It's In the Code Ep. 80: "I'm a Biblical Literalist"
“I believe the Bible is literally true.” Such is the claim of many self-professed biblical “literalists.” Academics and journalists who study American religion also often describe conservative Christians, in particular, as “literalists.” But in this episode, the first of several related to the understanding of the Bible within popular American Christianity, Dan argues that no one is actually a literalist. In fact, he argues that the idea of biblical literalism is incoherent. Why? Listen in and find out!
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Axis Mundi Transcription by CastingWords My name is Dan Miller.
I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
I am your host.
Joining you for the first time in 2024 and in the midst of my, I'm not going to call it a resolution.
I don't like New Year's resolutions for a number of reasons, but my commitment, my plan, I'm doing anything I can to avoid the word resolution.
To catch up on listener emails is underway.
So if you have emailed, hopefully you'll hear from me soon.
I'm getting through those before classes start up again.
But as always, I want to thank everybody who listens, those of you who give such great insight, questions, you know, pointers to new topics.
Please keep those coming.
You can reach me at danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
And also, I'm working on developing my own substack that'll be coming out soon.
It'll be tied in with Straight White American Jesus, also focused on this series.
So, you know, keep your ears out, as it were, for that.
More information coming up later this month.
So, I want to get started today.
I want to revisit a topic, and really I'm going to devote a few episodes to this.
I've been working on this for a while, thinking about it for some time, but I've done a number of episodes.
Those of you who have listened for a long time know this.
Others, I invite you to go back, take a look.
Episodes related to the concept of the Bible as it operates within popular American Christianity or conservative Christian high-control religious contexts.
I think there's a lot of overlap between those two things.
But we've done episodes on things like the concept of the Bible church or what somebody means when they're saying they're just being biblical or have used the language of being biblicist.
That's the kind of language that scholars like me might use to describe those things.
And I've had a number of follow-up questions that people have had about this.
And one issue that I've raised in episodes, I think I've raised it here in this series, I've raised it in episodes that I've done with Brad, is in opposition to the language of literalist traditions.
In other words, you will get people who will describe conservative Christians as biblical literalists, Or sometimes religious adherents themselves will describe themselves as a scriptural literalist.
And I have said that I disagree with this term.
It's a term that applies basically to any sort of conservative scripturalist tradition.
That could be Muslim, that could be Christian, that could be Jewish, that could even be Buddhist or Hindu in some contexts.
It's a term that's applied to them, but I've said multiple times I don't like the term.
And I have said no one is a literalist.
Even if somebody claims to be, even if, you know, your friend or your family member or a cousin or a brother or a father-in-law or whomever says, well, I'm a biblical literalist, I believe the Bible is literally true, they don't actually think that.
They're not actually that.
And I've gone as far as to say that I think that this is an incoherent notion.
And I've gotten a lot of questions about this over time, right?
I've gotten this question from listeners.
I've gotten the question and had discussions with this with my clients through the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, my coaching clients.
I've had this discussion with other academics, sometimes scholars of religion, oftentimes not, and folks asking, number one, why I say that no one is a literalist, especially if people claim that they are, and two, why I say this is an incoherent notion.
So, this got me thinking a while back.
I was formulating how to respond to this and giving some more shape to it.
And so I wanted to take a deeper dive into these issues.
But being me, and if you listen to me, you know that a deeper dive turns into a deeper dive.
And so really what I'm doing is putting together a series of episodes to take a longer, deeper look into this idea of biblicism, right?
So, I invite you, go back, listen to those episodes on Bible church, on what it means to be quote-unquote biblical, on the codes that are harbored in those, the language we might use of somebody being biblicist and so forth, because I want to dive more deeply into that for the next few episodes based on these questions that I get pretty consistently.
And so, I'm going to do that for the next several episodes, as I say.
Now, So, for today, what I want to look at is this claim that I have that no one's a literalist, right?
That's the name of the episode for today.
No one is a literalist.
What do we mean by that?
So, let's start with the most basic, general reason why I say no one is actually a scriptural literalist, right?
And when people say this, it's a term that's used very popularly, it just means that somebody, as they will say, they believe the Bible is literally true, or they believe the Quran is literally true, or the Torah, or whatever, okay?
And here's why.
This is the most basic reason why, just sort of analytically, I guess you could say descriptively, I think it's not a good term to use.
Even the most adherent, excuse me, the most ardent adherence to a scriptural religious orientation, and what I mean by that is A religious identity that somebody feels is tied to a text.
