Letter #121: To the Letter

"Literal" may not mean what you think it means.

Something felt off to me while reading your essay. I couldn’t place it. Then I realized: I’m enjoying a sensible, humane, and forthright commentary on a delicate subject by a person of good will. I had almost forgotten what that feels like! Where’s the spite, the partisan acrimony, the ringing denunciations? What are we paying you for?!

Grudgingly, however, I must concede that your cautious but open approach to reading the Bible—while it lacks the excitement of parading our enemies through town in the stocks—clarifies things enormously. One reason why is because it’s consistent with Church tradition. This may seem counter-intuitive, given the ready association in the public mind between orthodoxy and flogging. 

That’s because it’s easy to get so caught up in the gridlock of the moment that you assume the battle lines have always been drawn just where they now lie: on one side, faithful obedience and rigid literalism. On the other, a post-modern free-for-all descending steadily into filth and corruption.

Given those choices, I have a lot of respect for the people who keep a tight grip on scriptural interpretation. They would rather each word mean only one thing than that every word mean anything.

But those weren’t always the only two options. In researching my book on science and faith, I came inevitably up against contemporary debates about the creation story in Genesis. The “young earth” theory—that seven days means seven days, so the universe was created in 168 hours—has an aura of simplicity and finality. It also requires more faith to believe. Any other reading, in today’s climate, feels suspiciously loose.

Could it be, though, that physical literalism feels so secure because it is actually so deeply modern? Plenty of august church fathers did believe in a seven-day creation—St. Thomas Aquinas, for one. But others—like St. Augustine—felt as I do that an account of things before human perception can hardly be written in terms of human time. Taken as a whole, Church tradition offers at least four faithful ways of reading scripture: as history, as allegory, as ethics, and as prophecy.

The “historical” way of reading is probably closest to what we mean today by the word “literal.” Asking what the author intended most directly to say was called reading ad litteram, “to the letter.” But even this “literal” way of reading doesn’t mean every word corresponds to a bare physical fact. When Isaiah foretold that seven women would plead with one man for protection on the day of Israel’s exile, would he have been proven wrong if there were six or eight?

I think not. He meant the number 7 to stand in for totality—he was expressing a complete devastation that no mere quantity could exhaust. Like the physical facts of our lives, the physical particulars of scripture are often imbued with more meaning, not less, than they would have if they were just rote data. History, life, and the Bible speak in more than material terms. Kind of like a Shakespeare play.

Love,
Spencer