religious influence and better informed about biblical details, are outraged if any teaching implies a critical approach to the text.

Read the Letters to the Editor to Biblical Archaeology Review and BR or to any other journal that appeals to a broad readership. The subscribers all care about ancient geography, archaeology, artifacts and physical objects like scrolls and manuscripts. But they differ vastly regarding the assumptions they bring to the text.

In 1989 only 31 percent of Americans told Gallup or other pollsters that the Bible is “the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word” (4 years earlier, the figure was 34 percent).² But those who take this position hold denominational, political and cultural power far beyond their numbers. They seem more zealous than the informal camp of those who revere and study the Bible but are not literalists. Non-literalists are, in fact, in disarray despite their devotion to the Bible. When they care to fight at all, they tend to come out on the defensive. In open competition, literalists are better organized; they have more staying power; they know the techniques with which to reach new converts.

Literalism is not the only factor contributing to conversion and the prosperity of the literalists. The fastest-growing forces in the Protestant world are pentecostalisms—charismatic or prophetic movements that are spreading in Africa, Latin America and the American south.³ These tend to be exuberant—“effervescent,” sociologist Emile Durkheim would have called them—and ill-defined. Their prophets and followers are often too busy to slow down for philosophical defenses of literalism. They are quick to claim that God talked to them directly that very day. But when they are asked to state the sources of their thought and inspiration, they will almost always cite an errorless Scripture to which they have privileged access. Those with more open attitudes to the Bible tend to shun proselytization. They stay at home, not always able to retain even the loyalty of their own offspring. Their denominations and movements at best hold their own in the late modern world.

The early modern world was full of prophets who envisioned anything but what we have seen unfold in the 20th century. The first set of non-literalist prophets appeared alongside the historic churches, sometimes as rivals, but more often simply as people who believed that the old literalisms would disappear when Reason—they capitalized it—and Science and Progress came to prevail. Historian Crane Brinton put it well when he observed that such prophets were not anti-religious; they were neo-religious. “In the late seventeenth century … there arose in our society what seems to clearly be a new religion … I call this religion simply Enlightenment, with a capital E.”⁴

In the United States “Big E” Enlightenment religion rose mainly among the northern Congregationalists and southern Episcopalians, who made up the elites among America’s founders: John Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and, most articulate of all, Thomas Jefferson. Friendly to religion they all were, and they could say nice things about the Bible. But they posed Reason over against Revelation, and foresaw the triumph of the former. Supernatural revelation, the more militant among them said, was part of the “superstition and priestcraft” that had held the mind in bondage.

In his White House years, Thomas Jefferson cut up the Gospels (in English, French, Latin and Greek!) and pasted his reconstruction together in a text that survives: The Life and Morals of Jesus. He simply snipped out all references to miracles, revelation or the supernatural. Only moral teaching remained. In the last decade of his life, Jefferson decided that among the denominations complete victory would come to the most rationalist of 040them all, the Unitarians. Meanwhile, the biblical literalists were sweeping the old coasts and the new frontiers with revivalist techniques that gave them almost complete victory.⁵

The Enlightened of Europe and the Reasonable Founders in America belonged to the generation in which, as philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, “wise men hoped.” Whitehead added, “As yet, no circumstance had arisen to throw doubt upon the grounds of such hope.”⁶ A century after came a second set of non-literalists, this time within the Protestant churches. These non-literalists placed themselves over against the radically anti-religious scholars—most notably in Germany—people such as David Friedrich Strauss and his followers, who reduced the Bible to myth and saw it as destructive. By contrast, the positive, non-literalist biblical critics feared that unbelief would spread in the face of the rise of science and progress. They argued that a non-literalist and thus “scientific” approach to the Bible would win the hearts and minds and day. No thinking person could accept the Bible literally, they argued, and thinking persons were going to dominate. They appealed to the learned, beginning in the universities, by promoting non-literalist, and more “respectable,” approaches to the Bible. They introduced modern biblical criticism into the community of faith. They themselves were people of faith who loved the church and the God of the Bible. They were also wise men who hoped

