this literally drives me crazy
Everyone has their little annoyances, and here’s one of mine: when people complain about conservative Christians’ “biblical literalism.” This is almost always a misnomer, the one exception coming when the discussion concerns the age of the earth. Young-earth creationists do indeed read the Genesis narrative in a literal, as opposed to a symbolic or allegorical, way (or so they think). But in other cases the term is a red herring; it doesn’t even apply to fundamentalist readings of many other parts of Scripture. Just consider the long history of fundamentalist readings of the books of Daniel and Revelation — a history brilliantly told in Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: those spectacularly speculative interpretations of Daniel’s dreams and St. John’s visions, with their repeated invocations of the Six Days’ War, the European Union, and the Soviet Union, are anything but literal-minded.
Likewise, many gays and lesbians decry the “literalism” of “Christianists” who cite Biblical sources to condemn homosexuality — but that’s nonsense. After all, it’s not like there’s a possible symbolic meaning for statements like “You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination” or “the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another [and] committed shameless acts with [other] men.” Conservative Christians do indeed take those statements literally, but then, so does everyone else, because there’s not another way to take them. The real question is wholly different: whether those passages are to be granted authority, whether people should defer to them and see them as worthy of obedience. That’s the real disagreement here: whether what the Bible says — always assuming that it has been rightly understood — on these matters is binding upon us. It has nothing at all to do with “literalism.”
(And of course, no word is more often abused than “literally.”)
Interestingly, “lie with a man as with a woman” is “literally” impossible.
— Noah Millman · Mar 31, 10:18 PM · #
First a post on politics and abortion. Now a post on Christian fundamentalism and homosexuality. Alan is clearly attempting to drive up TAS’s traffic through commenter page views.
— Peter Suderman · Mar 31, 10:27 PM · #
Interestingly, “lie with a man as with a woman” is “literally” impossible.
Not anymore!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/we-just-want-to-be-a-family-says-oregons-pregnant-man-802520.html
— JA · Mar 31, 10:39 PM · #
I knew Peter would scope me out. My next post will be about whether Britney Spears is still hot. (Hey, if it works for the Atlantic, why not TAS?) Suggestions for future comment whoring welcome.
— Alan Jacobs · Mar 31, 10:46 PM · #
The problem is that the term abomination applies also to wearing clothing to two different kinds of cloth and that the second quote really hinges on the meaning of the word nature. What most people complain about when they complain about someone reading the bible literally, and yes that is not possible unless your taking aquinas’s definition, is a kind of reading into the bible what you want to be there as if there is some plain faced meaning to a text written thousands of years ago in different language and in the a completely different context.
— Parmenides · Apr 1, 12:06 AM · #
It’s true, it’s hard to argue that either the Torah or the Christian Bible doesn’t explicitly condemn homosexuality. However, considering the Bible contains over 3,000 verses regarding the obligation all Christian men have to help the poor and needy, and perhaps a dozen on homosexuality, I think it’s clear which represents a higher priority.
— Freddie · Apr 1, 01:11 AM · #
They might not have actual <i>symbolic</i> meanings, but they have different literal interpretations. The “you” in the first may only apply to Levites, the “shameless acts” in the second are underdetermined.
That said, yeah, when people say literalism, they frequently mean inerrancy. Doesn’t strike me as the worst mistake in the world.
— Consumatopia · Apr 1, 01:38 AM · #
Parmenides: That is indeed an interesting problem, but not one that I’m dealing with in this post.
Freddie: I’m not even saying that the Bible explicitly condemns homosexuality, just that whether it does or not isn’t a question of literalism or non-literalism.
C-topia: It may not be the worst mistake in the world, but it’s in the top five. Seriously: I do think it’s important for people who disagree with one another to know what their disagreements actually are.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 1, 01:52 AM · #
The best etymology (inherently speculative, as these things often are) I’ve heard of the word “to’evah” (which is translated as “abomination”) derives the word from the concept of order, and results in a translation something like “disordered.” Mixing linen and wool in a garment, or barley and flax in a field, or yoking an ox and a horse to a single plow, are also violations of proper “order” and hence also “to’evah.”
All of which is by way of saying: Parmenides is right.
