Surely I Am Coming Literally; or, the Messiah Has All the Lines

Then there was this one.

Followed by:

And later by:

"Simplistic" isn't the word I'd use, but ...

Liberal Christians and secularists love to mock conservative Christians for taking the Bible literally.  They're wrong about that, since conservatives believe the Bible to be inerrant, an illusion that requires a lot of non-literal interpretation to sustain.  Ironically, perhaps, Julian Sanchez here takes the Bible literally: he assumes that the gospel of John is a literal, factual report of Jesus' interaction with Jewish elites.  Anyone who has had any contact with New Testament scholarship will find that especially amusing, because the Fourth Gospel (as scholars often refer to it; it was probably not written by the disciple John) is known as the most "spiritual" gospel, even in Christian tradition.  It doesn't match up with the other three in chronology, style, or its portrayal of Jesus.  Yet, despite their dismissal of the Bible as the fantasies of illiterate Bronze Age shepherds and peasants, they frequently do as Sanchez did here, and take it as straight reportage.  The commenters under his posts follow suit.

The great teacher who must contend with the foolishly literal-minded inquirer is a staple literary device of "spiritual" writing, from Plato's Socrates and the Buddha down to Zen masters and Carlos Castaneda's equally fictitious Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.  It's also common in any kind of propaganda, religious or political: of course the outsider or unbeliever is a foil, dumber than a box of rocks and existing only to be schooled, though it's probably a vain effort.  The trope allows the teacher to hold forth at great length, and it doesn't hurt that the script is written so that the teacher gets all the gotcha lines, while the opponent can only gape helplessly and confess his stupidity.  It's fun to chuckle at Nicodemus, as Sanchez does, but it's disturbing to realize that he thinks Nicodemus was really that dumb and Jesus was really that smart, and that he himself is very clever to have spotted it.

In one post Sanchez balks at taking John's anti-Jewish polemic at face value, but this is straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel.  I agree that "It’s [sic] seems awfully unlikely, e.g., that the historical disciples really went around talking about 'the Jews' like some foreign group," but I see no reason to take the rest of the gospel material as gospel either.  Does he really believe that a writer who caricatured Jesus' opponents in this one respect would depict them accurately in others?

Another irony is that apologists like to claim that in olden days nobody took religious statements literally, that everybody from high priests on down knew better than that.  This is probably false, but it's true that people in Jesus' time and region were given to elaborate interpretations of religious teachings.  Not only the Hebrew Bible (the New Testament came along later) but the epics of Homer were treated as inerrant texts to be mined for hidden wisdom.  It's said that the Sadducees, the Judean faction who controlled the Temple at the time, insisted on interpreting the Torah literally.  That's unlikely in practice, even if it was their principle, but Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a sect very fond of non-literal readings of Scripture.  The Dead Sea Sect also had secret spiritual teachings, and interpreted the Torah for their own ends.  In all disputes, though, propagandists find it convenient to mock the literal absurdity of their opponents' beliefs and practices (the heathen believe that their graven idols can hear their prayers!).

The gospels do contain material that shows Jesus teaching in riddles so as to confound his hearers, not only those outside but his inner circle of disciples.  The fourth chapter of Mark consists of the Parable of the Sower, the disciples asking what it means, and Jesus explaining the parable while declaring that he teaches in parables in order to prevent outsiders from understanding, repenting, and being saved.  The parallel versions of the story in Matthew and Luke soften this as much as they can, but they retain the idea that no one could understand Jesus' teaching until after he died and was resurrected.  Only then could the Scriptures be opened to their true meaning.  But this idea isn't sustained throughout the gospels.  Most of the time the crowds and Jesus' opponents understand his meaning entirely too well, for example in Mark 12:12 and parallels: "And they were seeking to arrest him but feared the people, for they perceived that he had told the parable against them." 