Close to my home, one of the wise ones was William Rainey Harper, who founded the University of Chicago in 1892. “The cry of our times is for the application of scientific methods to the study of the Bible,” he said. Harper feared that if the old literalism endured, “The time will come when intelligent men of all classes will say, ‘If this is your Bible we will have none of it.’” At Harvard, Yale and other divinity schools and seminaries, as well as in the fashionable pulpits, dedicated and sincere people attached their hopes to belief-ful approaches to the Bible—but were belief-less in respect to literal understandings.⁷

The modernists and their learned constituency prevailed in liberal churches, in most higher education and in cultural fashions. But they did not win. I like to quote President Grover Cleveland, a Harper contemporary who was typical of the American majority: “The Bible is good enough for me, just the old book under which I was brought up. I do not want notes or criticisms or explanations about authorship or origin or even cross-references. I do not need them or understand them, and they confuse me.”⁸

Cleveland’s kind of aw-shucks, anti-scholarly literalism has ever since been a part of folk religion in Protestant America. One can always get votes for “the old-time religion” and “the old family Bible,” taken literally.

If Cleveland’s type shuffled their feet and shrugged their shoulders, a generation later a new kind of Protestant layman made literalism not only the issue in denominational fissuring but also the issue in the cultural and political divide of the day. The best-known layperson in the raise of this fundamentalism as a militant faction against modernism was the repeated Democratic presidential candidate and orator William Jennings Bryan. In typically colorful speech in 1923 Bryan sneered at the alternatives to literalism: “Give the modernist three words, ‘allegorical,’ ‘poetical,’ and ‘symbolically,’ and he can suck the meaning out of every vital doctrine of the Christian Church and every passage in the Bible to which he objects.”⁹ His belief in literalism led Bryan to oppose the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Nothing but doubt and immorality would follow, he believed, if America allowed the modernist interpretations of the Bible to make their way.

The Clevelands and the Bryans tapped into reservoirs of frustration, fear and faith that the “Big E” Enlightened and the “Big M” Modernists, for all their wisdom and calculation, had underestimated or ignored. If the Harpers thought that their scientific view of the Bible would pick up support for their more sophisticated religious views from the humanist and secular intellectual community, they were to be disappointed. Ironically, secular intellectuals often equated biblical literalism—to which they themselves could by no means hold—with real religion. Liberalism, biblical criticism and modernism were suspect attempts to gerrymander safe territories for faith.

Pundit and philosopher Walter Lippmann in 1928 presented an exercise in empathy for the threatened literalist. Lippman looked into the minds of those for whom an infallible, inerrant Bible—which they could interpret infallibly and inerrantly because literalism made it an open book—had to be the only absolute authority. For them, Lippmann went on, “The issue is whether there exists a Book which, because it is divinely inspired, can be regarded by men as the ‘infallible rule 042of faith and practice.’” Lippmann’s fictive modernist would say: “We can at least discuss it like gentlemen, without heat, without rancor.” But the Fundamentalist’s response was different “Has it ever occurred to you that this advice is easier for you to follow than for me?” Why? “Because for me an eternal plan of salvation is at stake. For you there is nothing at stake but a few tentative opinions none of which means anything to your happiness.” The literalist ends the conversation: “Your request that I should be tolerant and amiable is, therefore, a suggestion that I submit the foundation of my life to the destructive effects of your skepticism, your indifference, and your good nature. You ask me to smile and commit suicide.”¹⁰

No one will understand the hold of biblical literalism who cannot work her way into the mind of the fearful. What Lippmann called “the acids of modernity” do threaten people. Unsheltered, these people feel that they will be deprived of the authority they need in the face of relativism, the experience they crave in the face of scientism, the identity they would lose if they blended into the humanist, secular or, as they see it, moderate and liberal religious landscape. The reductionist psychologists have it easy typing the literalists. Reductionist psychologists tend to say that religion is “nothing but” this or that—nothing but class interest, or nothing but the search for the lost father or nothing but the defense of status. Literalism, then, is nothing but the expression of minds that cannot be open, cannot stand ambiguity or paradox or contradiction—even in the face of books like Job, Habakkuk, the Psalms, Paul’s letters (which often leave the reader with great questions of “Why?”) and in the face of biblical texts that, not easy matches for each other, often appear patently ambiguous if not downright contradictory.