A scripturalist, if you like, is somebody who understands a religious identity and a religious practice and what it means to be religious as defined in reference to a religious scripture of some sort, right?
And if that sounds obvious, just know that not all religions work that way.
Not all religious people work that way.
But certainly within the Abrahamic traditions, this is a pattern.
Those are the dominant traditions in the United States.
So for many Americans, I think that's a dominant pattern of religion.
The first, most basic reason I don't like this term is because even the most ardent adherents to a scripturalist religious orientation recognize that their scriptures shouldn't always be interpreted literally.
And folks, I've had this conversation, real conversations, with people who proudly proclaim that they are biblical literalists.
Why do I say that they're not?
Because on the most basic level, they recognize, for example, that there are metaphors Or similes in scriptures, that there are figures of speech, that there are parts of religious texts that are supposed to be interpreted non-literally.
So, for example, when the Bible says God is a rock and a fortress, no religious adherent that I'm aware of actually believes that God is literally a rock or a fortress.
It's a metaphor.
But when a text says something like, again, God is my salvation, I've had people say, that's literally true.
No, actually, you don't literally think that God is your salvation.
You think God is your source of salvation, or that God gives salvation, or that God is the agent that brings about salvation, or something like this, right?
You don't literally believe that God is salvation.
If God was salvation, I guess the existence of God would mean that we're all saved, and that's usually not true.
Certainly within a Christian or Muslim context, that's usually not what people mean, right?
They also recognize adherence of scripturalist traditions, that there are everyday ways of speaking that shouldn't be taken literally, right?
They're going to recognize, for example, that even if somebody talks about the sun rising or setting, that that shouldn't be taken literally.
And they recognize that about the ancient world just as we do now.
All of us talk about the sun coming up in the morning or something.
We all know, I hope, that the sun doesn't literally rise, it doesn't literally set, that the earth is spinning, and that's what gives the impression that the sun is moving through the sky and so forth.
We know that, right?
We know it's not literal.
We talk that way, and within scriptures you can find examples of people talking that way as well.
And again, I referenced this a minute ago, figures of speech, right?
Idiomatic expressions that we know shouldn't be interpreted literally, right?
Same way that when people say this now, we know when somebody says, For example, they're upset about something and they say, boy, if I have to hear that one more time, I'm just going to scream.
They're not, at least usually not.
Or, boy, I'm going to kill him when I find him and I get to talk to him about what he did last week, right, where we hope that person is not literally going to kill somebody, right?
These are idiomatic expressions, hyperbole and so forth.
You find the same kind of thing in religious texts.
So, the first reason, the most basic reason, the most obvious reason why I don't like people describing texts as literal, or scripturalist folks as literalists, is that even they recognize that there are parts of the text that shouldn't be taken literally.
And again, I've had this conversation with self-proclaimed literalists.
I have said to them, you really think the Bible is literally true?
And they're like, yes, I do.
And I rattle off a bunch of these examples, and they're like, well, okay, yeah, I don't believe that.
That's a really basic point, right?
And somebody's going to respond, just like people do in those real conversations I've had, well, obviously that's not what we meant when we described, you know, them as literalists, or that's not what I meant when I said I'm a literalist, right?
If you're talking to the Christian, what they probably mean is that God literally created the first two humans and evolution's not true, or God literally created the cosmos in six days or whatever, okay?
So yeah, there are things in the Bible they think are accurate historical descriptions, that's what they mean, but they're not literalists, okay?
But let's go deeper, right?
That's a really basic point.
If all that I meant when I say that nobody's a literalist was that there are metaphors in religious texts, That wouldn't be a really telling point.
My critique goes deeper than that to what I think are really, really significant issues that confront textualist religious traditions, right?
So every textualist religious tradition — again, I mean a religious tradition For whom practicing that tradition is tied in with a text.
There is a sacred text or texts, and those texts give the dictates of how the religion should be practiced, how people should understand themselves and their relation to the religion, and so forth.
And again, not all religions are textualist.
Not everybody within given traditions practices this way, but that's what I'm talking about, okay?
But every textualist religious tradition I'm familiar with, and I realize my knowledge is not exhausted, but the ones I know of, has to confront the issue of how to reconcile parts of their religious texts or parts of their bodies of religious texts that don't seem to fit together, that on, you know, sort of a basic examination appear to be contradictory.
And I should say, this is an issue about texts generally.
There's nothing unique about religious texts in this.
