While proofing an as yet unpublished revised version
of my book Liberating Christianity I read the paragraphs I’ve put into
this post below. I think they are some of the best writing anyone has ever done
on the inadequacy of religious literalism. I hope that you find them
enlightening and inspiring.
From an unpublished revised edition of Thomas
C. Sorenson, Liberating Christianity: Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the
New Millennium. © Thomas C. Sorenson 2021
One way to understand the inadequacy of
religious literalism is to see that it makes God too small. To take the
doctrines of Christianity (or of any other faith for that matter) literally is
to believe that the finite—the doctrines of a faith—has captured the
infinite—God. It is to believe that the finite has fully understood and defined
the infinite. When literalistic faith says “God is” this, that, or some other
thing it asserts that its words truly understand and express factual truth
about the infinite. To say that God “is” something or other, when “is” is
understood literally, is to reduce the infinite about which faith speaks to the
finite, to the words the faith uses when speaking about the infinite. It is to
reduce the divine—God—to the secular, to our finite human words.
We saw earlier in this study when we
considered the nature of symbol and myth as the language of faith that neither
any symbol nor any myth can fully encompass the spiritual. All they can do is
point beyond themselves toward the transcendent reality with which their
function is to connect us. To take symbol and myth literally is to ignore both
their inherent nature and their legitimate function. It is to turn them into
something they are not and cannot be. It is to fail to understand the no that
necessarily accompanies every symbolic or mythic yes. To use symbol and myth
without understanding what they truly are and are not is to confine the
spiritual, the divine, within the symbol or myth. It is to claim to have
confined the infinite in the finite, something that is ontologically
impossible. It is to have committed an error that goes to the inherent nature
of faith. It reduces faith to knowledge. It reduces mystery to certainty. It
reduces the mythic to the factual.
Religious literalism leaves us with the outer
form of faith without its heart. It gives us the external while killing the
internal. Literalism gives us a shallow faith with no spiritual essence. While
as we noted above literalistic Biblicism can function to connect people with
the spiritual (or at least something that is partially the spiritual) for a
time, it will however inevitably, unavoidably fail in that sacred work. It will
fail because it fails to understand the nature both of its own finite form and
the sacred, infinite nature of the spiritual.
The most profound, the truest
varieties of religious experience do not make that error. They live not with
dead form but with living mystery. They live not with smug certainty but in awe
before the grandeur and enormity of God, knowing all the while that that
grandeur and enormity eternally transcend all human knowing. They know that we
can and are called to live with wonder and humility before and with that which
we can never fully understand but toward which we are inexorably drawn and with
which our souls long to connect. Mere facts do not draw us. Longing to connect
with dead facts is not part of being human. Transcendent mystery draws us.
Longing to connect with spiritual reality that is so much more than fact inheres
in our very nature as created beings. It is not possible for us finite
creatures ultimately to know the fullness of God. It is possible for us to
allow symbol and myth to draw us into the wonder, majesty, and mystery of God.
To live in wonder and awe before the ultimately unknowable God is to become
more fully who God created us to be, mortal creatures whose fullness lies in
connection with the immortal. We are finite beings created to live intimately
with ultimate being. Mere fact will never make us who we really are.
Understanding God as so much more than that can. The mythic and symbolic
understanding of the faith therefore has not only the potential to save the
faith for non-Christians. It has the potential to save the faith even for a
great many Christians. It can allow those Christians to give up untenable literalist
positions without giving up their faith.
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