Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.  He came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.’  Jesus answered him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.’ 

Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old?  Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’

Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.  What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Do not be astonished that I said to you, You must be born again.  The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’  Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’  Jesus answered him, ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?’”  (John 3:1-10)
 

In this famous passage of Scripture, Jesus is imparting a great truth to Nicodemus.  Jesus is saying that physical birth is only part of the story.  In order to see and understand the things of God, you must have a spiritual birth as well.  It’s an important truth and there are probably a number of ways that Jesus could have expressed it.  What he chose, however, was a metaphor.  He decided that the best way to understand the spiritual awakening he was describing was in terms of a second birth—born again, or as many translations put it, “born from above.”  A spiritual birth as opposed to the physical birth from the waters of the womb.
 

But Nicodemus is a Pharisee, an important player in the legal system of Jesus’ day.  Pharisees were charged with interpreting and enforcing the letter of the law, a practice that can easily lead a person to forget that when most people speak, they don’t intend for all of their words to be taken literally.  So when Jesus the storyteller, meets Nicodemus the literalist, they have difficulty communicating. 

Nicodemus takes Jesus’ metaphor of a second birth literally and as a result is baffled by a profound, yet simple truth.  Jesus suddenly recognizes that the top of the religious ladder in Israel has lost the ability to see truth in more than legalistic terms, and his final words to Nicodemus are in stunned disbelief:  “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?”
 

And this isn’t the only time Jesus runs into the problem of literalism.  In the next chapter of John when Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, he talks about giving her living water so that she will never be thirsty again.  She thinks he’s talking about some magic water that will replenish itself so she never has to do the hard work of drawing water again.
 

In Matthew 16 Jesus is warning his disciples about the “yeast” of the Scribes and Pharisees and they think he’s upset with them for forgetting to bring bread.  Again, Jesus is amazed at their lack of imagination.  “Why can’t you understand that I’m not talking about bread?” he asks them.  The question hangs in the air, unanswered.
 

No matter where Jesus turns, his efforts to communicate are hampered by those who want to interpret his words literally, and by doing so miss the entire point.  I would argue that it is no different with those who interpret the Bible literally today.  By reading the Bible as a legal document where every sentence is meant to be taken at face value, we miss the entire point.  Like Nicodemus we miss simple yet important truths because we’re caught up in trying to prove that the earth is only 6,000 years old, that Jonah really could have been swallowed by some kind of big fish and lived inside it for three days, or that God actually decided to allow Satan to torment poor old Job to win a bet.  The world looks at us and says, “Are you leaders of your religion and yet you don’t understand metaphor?”
 

Confession time.  In my late teens and early twenties, I, too, took the Bible literally.  On the door of my college dorm room I had a bumper sticker that said, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”  Well, over time it settled me into a faith that was mean and judgmental and a God that I no longer recognized.  When I let go of the literalism, the loving God I knew so intimately as a child was able to shine through again and as THAT God shone through me, people were attracted to rather than repulsed by the Gospel.
 

When I say now that I don’t take the Bible literally, I get pounced on by people claiming I don’t think the Bible is “true.”  My response is that there is more than one kind of truth.  Facts are only one small subset of the vastness that we call “truth.”  Jesus’ parables are true, even though they never happened.  Aesop’s fables are absolutely true in their portrayal of human nature and many of the myths of ancient pagans give us truth about the world and the human condition to ponder.   Poetry is often true in ways that we can’t even describe because it speaks to us at such a deep level.
 

Truth not only comes in parable, fable, poem, and myth.  Truth can be embodied.  Jesus describes himself as the truth in the Gospel of John.  He doesn’t describe his words as truth.  He himself is the truth.  Truth is a who, not a what.  I think that’s why Jesus is silent when Pilate asks him, “What is truth?”  It’s the wrong question.  Pilate’s question implies that truth is some fact to be known with the mind and described in technical language.  Jesus can only answer by being the truth and hoping Pilate can see for himself.
 

I believe the Bible is true in that deeper sense.  I don’t care if Jonah was swallowed by a whale, a goldfish, or if somebody made the whole thing up.  The story tells me truth about how we respond to God’s call, about God’s love for all people, and about how God works with even the most pig-headed of us to spread the news that God is love.
 

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line our culture has become very dualistic in our thinking.  I don’t for a minute believe that the entire Bible is literally true, and I think those who wrote the biblical books would be as baffled as Jesus that religious leaders would not recognize a myth or a poem when they saw one.  Talking snakes…hello?  But that doesn’t mean I think the whole thing is metaphor and symbol either.  When the Gospels describe the crucifixion, I think they are talking real tortuous execution, not a nasty package of hate mail.  The Bible is not devoid of factual, literal truth—that’s just not the only form that biblical truth takes.  It is everything, all mixed together.
 

And that becomes the real dilemma for those who have become convinced that the Bible must be taken literally.  If truth comes in all forms in Scripture, it is left to us to discern which is which.  That’s a scary thing since there is a lot of talk in the Bible about nasty things happening to those who get it wrong.  I remember doing pastoral counseling with a man who was convinced that his life’s hardships were evidence of God’s disdain for him.  “Why would you think that?” I asked him.  And then he pointed to about six different passages of Scripture.  Well, God sends poisonous snakes to people here, strikes them dead here, sends plagues here…
 

In a sense, that dilemma is why I am a Christian.  I had the advantage of being born into a Christian home with loving parents.  I think I could pray before I could speak, and I was in Sunday School before I could walk.  I learned to read very young and read the Bible for myself before anybody had told me how to read it or what to think about it. 

And what did I learn there?  “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”  I learned that there was a thing called the Gospel—good news that Jesus preached himself, which meant that it wasn’t just about his death and resurrection.  Jesus had a Gospel to preach during his lifetime.  He preached that God had come to earth.  That the Kingdom was among us—here—if we would only open our blind eyes, get that spiritual rebirth so that we could see it.
 

I learned that whatever the Bible said literally on its pages could be confusing so God made it clear to us by making the word into flesh.  The words on the page might sound scary, but there was Gospel—Good News for those who were frightened.  The nature of God was revealed in Jesus.  God was not the capricious guy holding the lightning bolt with his finger hovering over the trapdoor to hell.  God was the one who changed our lives by loving us until we felt safe enough to peek out from under the covers and see.
 

And then I could see.  I could see that truth was bigger than words on a page and that it could be greatly distorted if someone tried to capture it and limit it to certain creeds or Bible passages.  “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free,” says John in chapter 8 verse 32.  But that truth is not a set of intellectual propositions or doctrines.  Truth is a who, not a what.  John 8:32 is inviting me to relationship with a living truth—a truth that can and does take many forms according to the needs and circumstances of the relationship.  And it has set me free.
 

One of the ironies I have discovered in my role as Executive Director of MassBible is that it is not just right wing Christianity that gets caught up in literalism.  The left wing also has trouble seeing truth in broader terms—at least when it comes to the Bible.  The difference is in the response.  The right takes it literally and tries to impose it as law both on themselves and on society.  When the left see passages that are offensive in their literal sense, they simply toss the Bible out and don’t refer to it at all or even fight against it.  Those who have put the Bible aside as harmful or as something that we have morally outgrown are also missing out on some of the wonderful truths that are revealed there. 

To live a full and rich spiritual life, we need to take the Bible seriously.  We need to read and study and interpret and inhabit the stories until our spiritual selves are awakened to the one to whom it points.  But if we read it literally, the way will be much more difficult, whether our literalism seeks to take the Bible out of people’s hands or seeks to chain them to it.  Maybe it is time not just for us, but for the Bible itself to be born again.