Am I A Literalist?

 

Am I A Literalist?

June 22, 2025

 

Those of you who have followed my writing about the Bible even a little bit know that I have criticized and deconstructed biblical literalism from many different angles. I consider it to be a deadly sin that will kill our great, ancient Christian faith if we can’t overcome it because it so out of touch with the cutting edge of our culture, with where that culture clearly is headed. I am not a literalist. I am not a biblical literalist, neither am I a literalist about any other Christian document or statement of faith. About that I have no doubt whatsoever.  So my answer to the question that is the title to this piece is: No, I am not a literalist.

Yet a friend and colleague of mine, with whom I do at least a little bit of Bible study nearly every week, has called me a literalist. Not to my face but apparently to others, perhaps including my wife. So I have to wonder: What is it about me that would cause him to call me that? What about my approach to the Christian faith could possibly seem literalistic? I’m so convinced that I am not a literalist that I’m not sure I can really answer that question, but I have given it a good deal of thought. So here are those thoughts, which may or may not actually answer the question of what about me could seem to be literalistic.

I’ll start by asking: What is a literalist? In other words, what, for our purposes, is biblical literalism? It is the belief that we must read everything in the Bible as literally correct. To put the matter in other but equally true terms, it is the belief that we must take everything in the Bible as factually correct. This belief is false in large part because it almost always rests upon the assumption that God wrote or at least directly inspired everything that is in the Bible. I won’t go into all the reasons why that assumption isn’t just wrong but is actually absurd. If you want to know, ready my book Liberating the Bible, especially the first volume of that book’s Revised Edition, which has the subtitle, Approaching the Bible. I’ll just say here that the Bible is so full of statements that are just factually false, and it is so full of obvious factual contradictions, that God can’t possibly have written it or even much inspired it.

Next I’ll present what I have been taught and believe is a foundational principle of biblical exegesis. The purpose of biblical exegesis is to understand the biblical passage one is considering. Exegesis means to bring out of. It doesn’t mean to read into.[1] And it perhaps is, and it certainly should be, obvious that to do exegesis of a biblical text you have to start with the text itself. Even when we read a biblical text in translation, which nearly all of us do nearly all of the time, we have to start with what the text actually says. With what the words of the text are. We cannot start with what we wish the words were. We cannot start with what we want to words to be. We cannot start with a meaning that we read into the words. We have to start with what the words of the text actually are.

And we have to start with what the words of the text actually mean. Now, knowing what the words of a biblical text actually mean can often be more difficult than we might assume it would be. After all, the biblical text were (almost all) written in either Hebrew or koine Greek, ancient languages that most of us, you humble author included, don’t know. We have to rely on our translations and on whatever we’ve learned about specific translation issues. Once we’ve taken any translation issues we know about into consideration, we can proceed with our exegesis relying on our translations.

We read what the words of our text actually are. Unless we’re doing it because we know of a specific translation issue, we read the translated words that we have just as we have them. We don’t replace them with words we prefer. We don’t replace them with words we wish were there, that we want to be there. What are the words of our text? What do they say? We have to know that before we move on.

Then, when we do move on, we must recognize that our text, whatever biblical text it may be, was written nineteen hundred or more, sometimes a lot more, years ago in and for cultures very different from ours. We must make an effort to understand what the words meant in their original context. We’re starting with the words, and those words weren’t written in a vacuum. They were written in and for the people of a particular time and place, the people of a particular culture. We need to understand what the words of our text meant in their original context before we ca move on.

Understanding our text in its original context isn’t always easy. Scholars spend lifetimes studying just small aspects of the ancient cultures that are the original contexts of every biblical passage. We non-scholars, ordained or not, don’t do that. We can’t. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the training. We have to rely on what we’ve been taught and what we’ve read about those cultures as we seek to understand our text in its historical context.

Sometimes a word, phrase, or passage will have meant something quite different in its original context than it means to us. A good example is the word “adultery” in the Ten Commandments. We all know that those Commandments prohibit adultery. See Exodus 10:14. What far too many of us don’t know is that “adultery” meant something quite different in ancient Israel than it means to us. Most of us take it to mean a married person having sex with someone other than their spouse. Some of us understand the word more strictly as meaning any sexual act outside of marriage.

That, however, is not what the word meant in ancient Israel. It is not what it meant, originally at least, in the Ten Commandments. In ancient Israel, only women were prohibited from having sex outside of their marriage, which was, of course if unfortunately, always to a man. Men were not prohibited from having sex either when they were not married or outside of their marriage.

The reason for this dichotomy had nothing to do with sexual morality as we understand it. It had to do with property rights. Property belonged to men not to women, perhaps with rare exceptions. Ancient Israeli culture put great emphasis on a man’s property passing to his biological offspring after his death. If a man’s wife had had sexual relations both with her husband and with someone other than her husband and become pregnant, the man would have no way to know if a child to whom his wife gave birth was his biological child or not. Therefore, married women were prohibited from having sex with anyone other than their husbands. That’s what adultery was, a married woman having sex with someone other than her husband. It is not what our culture means by the same word, by adultery. Yet, it seems, nearly no one in our culture is aware of the truth that that word originally meant something different in the Ten Commandments than it does in our culture today.

Which raises an important question about exegesis applied to this prohibition of adultery. Is it appropriate for us to apply our definition of adultery to that prohibition when we understand the word differently than the word’s author and its original audience did? I have long insisted that words can have meaning beyond what the author originally intended the words to mean. I have long understood that words can have an “excess of meaning,” that is, they can mean more than its author took them to mean. I have long insisted that we must allow the meanings of ancient texts to evolve as culture and language evolves. That’s post-modern hermeneutics in a nutshell. That’s what I was taught in seminary.