But religious folks have to deal with this.
These traditions have to deal with this.
And so here are some examples.
Jewish interpreters have, for centuries, had to confront issues about how to reconcile passages in the Torah about Ritual and practice that presupposes the presence of the Temple in Jerusalem and a priesthood and all of that, with the fact that the Temple was destroyed a very long time ago, almost 2,000 years ago, and that they are still enjoined to live their lives as Jewish folk.
How do we do that?
How do we reconcile that textual description with our experience?
Or Buddhists over the history of Buddhism had to deal with the claims of authority of newer Buddhist texts.
You had different bodies of texts, some of which were newer, and they claimed an authority equivalent to or even higher than established older Buddhist texts.
And so Buddhist practitioners had to confront, how do we deal with this, right?
Muslim interpreters have had to reconcile Quranic passages that seem to contradict.
Famous ones are passages about warfare, right?
Some seem to advocate offensive armed conflict, while others seem to allow only defensive armed conflict.
How do they reconcile these?
Christians, to give one really obvious example, are confronted with two bodies of Scripture, right?
The New Testament, the Christian Scripture, and the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.
Those two bodies of literature don't always fit together well, right?
In every case, all of these saying, well, the answer is to take all the text literally, doesn't do anything, because on a literal reading or a straightforward reading or a side-by-side reading, There are portions of those texts or differences in those bodies of texts that can't be reconciled, that make them impossible to sort of live out, that make it so those texts can't serve the purpose to which this religious community thinks that they belong.
And these are big, meta-level issues.
They have nothing to do with smaller-scale issues related to other differences, and we could elaborate those.
But in each case, they show why literalism won't work, right?
If these texts were literal, it would just be unworkable.
Right?
And I think this is another interesting point, is the fact that literalism, or that there has to be a reconciliation of these issues, is precisely because the people that are concerned with these texts in these ways take them to be central to their religious articulation, their understanding of the tradition of which they are a part.
If they didn't care about those texts, if those texts didn't operate as authoritative for them, Wouldn't matter if there were parts that didn't fit together.
There are plenty of people in the world that will look at parts of the Bible and say, you know what?
I see a contradiction there.
Straightforward contradiction, and I don't need to reconcile it because the Bible doesn't mean anything to me.
Or maybe I'm a Christian, but I don't believe that the Bible is what a Biblicist thinks it is, and so I don't need to fix that.
In other words, The fact that people elevate these religious texts is what makes it so they can't be literalists.
They have to reconcile these differences and these difficulties.
And so, in all of these cases that I've given, the traditions have advanced complex ways of seeking to preserve the authorities of the Scriptures in question, By reconciling these difficulties.
And so, for example, within the Jewish tradition, how did that happen?
And I want to just be clear, these are quick and dirty descriptions, right?
We could elaborate on all these in much more detail, okay?
Within the Jewish tradition, a model of interpretation arises that says that, well, you know what?
There's all these rituals and legalistic elements, but they actually have a moral force.
What matters is the morality or the ethics behind it.
And so we can still practice these ethical demands outside the context or confines of ritualistic observance in a temple.
Within Buddhism, these bodies of literature, Theravada Buddhists did reject the newer texts on the grounds that they contradicted the teachings of the Buddha.
But Mahayana Buddhists argued that these newer texts actually differed from the earlier ones because they preserved deeper teachings of the Buddha or more authentic teachings of the Buddha, and therefore that they had actually greater authority or went to greater depths than those earlier texts.
This is how they related them.
Within Islam, a mainstream principle of Quranic interpretation is what's called the theory of abrogation, right?
Which means that earlier Quranic revelations, revelations that were chronologically earlier, can be abrogated or substituted or sort of adapted, and lots of different verbs can go in there, okay?
But they can be abrogated or substituted with newer or more chronologically recent ones.
In other words, newer revelations become the principle of interpretation for older revelations.
Within the Christian tradition, a long-standing principle of interpretation, evident in the New Testament itself, is that passages in the Hebrew Bible should be interpreted according to the teachings of the New Testament.
In other words, that the Hebrew Bible is fulfilled by the New Testament, that the New Testament becomes the principle of interpretation for the Hebrew Bible, and so forth.
Right?
In other words, All of these traditions have had ways of having to deal with these complexities and tensions, either within a particular text or a corpus of texts.
They can't do that as literalists.
This is a non-literalist approach.
You can't simply say the Bible is all literally true.