I also think that Julian Sanchez gives Jesus far too much credit for profundity.  Why should Nicodemus have understood Jesus' claim that one must be born again to see the kingdom of Heaven?  His question about it, far from being stupidly literal-minded, is simply feeding Jesus a chance to explain himself -- which, as usual, Jesus takes, though his follow-up is as usual as clear as mud.  Does Sanchez thinks he understands Jesus' pretentious bloviation about sin and salvation in the Fourth Gospel?  He recognizes that "born again" is a pun in the original Greek -- it can also mean "born from above," which isn't self-explanatory either -- but still thinks it means something.  Maybe it does, but what?  I can understand a Christian apologist taking this stance, but why would a self-styled secularist do so?  What does Sanchez thinks "the kingdom of Heaven" refers to?  It's a Christian commonplace that Jesus' Jewish contemporaries had wrong ideas about the Messiah and the kingdom he would establish, but I don't agree that Jesus' ideas, whatever they were, were correct.  Considering that the kingdom he promised did not arrive within a generation, as he promised, it's a safe bet that his ideas were wrong.  (Trying to interpret his teaching to get around that basic stumbling block is a hallmark of fundamentalism, not of secularism.)  The Christian churches have changed their understandings of Jesus' teaching over the millennia, and modern scholars disagree on just about everything aspect of it. 

As an atheist, I am free not to think "the Kingdom of Heaven" has any real referent.  Based on my experience with both modern scholarship and lay atheists' confused efforts to appropriate Jesus' teaching for their own purposes -- efforts which make no sense to me at all -- I don't think they know any more about it than Nicodemus did.

When the World Was Square

Yesterday a DJ on our local community radio station played Andrew Vasquez' idiotic recitation about "the days when the world had four corners --

the age when the young maiden
and the distinguished warrior defined
the perfect union

which I hadn't heard in a few years, and it wasn't long enough.

Then today I was reading Kenneth L. Feder's Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaelogy (7th edition, McGraw-Hill, 2011), which I'd stumbled on at a library book sale.  The book was written as a college-level textbook, and it's not bad, despite Feder's simplistic picture of science.  He even surprised me pleasantly by referring respectfully and accurately to the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who's something of a bogeyman among scientific fundamentalists.  On the other hand, Feder also refers constantly to biblical "literalism"; well, nobody's perfect.

But Feder also answered a question that has been on my mind ever since I read Scott Richard Lyons's X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minnesota, 2010).  Lyons, an Ojebwe/Dakota professor of English at Syracuse University, recalled 

.. several arguments I had as an instructor at Leech Lake Tribal College with culture cops who wanted to shut down our science programs because they taught evolution. "Nothing in our oral traditions says that we came down from trees." Science was considered suspect because its origins lay outside an Ojibwe epistemology; because the latter was deemed suspect and pure, it had to be protected from contamination. My side eventually won the day, though not (as one might expect) through our claim that we needed to teach science to produce more local doctors and nurses. It was only after we successfully argued that our clan origin story could be read as a kind of proto-evolutionary theory that the culture cops backed off [96].

This story made me wonder about the existence of Native American Creationism, a traditionalist rejection of Darwinian theory, not because it teaches that "we came down from trees," but because current evolutionary theory has concluded that human beings originally emerged in Africa, and current archaeology concludes that human beings migrated to the Americas across a land bridge between present-day Siberia and present-day Alaska.  That would conflict with American Indian creation myths, which put human origins in the Americas.  And according to Feder, sure enough,

Some Native Americans object to the Land Bridge scenario because, as one told me directly, "It makes us immigrants, no different from you and your ancestors."  Maybe that is the case, but the most conservative scientific view places Native Americans in the New World more than 13,000 years ago -- "immigrants" they may be, but certainly not latecomers! [109]

(Have I mentioned that Feder has the same hearty chalk-talk style I've complained about before in certain academic writers addressing a lay audience?)

Indian activist, author, and historian Vine Deloria, Jr. (1995), made this issue the core of his book Red Earth, White Lies.  His argument was that the Bering Land Bridge model cannot be proven.  Besides, Indian religion maintains that native people in the New World have always been here; they were created here and did not come from anywhere else.