Yet as I write this post I’m struggling with that concept. I’m thinking: Really? It is supposed to be legitimate for me to read something written something like two thousand five hundred years ago as meaning something different today than it did way back then? I guess the answer to that question has to be yes, but for me it has to be a qualified yes. Perhaps it can be yes, but we can make words mean something different from their original meaning only if we truly understand that original meaning.

In the case of the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery, we must always remember that that prohibition had to do with property rights not sexual morality as we understand it. So in determining what, if anything, that ancient commandment means for us, we must begin by asking not about sexual morality but about property rights. We have to ask whether property rights have anything to do with sexual acts in our culture the way they did in the ancient culture of the Ten Commandments. The answer to that question, I think, is no, they do not. Even if one is concerned that a man’s property pass only to his biological offspring the way the ancient Hebrews were, we have DNA tests that can determine definitively who is a man’s biological offspring and who isn’t. Ancient Israel, of course, had no such thing. So the first thing we have to conclude about the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery is that its original reason for being in those commandments no longer applies to us.

So, does that make the commandment’s prohibition of adultery irrelevant to us? Well, not necessarily. The Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery, obviously, applies to sexual acts. And, of course, we all know that the morality vel non of sexual acts is a vital issue in the lives of us humans. Of course, we know that truth quite apart from the Bible. So I think the use we make of the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery is to understand what the prohibition meant in its original context and then to ask: What does a prohibition of adultery mean in our context? Adultery is about marital relations. In the context that produced the Ten Commandments, marital relations weren’t really about love. They were mostly about procreation and property rights. In our context, marital relations are different. They are, or at least we believe that they should be, about love.

And that change of context makes a huge difference in what the Bible’s prohibition of adultery means to us. In our context, adultery is a violation of the bonds of love. To us, adultery means, or at least I am convinced that it must mean, sexual relations that violate that bond. That bond may be expressed in a marriage or not, but the value of the bond of love is that it directs the people who have entered into it to be faithful to the person with whom they have done so and to conform their behavior to the terms of the commitment they have made to the other person. It follows that where there is no bond of love between the people engaged in a sexual act, and when neither of them has formed a bond of love with another person, the sexual acts between them are not adultery. Those acts may or may not be legal. They may or may not be moral; but, in any event, they are not adultery.

So, am I a literalist? No, I am not. I do insist that in seeking meaning for our lives in any biblical passage, we must first understand what the passage meant in its original context. We must understand what the words of the text really are not what we perhaps might wish them to be. Then we must remember that no biblical text arose in a context anything like ours except that the people of biblical times were every bit as human as we are. But while any text may have a surplus of meaning, it also has an original meaning. That meaning may be one the author intended, or it may be one we must assume the text’s original audience would have found in it whether that was the author’s intended meaning or not.

We cannot legitimately go reading any meaning we want into a text. Every text has its own integrity, and any meaning-making we do with the text must understand and respect that integrity. We may draw a meaning from the text that its author never intended, but we can do that legitimately only if we can truly assert that the text means something in our context different from what it meant in its original context. That’s what I have done with the example of the Bible’s prohibition on adultery in this piece.

Perhaps it will help if I give another example of what I mean. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples to love one another. John 13:34. In its original context, the words the gospel attributes to Jesus applied only to Jesus’ inner circle of disciples, the people he was talking to when he spoke the commandment. The context of this verse is that it was told from and to a very small, insecure, an perhaps persecuted group of Christians. Clearly, those Christians had to love one another if their community and their faith were to survive at all.

Christians today are not a very small, insecure, and perhaps persecuted group. Christianity is, rather, the largest faith tradition in the world, and it has been that for a very long time. It doesn’t exist only in small communities in the Roman Empire the way it did when John was written. It exists everywhere in the world. It doesn’t exist almost exclusively in one culture the way it did in John’s time. It exists in every culture there is in the world. Jesus’ directive to his disciples to love one another is still important inside Christian communities, but the changed context in which we read it today gives the directive a much broader meaning. The “one another” the author of John had in mind was the Johanine Christian community. To us, “one another” must mean everyone. Everyone in the world. I have heard this verse quoted for that meaning many times, though I have never seen an exegesis other than my own that explains how it came to have this meaning that is so much broader than its author ever intended. To read this verse as saying “love everyone” is legitimate even though that’s not what it originally meant. It has a surplus of meaning. It can mean more than its author intended, and to us indeed it does.

So, I’ll ask once again: Am I a literalist? No, I am not. I am, however, professionally trained in both history and ministry. When I was writing things that were history only I had no interest in considering whether an historical text I was working with could have a meaning for me and my world other than the one it had for its author, though I suppose some of them could have that surplus of meaning. Doing that is not the historian’s job. It is, or at least in many circumstances it can be, the Christian minister’s job. Yet the minister’s job when doing exegesis must begin where the historian’s job both begins and ends. It must begin with the text itself. It must always respect the integrity of the text. No one doing exegesis of a biblical text can ever legitimately make it mean something totally unrelated to the text itself. If you’re going to do that, just write your own text. Don’t do it an call it legitimate biblical exegesis. It isn’t.

So no, I am not a literalist. I do insist on staying closer to any biblical text one is considering than many of my clergy colleagues do. I object to reading any meaning into a text that is simply unrelated to the words of the text. I don’t go in for speculation about things we might want to know about a story that the story doesn’t tell us. I consider such speculation to be a waste of time. No. I am not a literalist. I just respect biblical texts more than many of my liberal/progressive Christian colleagues do, something for which I have no intention of apologizing.

 

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[1] Reading something into a biblical passage that isn’t actually there is called “isogesis,” something any decent biblical scholar will always seek to avoid.