You have to say, well, the Hebrew Bible, if you're this kind of Christian, the Hebrew Bible is accurate when properly interpreted according to the principles of the New Testament.
Literalism is too blunt an instrument to allow that.
And so I want to, again, make this point that the more a tradition is scripturalist, in other words, the more authority it places in a fixed set of scriptures, the less literalist it will be.
And this is part of why I'm saying it's an incoherent notion.
When people say that a tradition is literalist, what they really mean is that they are scripturalist, that they build their identity and their understanding of their faith on a set of scriptures.
That's part of what that term means.
And I'm saying it's actually the opposite of that.
The more you're a scripturalist, the less you can be a literalist.
The more you're going to have to adopt a non-literal approach of interpretation to try to reconcile apparently contradictory passages or texts precisely so that they can retain their authority.
Okay?
So, what about religious adherents who call themselves a literalist?
This is what I would say, and again, if you go back and listen to those earlier episodes, this just reiterates that point, right?
When they claim to be literalists, they're not actually being literalists.
They can't be.
It's incoherent.
Literalism is a kind of code.
A code for what?
It's a code for authority.
What they mean is, this religious text is authoritative for me in issues of how I live, how I practice my faith, etc.
It is code for reliability.
I think that this text is reliable.
I think it is accurate.
I can have assurance that what it says is true.
So, when somebody says they're a literalist, and they are saying that they literally believe the world was created in six days, or that Adam and Eve were the first two humans, or whatever, that's what they're really communicating.
This is accurate, it is true, it is faithful, it is what God wants us to know, and so forth.
Right?
That's what they're claiming.
And it's understandable to me when religious adherents use this language of literalism as a shorthand for all of this.
The stuff I'm talking about there, most people don't know what Scripturalism is.
Most Christians who are Biblicists and read the Bible this way, they use these principles of interpretation.
For example, that the New Testament interprets the Hebrew Bible and so forth, It's never been formalized this way, so they call themselves a literalist.
It's a language that they're familiar with.
It's a language that they understand.
It's a language that encodes a lot of emotions and feelings and affirmations that they have.
I also understand why folks who study American religion, for example, say a peer research center or something, When they want to go out and do polling data about American Protestants, they might ask questions about, do you consider yourself a biblical literalist?
Okay?
It's a term people are familiar with.
Here's the thing, though.
I find when academics use this term, when journalists use this term, I think it's just inexcusable to the point of laziness.
Do some more work.
Find a better term.
It's not a good term for the kind of religious practice that's in view.
We shouldn't use it.
So that's what I mean as a general point when I say that nobody is a scriptural or biblical literalist.
It's why I claim that literalism is an incoherent notion.
One can't be a literalist In the intended sense.
And this is why, by the way, when somebody runs around and shows—one of the reasons why—when somebody shows contradictory passages to somebody who is a scripturalist of this kind, they'll be unpersuaded, because they're not actually literalists.
If we want to understand more about this, right?
If we want to decode and dig deeper, we're going to have to spend some other episodes doing that, right?
And that's what we'll be doing.
I'm going to dive into this in more detail in upcoming episodes.
I'll start with this.
When we apply all of this stuff that I've been talking about, notions of what literalism is a code for, how these texts actually operate, and so forth, when we apply this to the kinds of high-control religious contexts we're interested in, and for us, oftentimes, most of the time, that is conservative, evangelical, American religion, right?
When people say that they are literalists, what they really mean is that they are inerrantists.
What they mean is not that the Bible is quote-unquote literally true, but that the Bible is inerrant.
If you're listening to this, you're like, what does inerrant mean?
We're going to talk about that starting next episode.
If you come from these traditions and you're familiar with it, this is going to be my account of inerrancy.
I'm going to argue the same thing about literalism.
I'm going to say inerrancy is an incoherent doctrine as it's articulated within evangelicalism.
This is a significant part of why I left Evangelicalism, why I ceased to be a Biblicist.
Why is that?
What does that mean?
Why do I say it's incoherent despite the fact that literally thousands of pages are spilled, are written about this, ink spilled to define inerrancy?
We're going to talk about that in upcoming episodes.
All right.
Thank you for listening.
As I say, this is the first of several episodes.
We're over time.
I've got to go.
Can't do this without you.
Thank you all for your support, your kindness and grace, and the responses you give.
Always looking for new topics.
Please keep those coming.
My email is danielmillerswaj.com.
I will keep these coming.
Would love to hear from you.
In the meantime, please be well until we talk again.