Feder points out that there are many different Native American creation myths, so which one is the true one?  He quotes Deloria's answer to the question:

Tribal elders did not worry if their version of creation was entirely different from the scenario held by a neighboring tribe.  People believed that each tribe had its own special relationship to the superior spiritual forces which governed the universe.  (Deloria 1995: 51-52)

I'll have to read Red Earth, White Lies.  (It's in the public library!  And it looks like Deloria took on the subject of creation vs. evolution more than once.  This could be interesting.)  Deloria, who's most famous for Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) and God Is Red (1975), is right that the Land Bridge hypothesis can't be proven -- scientific knowledge, unlike mathematics, is never proven with absolute certainty -- but there's no more reason to take Indian creation stories as fact than there is to believe their many Old World counterparts.  And if the discrepancies between differing "versions of creation" can be dealt with, I don't see why the myth of a Bering Land Bridge represents a problem.

Years ago, in the 80s I think, I heard a Lakota elder on a PBS program declaring sententiously, "God gave the land to the Human Beings."  I gave him credit for saying "God" instead of "Great Spirit," but noticed the ethnocentric use of "Human Beings" for his own nation as opposed to others.  (You can find the same ethnocentrism in the biblical book of Daniel, where the evil pagan kings are symbolized by beasts, and the faithful remnant of Israel is the One Like a Son of Man.)  It was the first time I realized that indigenous religion is no more respectable than that of the European invaders.  Which doesn't justify the invaders' cruelty and violence, of course.  But indigenous Creationism is no answer to it. 

I'm Literally on Fire with the Spirit!

Someone last weekend drew my attention to an article at the Huffington Post, "4 Reasons Not to Read the Bible Literally," by one David Lose, who's written a book on how to read the Bible but doesn't seem to know much about that subject.

Lose begins by expressing his displeasure at the results of a new Gallup Poll which found that 30 percent of its respondents believe that the Christian Bible should be read literally. I thought the poll questions were especially badly designed, blunt instruments that couldn't get much useful information from anyone.

• The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.
• The Bible is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally.
• The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts.

I suppose, if I'd been asked, I'd have to go with the third option, but I'd have balked at it. But look at the first two: are "actual" and "inspired" the same thing? Why'd they change the adjective? The second option doesn't rule out the third, because the Bible is both ancient and contains fables, legends, history, moral precepts and more. (Neither the letters of Paul nor the Revelation fits into that list.) If it's "inspired," that means Yahweh chose to inspire fables, legends, history, moral precepts and more; not exactly a radical notion. The question for any reader will be how to read and understand that content.

My first reaction to that thirty percent figure, and to the forty-nine percent who answered that the Bible needn't be interpreted literally, was that they were meaningless, because most people don't know what "literally" means. They commonly use it as an intensifier, to mean "totally" or "virtually" or even figuratively. In order to know what those poll numbers mean, you'd have to ask a lot of other probing questions. The one person I've met who claimed to take the whole Bible literally backed down immediately when I asked her about some of the more difficult teachings, like becoming eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. "I didn't mean you should take it all literally!" she said. I'd bet that a good many of the thirty percent would react exactly the same way.

But Lose immediately jumps to equate "literal" with "inerrant." They're not the same thing, as I've pointed out before; indeed, they're incompatible. In order to maintain the belief that the bible is free from error, the faithful are forced to interpret it very non-literally -- by interpreting the six days of creation as six ages of geologic time, for example, or by arguing that when Jesus said that his disciples must hate their families and their own lives, he was using a semitic idiom that meant "to love less." Modern conservative evangelicals emphatically do not take literally Jesus' teaching that a person who divorces and remarries is committing adultery against the former spouse, or that if their eye lead them to sin they should pluck it out, or that if someone strikes them they should turn the other cheek, or any number of other teachings ascribed by the gospels to Jesus. But then, neither do liberal Christians who think that Jesus was a great moral teacher.