As for Alan’s original point: I don’t agree that the only choices are accepting the plain meaning of the text or rejecting its authority. There are a number of shades of gray.
True, traditionalist believers would probably interpret the words in the light of the inherited tradition of what they meant – which, in the Jewish tradition, would indicate that they mean pretty much what the naive reader would think. There’s not a whole lot of dissent to hang your hat on if you’re out to come up with an alternative reading.
But even those who choose to blaze a new interpretive trail (as those who have argued for a narrow reading that prohibits penetrative intercourse between men, but not other intimacy, do) are still accepting that the language has authority.
Indeed, even if you said something on the order of “I accept the concept that there is something like a proper order to things, objective and not just a matter of convention, and I get that concept from the Bible, but I don’t accept that prohibiting love between men brings their lives into line with that order” – someone who said something like that would certainly not be reading the Bible in a traditional manner, and I’d certainly argue that such an answer is an inadequate reading of the letter of the text, but the argument claims, at least, to be respecting the “essence” or “spirit” of the text. Is that enough to sustain a religious tradition? Is it enough to make one sure one is doing right by God? Those are other questions. But it’s an interpretive posture that is distinct from rejecting the authority of the text.
— Noah Millman · Apr 1, 02:15 AM · #
Perhaps I’m missing something here but, assuming you’re reading in an English translation, I don’t know how you could possibly consider “Thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman” as literally entailing a prohibition against homosexual sex. “Lie” and “intercourse” simply don’t mean the same thing, so if you are interpreting the Bible literally you have to attribute this restriction to lying – and nothing else. (Words have meaning and all that.)
To do so, of course, would be to admit that there’s some serious ambiguity surrounding what the Bible “means” when it “says”, but this obviously isn’t incompatible with literalism.
The same problem applies to “shameless acts” – people act like this says something specific when it does anything but. We infer that the restriction is about homosexual sex because another part of the passage is about sex – but this is an inference!
— berger · Apr 1, 02:47 AM · #
Good post—so true! As a Christian, I notice I sometimes pick the Bible apart to a degree that I wouldn’t with any other text, hoping to get out of doing something it tells me to do (or not do).
— Joules · Apr 1, 03:21 AM · #
Well, if I deny inerrancy but still claim the entire Bible is divinely inspired, I’m essentially arguing that God was composing figuratively, giving us a universal, timeless, eternal message in terms of the specific beliefs and values of a particular person at a particular time and place.
That seems like a particularly reasonable way to read Romans 1, in which Paul is describing a set of punishments issued to those who “changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections:”, and then a number of things that people at the time would recognize as evil were listed. The main point is that disregarding God will lead you to evil. This evil was described in terms easily grasped by people in most of Christian history even if not literally true. Romans 1:26-27 is a shared assumption in service of a larger point, not itself a revelation. Paul would be writing literally, but God would be writing through Paul metaphorically.
And I think that sort of analysis is implied by any complaint of biblical literalism—the writers of Genesis, under some divine inspiration, may have literally believed things that were not the case, but their personal error was just part of God’s symbolic composition.
— Consumatopia · Apr 1, 03:46 AM · #
It appears that I wasn’t altogether clear about a couple of things — sorry about that. Re Noah: I didn’t say that “the only choices are accepting the plain meaning of the text or rejecting its authority.” Nor did I say what berger seems to think I said. The passages I quoted from Leviticus and Romans are subject to a variety of interpretations, and are not straightforward in their meaning, but someone who says that “lie with” means “have sexual intercourse with” is not being more “literal” than someone who says that it means something else — that’s really my only point. The passages from Leviticus and Romans are quite obviously concerned with questions of sexual behavior, and there’s not some other sense or level of the text on which they are really or more deeply concerned with something else. (They are not allegories of the Covenant or the Church, for instance; or at least no one today claims that they are.) All the disagreements we currently have concern what these texts actually say and teach about sexuality morality, or else they debate whether the texts are binding upon those who hold them to be Scripture. None of the disagreements pit a reading that is “literal” against some other reading that’s “not literal.”
(I don’t know whether this addresses Consumatopia’s comment or not because I’m not sure I understand it.)
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 1, 04:25 AM · #
I’m afraid not, because I’m offering up an interpretation of Romans 1 that is not literal.
