Is The Bible Literally True?
Greetings all, Henry here. I’m writing this on Sunday, so I guess I’m having particularly “religious thoughts”. My wife and I recently got back from visiting our sons for two weeks in Vancouver. While there, I heard a local preacher declaring emphatically that we all had to take the Bible literally. What a strange thing for someone who is supposed to be educated to say. Taking the Bible literally is like reading instructions for assembling a BBQ and trying to interpret them as a detective novel: it’s just not how the Bible is meant to be read.
Anyone who has read the Bible carefully knows it is full of contradictions. For example, people have tried many times to turn the story in Genesis into one coherent history, a blow-by-blow account of what really happened. Scholars have decided that the only thing that makes sense, is that there are two stories in Genesis that have been blended together. That is only one example, but there are many more.
St Paul says that: “When I was a child I thought as a child”. Part of the magic of childish expression is that they take stories literally. It is a lovely quality, except when they take it to extremes and take literally the story of Superman flying and fearlessly jump off the dining room table. But is this the right attitude for an adult?
The story of Palm Sunday says that they brought a donkey and its colt for Jesus to ride on. It goes on to say that they threw their clothes over them and he rode on them. One silly interpretation I hear of this is that the colt walked beneath its mother’s belly so that the phrase is literally true. What a lot of silliness.
The Bible is a heavily interpreted, edited and several times translated book and to stand around trying to prove that each word in it is the literal truth could not be a bigger waste of time. The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter where the colt walked: It matters what the story the colt is in is trying to say. That’s what has meaning for our every day lives. You can spend hours trying to decipher some mystery of the Bible and not be really any wiser when you’re done. Read the Bible honestly and deal with the conflicts honestly as scholars have tried to do. Such a reading does not destroy faith: it gives it a much more solid foundation. And that’s the truth.