Question to theists: When to take the bible literally?

[T.J.]

I thought this would make a good discussion in its own thread. Question to any bible-believing theist out there, but how do you know when to take the bible literally, or metaphorically? For example in the story of creation the bible says God created the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Some tend to believe this means a literal six days, others think it means there was a thousand or some odd years in a single 'day' because days to God are different from mortals. How did people come to this conclusion? How do you know when the bible is being literal and when it's being metaphorical?

Discuss.

[HappySkeptic]

The days are clearly a metaphorical period of time. The story itself is clearly a myth designed to explain how a perfect God could create imperfect people living in a harsh and brutal world.

However, for the Christian, something about the story must be true. Mankind must've had some sort of fall, or else the redemption by Jesus makes no sense.

The more one turns the OT stories into "metaphor", the more the NT story falls apart. I think the "bible believers" know this.

[no one]

Whenever cherry pie and just desserts align.

[T.J.]

Whenever cherry pie and just desserts align.

You're making me hungry, and then I ask myself, how can you make me hungry if you are no one?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

If it makes a theist happy, comfortable, and feeds into his prejudices, it’s literal. If it causes a theist unease, it’s a blessed and holy metaphor.

This is the chief reason that theists expend so much time and energy trying to prove that the Bible doesn’t mean what it says.

Boru

[Belacqua]

I’m not religious at all, but I’ve read a little bit about hermeneutics, so I can say a few things here.

How do you know when the bible is being literal and when it's being metaphorical?

The short answer to your question is: you have to use your brain. You have to think about what you’re reading. The meaning may or may not be obvious at once — it may be something that challenges you or provokes you or only reveals its relevance over time. 

These days we tend to think that the best writing is the easiest. A good text will be like good journalism or a science book: completely clear, no ambiguity, nothing that requires interpretation. Religious texts don’t work that way. Neither does Plato, or the Heart Sutra. Neither does Proust or Dostoevsky. Any book which addresses the human heart, with all its infinite complexity, contradictions, and depth, can’t work like a science book. 

The writers of the Bible didn’t intend every sentence to be read literally. That’s not how myths or parables work. The idea that it should all be read 100% literally is a new thing, based on ignorance. But even people who say they read it all literally don’t live up to that. When Jesus is talking about not throwing your seeds on stony ground, for example, everyone knows he isn’t giving agricultural advice. Both Jesus and Paul recount stories from the Old Testament and interpret them as allegory, not literally. 

It’s been traditional for a very long time to read each sentence of the Bible on four levels. In Christianity, these four levels are: literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical. The levels are a little different in Judaism and Kabbalah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_senses_of_Scripture

But even here we have to be careful, because when Augustine, for example, uses the word “literal,” he doesn’t mean what modern Christians do. For him, the literal meaning is the meaning intended by the original author. So, paradoxically, if the original author intended a sentence to be metaphorical, then the literal meaning is metaphorical. But Augustine thinks that the text is inspired, so it can have a great deal more meaning than the original author was aware of. 

So it’s important to see that the meaning of the Bible, for us, isn’t just what’s written on the page, but is the text plus all the centuries of interpretation and elaboration that has happened since. (Derrida and some of the other Frenchies secularized this idea, when they talked about interpreting literature. The much-misinterpreted “death of the author” has to do with this.)

I want to say thank you, by the way, for asking a genuine question. It’s really nice to see someone who sincerely wants to know, rather than just type snark.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I think that's exactly what I said.

Boru

[Jehanne]

Few conservative Christians take the Bible literally; instead, they have elevated themselves above their Scriptures, and it is now they, their private authority, that decides when the Bible is being literal and when it is being figurative.

In other words, even fundamentalist Christianity has become subjective, hence, the appeals on billboards all throughout my town that, "I have eyes at 8 weeks..."

[HappySkeptic]

The writers of the Bible didn’t intend every sentence to be read literally. That’s not how myths or parables work. The idea that it should all be read 100% literally is a new thing, based on ignorance. But even people who say they read it all literally don’t live up to that. When Jesus is talking about not throwing your seeds on stony ground, for example, everyone knows he isn’t giving agricultural advice. Both Jesus and Paul recount stories from the Old Testament and interpret them as allegory, not literally. 

I believe that the writers intended that their message be taken as true.  That message may have been history, a moral, a commandment, a prophesy, an insight into the nature of God, or a combination.

It doesn't matter if a story is history or myth - what matters is if the message is meant to be taken as true -- and yes it is.

A bible believer has to believe that the writers were "inspired" by God to give a true message.  If they are not conveying a true message, then the bible is nothing more than a book of philosophical musings and delusional writings.

I say this as a former Christian someone who read the whole bible and chose to believe it. 

The need to cherry-pick which messages are true and which aren't invalidate the bible as the Word of God.  There still might be a god, but these writers didn't know anything about It.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Terrible comparision maybe but I recently saw the movie about the CBGB club and the line where the owner listens to an underground punk band and says ..."yeah, there's something there". In other words he sensed some intangible quality in bands like the Talking Heads and and the Ramones. And the irony is that his club became an epicenter for new underground rock despite his original intention to platform country, bluegrass, and blues. That is how I as a mostly esoteric reader of Scripture feel about reading the bible...there's uncanny something there, behind the text or maybe woven into it. Hence my facination with Swedenborg, the Gnostics, and such...I am not reading for answers; but rather for the experience of particapring in the Divine. ...and no, God did not talk to a snake...that's just stupid.