Lose points out that "Most Christians across history have not read the Bible literally." True, but then neither do Christians today. Nor does this mean that their interpretations were necessarily valid, especially if they were developed in the service of inerrancy. "Earlier Christians -- along with almost everyone else who lived prior to the advent of modernity -- simply didn't imagine that for something to be true it had to be factually accurate, a concern only advanced after the Enlightenment." Still, few earlier Christians doubted the factual accuracy of the Bible. The usual way of getting past inconsistencies was to harmonize them, as in the different accounts of Jesus' cleansing of the Temple (discussed by Lose), or the wildly discordant reports of Jesus' appearances to his followers after his resurrection. Believers and scholars alike simply pasted them all together.

Incidentally, a similar attitude prevailed with respect to other authoritative ancient writings. It wasn't until fairly recently that Plato's dialogues began to be read with the same critical eye that the Bible received; even though it was obvious that many elements in them weren't factual, philosophers tended to assume that they were an accurate picture of Socrates and his teaching. The epics of Homer got the same treatment. The writings of competing sects weren't examined critically, just denounced as demonic fabrications. Another approach assumed that the events described in ancient writings really did happen, but over time they had become encrusted with legendary additions, so that human heroes were exalted into gods, and natural events were inflated into supernatural ones in order to impress the credulous.

A similar rationalizing method has been applied, even by conservative scholars, to the miracles of Jesus: he didn't really walk on water, his frightened disciples saw him walking through the surf and misinterpreted what they saw; he didn't really raise the daughter of Jairus from the dead, she was in a coma and just happened to wake up when he came into the room; or Jesus himself didn't rise from the dead, he swooned on the cross and was nursed back to health by Essene healers led by Joseph of Arimathea, who sneaked into his tomb through a clever hidden entrance. And so on.

Lose concludes that literalism "undermines a chief confession of the Bible about God."

Rather than imagine that the Bible was also written by ordinary, fallible people, inerrantists have made the Bible an other-wordly, supernatural document that runs contrary to the biblical affirmation that God chooses ordinary vessels -- "jars of clay," the Apostle Paul calls them -- to bear an extraordinary message. In fact, literalists unwittingly ascribe to the Bible the status of being "fully human and fully divine" that is normally reserved only for Jesus.

Again Lose confuses literalism with inerrancy. I also don't think he's right about inerrantists' view of the biblical writers and characters. The theme of fallible human vessels is the mainstay of many a fundamentalist sermon. It's not the writers, but the guidance of the Holy Spirit that makes the Bible trustworthy for them. But the real trouble with Lose's argument is that he's still basically an inerrantist. Properly interpreted and understood, the Bible on his account offers a "confession about God." To believe that, I suppose, requires "faith."

Lose inadvertently lets the cat out of the bag, though, when he admits that Saint Augustine's acceptance of Christianity was blocked for a long time because of "the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale. It was not until Ambrose, bishop of Milan, introduced Augustine to allegorical interpretation -- that is, that stories can point metaphorically to spiritual realities rather than historical facts -- that Augustine could contemplate taking the Bible (and those who read it!) seriously." Augustine's mother was a Christian; couldn't she have disabused him of "the notion that Christians took literally stories like that of Jonah spending three days in the belly of a whale"? Maybe it was because many Christians, then as now, did take such stories literally.

And how far are Christians supposed to go with these metaphorical interpretations? One of the selling points and central dogmas of Christianity is that God acted in history, not in myth. The events recounted in the Bible are supposed to have spiritual meaning, but that doesn't mean they didn't (supposedly) happen. So, does David Lose believe that Jesus was literally born to a virgin? And whether he was or not, what "spiritual reality" is pointed to by that story? Ditto for the miraculous feedings of thousands with fish and bread, or the miraculous healings, or walking on water. And what about the death and resurrection of Jesus? Does Lose take those stories literally? As an atheist, I have no doubt that Christians find "spiritual" meanings in the stories of the Bible. But since Christians often disagree about the meanings conveyed by their stories, which ones should I believe?

