On the Failings of Religious Literalism

 

On the Failings of Religious Literalism

 

My wife, the Rev. Jane Sorenson, has been proofing a revised edition I have written of my first book, Liberating Christianity. She read the last paragraph of Chapter 5 to me. It’s the last paragraph in this post. I’ve added two paragraphs that appear before it. These paragraphs are among the best things I’ve ever written, so I’m posting them here. I am not generally one to boast, but these paragraphs speak profound and important truth. They are well worth the short time it will take you to read them.

 

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 they function 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 mere fact 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.