What Does The Bible Literally Say?

The Bible does not literally say anything, because books do not literally talk, and the Bible as an anthology certainly doesn’t speak with a single voice even metaphorically.

Jim Manchester said the words in the meme on Facebook, when sharing my blog post about biblical literalism. I asked for permission to turn what he said into a meme, and he agreed.

Of related interest, I came across the blog of David Schell, who writes:

1. For Biblical literalists, their interpretation is the truth of God.
2. If their interpretation is the truth of God, then anything that disagrees with their interpretation is impossible.
3. And, according to Mr. Holmes, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

This forces Biblical literalists to accept all manner of harebrained ways of explaining away the contradictions in the Bible and between their interpretations of the Bible and science.

Click through to read the rest of the post, which emphasizes the need to question one of several presuppositions that this logic is based on. He has another great post about the danger of confusing one’s ideas about God with God. Here is a snippet:

Some Christians have a painfully difficult time distinguishing God from their ideas about God. Many think the two are one and the same – that God is identical with what they think God is like. This leads to those same Christians assuming that an attack on what they think about God is identical with an attack on God.

On the contrary, many such “attacks” are not attacks on God at all. They are attacks on dangerous false ideas about God, and as such are defenses of God’s character, not attacks on it.

Let those with ears, hear.

Of related interest, see also my older blog post, “Fundamentalists aren’t ‘Biblical’.”