One of my favorite examples of this problem is the fourth chapter of the gospel of Mark. Jesus tells the parable of the sower to a crowd. After he's done, his disciples ask him privately what it means. Jesus expresses surprise that they don't get it, and explains that he teaches in parables so that "those outside" will not understand what he means, so that they won't repent and won't be saved. He then gives his disciples an allegorical interpretation of the parable: the sower is the preacher, the seed is the preacher's words, the different soils on which the seed falls are the different listeners. That's the secret meaning Jesus wants to keep away from "those outside," and I'm not alone in finding it much ado about nothing much. Jesus' deliberate withholding of understanding, and therefore of salvation, from most people is morally shocking. Matthew gives a different account, and modern scholars do their best to interpret the story so as to make it less offensive. If Jesus had secret teachings about the spiritual significance of his preaching and actions, though, they're lost, and we'll never know what they were; interpreters disagree widely about what it's all supposed to mean.

Another example: I fully agree that the book of Revelation is not to be taken literally. My question is how to understand it on any level, though I'm more interested in what you might call sociological questions. The author strung together his bizarre symbols with angelic interpretations of their meaning, or part of it. By the time the Revelation was written, there was already a tradition of such books, and the angelic guide who explains extravagant visions to a confused human seer is a convention in that tradition. But we know very little, maybe nothing, about what the people who wrote such books thought they were doing. The symbols were readymades, probably even older than the oldest apocalyptic book we have, the book of Daniel. The writers borrowed them and adapted them to the political situation of their own time. We know that while early Christian believers understood that difficult symbolism was involved, they believed that the world was going to change radically, and soon. We know this because of Paul's struggle with his congregations as set forth in his letters, to get them to behave responsibly (keep working, be good citizens) without denying that the End was indeed near.

It's not just because I'm an atheist that I believe that much of the Bible was meant to be taken literally. The writers believed in the Exodus, in David and Solomon's kingdom, in Jesus' miraculous birth and wonderworking career; they also believed that these events had spiritual meaning. I'm just lucky that I don't think anything important hangs on what their meaning is. It's actually serious Bible scholars who are most likely to read the Bible literally, and liberals who are likely to get all the details wrong.

It's Literally Turtles All The Way Down

(Cartoon from Baldo, via Literally, A Web Log)

But back to literalism. I’ve finished reading Philip Kitcher’s little book Living with Darwin, and he has it all wrong. The Book of Genesis has him in a tizzy, but fundamentalists and creationists don’t even take Genesis literally.

I mentioned before that there are two different creation stories in the first two chapters of Genesis. In chapter one, the sequence of creation goes roughly like this: on the first day God creates light and darkness; on the second day, he creates a dome called the sky; on the third day he creates the dry land by separating the waters into the sea, then creates vegetation; on the fourth day, he creates lights in the sky, the sun and the moon. (How did he create light and day without the sun, I hear you ask? Don’t ask.*) On the fifth day he creates the animal kingdom: birds, fishes, and sea monsters; on the sixth day, he creates land animals, and finally human beings, both male and female, in his own image, and gives them dominion over all other living things. On the seventh day, famously, he rested.

Chapter two recounts that in the day when Yahweh created the heavens and the earth, before he created the plants, he formed Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed life into his nostrils. Then Yahweh created a garden in Eden, with the trees of Life and of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in it and a river flowing out of it. Then Yahweh, deciding that Adam should not be alone, decided to create the animals, and brought them to Adam to see if any was a suitable companion for him. None was, so he put Adam to sleep and, famously, created Eve from his rib. They were both naked, and were not ashamed. No passage of time is specified here, and since it’s clearly a fable (notice the allegorical Trees), it’s possible that the writer supposed that everything here happened in one day.

Now, these two stories are completely different in sequence. Serious fundamentalists know full well that a literal reading won’t work, so they have to work pretty hard to harmonize them. Non-fundamentalist scholars have concluded, on the basis of this and other evidence in the Biblical text, that Genesis is actually the product of pasting together different source materials into a literary patchwork. (Richard E. Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? is a good introduction to this approach.) Kitcher never addresses this matter; perhaps he doesn’t consider it important, though I think that if you want to address fundamentalist positions, it’s more relevant than throwing Darwin at them. At one point Kitcher complains that the creationist and Intelligent Design positions consist more of trying to find flaws in evolutionary theory than in presenting an alternative; so why not play their own game, and show the problems in their own reading of the Bible? But that would be, like, hard. In any case, this example alone is evidence that “literalism” is not really the issue.