This psychological reductionism does not do justice to all the dimensions of literalism. In England and America, at least, for over a century there have been intellectual defenses of biblical literalism. While Harper and his kind were making Chicago, Yale and Harvard advance stations for the “scientific study of the Bible,” theologians at Princeton were turning that school into one of the bastions of a literalist approach to inerrant Scripture.¹¹

Princeton professors A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield argued that the original autographs, now lost, of the Bible were verbally and completely inspired and inerrant. They depended upon a school of thought technically known as Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. It was a method of induction based on faith in “sense” and “common sense,” on the belief that reasonable people could intuit moral absolutes. By logical deduction they argued that God, being God and thus inerrant, spoke through a necessarily inerrant Bible, which they turned into a kind of fact-book. Such an inductive approach and a faith in facts meant that every word, every letter, represented absolute truth and therefore should be taken “literally,” according to their Common Sense definition of the literal. The kind of literalist fundamentalism that once prevailed and which seemed defeated in the 1920s made a comeback in the 1970s, especially in more moderate evangelicalism—roughly, the Billy Graham sorts. (It must be added that many evangelical intellectuals have chafed in the face of what they see to be the shaky philosophical undergirdings of literalism, thus exposing or creating a fissure in that camp, too!)

For the non-literalist critics of the Princeton-type of fundamentalism, the literalist edifice seemed built on a metaphysically condemned site. In the fashionable language of the late-20th century, literalists, it is argued, are anti-hermeneutical; that is, the literalists oppose the notion that the interpreter brings presuppositions to the study of the biblical texts; that what one finds in the Scriptures depends to some extent on what one brings to it; that the community to which the interpreter belongs colors the meanings the interpreter extracts from the biblical text.

The non-literalists have a second critique: What, if anything, they ask, does the literalist devotion to biblical inerrancy solve? If one must be anti-hermeneutical, believing that all sincere people of open mind who confront a biblical text will find the same patent meaning, then why do such vast differences exist within the literalist camp? The literalists, it is charged, use inerrancy less as a doctrine than as a weapon in intradenominational warfare. The literalists win the hearts of the laity and much pastoral leadership by in effect arguing: “Our opponents, the non-literalists, may be Christian; they may believe the Bible to be the word of God; they may share much of our confession; but since they are not literalists and do not insist on inerrancy, they may be only 99.9 percent (or 50 percent!) faithful and reassuring. Stay with us, the 100-percenters, and enjoy real authority and assurance, real doctrinal solidity and purity, and a real basis for morals and eternal life”¹²

But, while the literalists can unite against their opponents, they are far from unanimous on matters they 043themselves regard as important. Thus some believe that infant baptism imparts grace and others insist that only “believer’s baptism” is effective. Some believe that Christ is “really present” in the Lord’s Supper and others believe that the elements at the table “merely represent” Christ and that what matters is the faith one brings. Some see in the literal Bible only one polity, congregationalism; others insist that the Bible teaches presbyterian, synodical or even episcopal patterns of government. The literalist interpretations of eschatology, apocalypse, the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ are wildly diverse and competitive. The idea of literalism turns out to be more important than a consensus based on its yield.

Back to the “metaphysically condemned site” on which, according to the non-literalists, the literalists build their houses: Their critics say that, for all their literalism, they can quote no clear and unambiguous intra-biblical texts that teach what they mean by literalism. They are wrong, the critics say, in their notion that the Bible can be a virtual textbook on natural science, as some “scientific creationist” literalists contend; they are wrong in their contention that, at least in its original autographs, now lost to us, Scripture could have had no contradictions or errors or complications in matters of history, geography and grammar. Indeed, if common sense says that an unerring God was revealed in an inerrant Scripture in the original autographs, would not common sense say that God would have to assure unerring transmission?