“For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections:”. Paul is saying that God is really pissed off about the heresies described in 1:18-24, and is punishing them by allowing them to fall to homosexuality and a wide variety of evil actions and temptations across the board.
Most of the listed sins are the sort of sins that lead to social chaos:
Homosexuality could be symbolic for the social disorder that results from a society abandoning God’s teachings. Whether it truly is socially disordered would depend on what kind of society you happen to be in.
I don’t think I’m being particularly novel here—surely I’m right about the larger point of Romans 1:18-32 being that false belief will lead to disordered lives.
— Consumatopia · Apr 1, 12:53 PM · #
Consumatopia: that was very well expressed.
— Noah Millman · Apr 1, 02:03 PM · #
Thanks for the clarification, C-topia. But as I understand you, you’re not really offering a non-literal interpretation of the passage from Romans at all. You’re not saying (are you?) that Paul wasn’t actually writing about homosexuality and the other specific sins that he lists in that passage; you’re not saying that the passage is allegorical or symbolic. You use the word “symbolic” — “Homosexuality could be symbolic for the social disorder that results from a society abandoning God’s teachings” — but from the context you seem to mean not “symbolic for” but rather “exemplary of.” You’re saying (aren’t you?) that if we are going to apply that passage to our own context, to make sense of it and profit from it, we have to see the larger categories that Paul is employing, and that his list of sins merely illustrates. But that’s still a literal reading of the text: you’re saying that the text really is about what it seems, straightforwardly, to be about, which is moral disorder and its consequences: it’s not referring to some other level of meaning, as most scholars would say the first chapter of Genesis does. (It may look, superficially, like a chronological historical narrative, but it’s really something else.) So I think what I said in my previous comment still holds.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 1, 02:39 PM · #
Alan:
Not to speak for Consumatopia, but it seems to me that he’s saying that the authority of the text is on the level of meaning that is metaphorical or symbolic. That is to say: Paul was literally talking about homosexuality, but God wasn’t. And we really care about what God was saying, not Paul. (Well, you do. I mean, I do, too, but that’s because I’m Jewish, so what Paul says has no authority for me at all. You know what I’m saying.)
If someone said, “my son Gregor, when he woke up this morning, he was an absolute cockroach” you would know the person didn’t mean it literally. By contrast, when Franz Kafka writes a story about Gregor waking up as a cockroach, the sentences of the story do literally describe a man waking up as a cockroach. But the story fails if it doesn’t appear to mean something larger, and more relevant to our lives, than that. So: a “literal” reading of Metamorphosis would miss what is most crucial, and this in spite of the fact that Metamorphosis is not an allegory, and doesn’t even have a clear referent as a metaphor.
So, similarly, Consumatopia is saying that you can read Romans as meaning something other than what it’s literally saying, even though it’s not an allegory. I don’t think he’s really saying either that homosexuality is a symbol of disorder or an example of disorder; he’s saying it’s a synecdoche for disorder. And, as such, if the part no longer represents the whole (or, in our view, is still even a part of that whole), then the meaning of the text has become detached from its literal sense – what was once a synecdoche can now only be understood as a historical metaphor, or else it will be misunderstood.
Regardless of whether or not you find his reading persuasive in this instance, do you see what I’m getting at? Because I do think this is an argument against your original point.
— Noah Millman · Apr 1, 03:06 PM · #
Noah, yes, I absolutely see what you (and, we think, C-topia) are getting at. It goes something like this: “While I would disagree with Paul about some of his specific charges — some acts that he singles out as sinful — his larger point about ‘the social disorder that results from a society abandoning God’s teachings’ is absolutely valid.” But to say that that’s not a literal reading of Paul strikes me as an idiosyncratic and unhelpful use of the term “literal.” It seems to me that a literal reading of Paul is exactly what you and C-topia are offering; you’re just saying that you don’t agree with him about all the details (and C-topia is going beyond that to say that God doesn’t agree with him about all the details). So I stand — boldly, even heroically — by my original point.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 1, 03:46 PM · #
But Noah, Paul was a kick-ass Jewish scholar before he converted! ;-)
— Joules · Apr 1, 11:07 PM · #