Finally, many literalists make use of interpretations that are themselves grounded in allegory and symbol. Consider the supposed literalisms about the second coming, the millennium and the end of the world that characterize many American and British fundamentalist groups. One fundamentalist position of immense power and popularity, known as dispensationalism, was devised (or discovered, or reasserted, the dispensationalists would say) in the 19th century and transported from England to America by evangelists like Dwight L. Moody and derived from Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation and other prophetic and ambiguous biblical books. It renders literal what the biblical writers themselves described as dreams and visions.

James Barr’s summary judgment on dispensationalism: “The distinctions and separations of critical scholarship are models of clarity, simplicity and naturalness when compared with those involved in dispensational or other millenarian schemes … To say this [, however,] is not to sneer at a system like dispensationalism, [which] is a remarkable achievement of the mythopoeic fantasy. As a feat of the imagination it might well be compared with the apocalyptic poems of Blake.”¹³ And, he might have added, it is adhered to by millions. When President Reagan used to say to the New Christian Right that he was reading “your” theologians, he was reading popular works of dispensational premillennialists.¹⁴

I have been very American here, having given roughly “equal time” to the literalists and the non-literalists, trying to understand their strengths and criticisms. If the “wise men” who hoped for Enlightenment and Reason or the scientific study of Scripture to support faith looked foolish in the first part of this article, the literalists have not looked so good in the latter part. The “Big E” people looked to the future through Progress; the “Big L” people (for literalist) envisioned the future through millennial eyes.

What of the future—if we project historical trends? According to the polls, literal belief in an inerrant Scripture has a permanent if slightly declining share of the American market. But it has power beyond its numbers because its adherents feel they have so much at stake. While those who believe in the Bible as non-literalists, as somehow a revelation, a disclosure or word of God, are in disarray, the literalists are not only arrayed, but are motivated and organized. They appeal to one sort of modern mentality. Surprisingly, they find 050acceptance in the sciences, where the modernists thought them least likely to be at home. The literalists claim to deal with facts, with the empirically verifiable, if only the verifiable texts and prophecies of the Bible. They resist subjectivisms existentialisms, personalisms, relativisms and all the other “isms” that sometimes seem to dominate those parts of the university where humanities and social sciences prevail. Expect to find literalists in the laboratories or computer centers more than among anthropologists or literary critics.

Most people who live where communities of faith are growing—for example, in Africa and Latin America—are not measured or marked by the disciplines of the universities, even if they attend them. They want to make sense of personal and communal existence. They are drawn to what speaks the truth to them when they want to celebrate the birth of a child or the happiness of a marriage or when the candle burns low and life nears the end. They expect Scripture to address them if they are fighting an addiction or seeking inspiration for daily work. They want readings of the Bible to inform their prayer life and worship. In public life, they may want the morals and values of their political party or their nation to be somehow grounded in Scripture.

One set of such searchers will continue to find security only in literalism, which the other sees as arrogant and falsely reassuring and thus incongruent with the nature of faith. The other set will hear the voice of the Divine One disclosed in discourse based upon a non-literal reading of texts that offer them access to the sacred and that stimulate their spiritual quests or guide their journeys. Often the two groups will ignore each other or simply pass each other along the pilgrimage. When they do meet and contend, they live in such different worlds that one expects little empathy or understanding. So it has been for two centuries, and so it is likely to remain for some time to come. The Millennium of one camp’s dreams and the Progress of the other have not yet been manifest. The “Wise Ones” will continue to have to hope, at best chastened by the frustration their arguments meet, or motivated to take a second look at their own presuppositions. Meanwhile, expect much noise when they meet each other in open encounter, in classrooms, in town halls and school boards, on the floor of denominational conventions—and in the letters column of magazines like BR.

A fissure runs through communities that take the Bible seriously, especially within American Protestantism. “Literalism” marks the divide between the two camps, the two spiritual regions, the two political forces. Listen to the two factions fighting for the spoils within a single denomination—as in the recent case of the Southern Baptist Convention1 or the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod—and you will hear them fighting over biblical inerrancy and a literal approach to Scripture. As battle lines are drawn between the “evangelical” and the “mainline” churches, no concept is used more frequently as the divider than literalism, by whatever term it is […]