But wait -- there’s more in Genesis 3. The usual Christian interpretation, common to fundamentalists and less conservative Christians, of the events leading up to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden is that Satan, in the form of a serpent, teased Adam and Eve into eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yahweh had warned them that if they did so, they would die. Satan told Adam and Eve that they would not die but become as gods, knowing good and evil – absurd, of course: how could mere humans become like God? But they ate the fruit, and immediately felt the shame of their nakedness. For their disobedience, Yahweh threw them out of Eden and cursed them to labor and suffering, and sentenced Satan the serpent to crawl on his belly forever.

This is not what Genesis 3 actually says, however. A literal reading is instructive. There’s no hint that the crafty serpent is Satan, a figure who doesn’t show up until much later in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament, as Christians call it); it takes a nonliteral reading to find Satan here. Then, when Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit and are cowering in shame, and after Yahweh has cursed them to dirt and suffering and enmity with the serpent’s tribe, Yahweh reflects: “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and live forever” – and only then does he drive Adam and Eve from Eden. The text is clear that Yahweh had lied, for they didn’t die when they ate from the forbidden tree; and it is explicit that by doing so, they had become as gods. For some reason Yahweh feared this, so he cut them off from the tree of life. This is more like, say, Greek mythology, where the gods try to keep knowledge from human beings; Yahweh is not a moral figure in this tale. Again, non-fundamentalist biblical scholars generally recognize this, but anyone reading the text can see it. A literal reading produces unacceptable results, so most Christians (apart from scholars) ignore the literal meaning of the story and understand it differently. Conservative Christians seem not to have minded, or even noticed, the departures from Scripture of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ; the letter of the text is not all that important to them, except when it becomes an excuse to draw a line in the sand over some other issue.

The model of the universe in the Hebrew Bible, with its domed sky hung with lights, is, from what I’ve read, not “supernatural” at all but based on ancient, mostly Babylonian, astronomy. The New Testament borrows from the astronomy of its own time, with the planets moving in concentric spheres or heavens. (“Seventh” heaven is the highest of these.) To insist on thinking of the universe in this way is not so much believing in the supernatural as in outdated science, like believing in humors or phlogiston. But then, popular astronomy books today contain pictures of the planets strung like beads on circular lines around the sun, called “orbits.”

Notice that the importance of a literal reading of Genesis 1-3 has nothing to do with the “supernatural” (another of Kitcher’s buzzwords, along with “spiritual religion” and “the enlightenment case”), though there are supernatural elements here and elsewhere in the Bible. The inconsistency of Genesis 1 and 2, or of the different accounts of Jesus’ birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke (which Kitcher does discuss), is not due to the supernatural; it’s due to different, irreconcilable story lines.

Even when ordinary believers believe in the supernatural, it doesn’t mean they don’t also believe in an everyday material world where the supernatural doesn’t usually intrude. They know that if you jump off a tall building you’ll probably die. They know that virgins do not usually become pregnant, and if one of their single daughters were to try to claim the Holy Spirit as the father of her unborn child, they would become extremely hard-headed skeptics. Stanley Tambiah says that the anthropologist Meyer Fortes “once invited a rainmaker to perform the ceremony for him for an attractive fee, and the officiant in question replied ‘Don't be a fool, whoever makes a rain-making ceremony in the dry season?’” (Magic, science, religion, and the scope of rationality, Cambridge 1990, p 54). It seems that often it’s the modern, scientific rationalist who takes such things literally, while the believers think about them differently. The actual function of the supernatural in human belief is still being studied, and while it may be comforting to dismiss the “superstitions” of those who believe in different foolish things than we do, it’s not a sign of wisdom.

Things are not so different in the present-day secular world. For example, a lot of American women believe in the existence of “snuff films,” in which a woman is actually killed on camera during or after performing sexual acts, and that such films are available under the counter at adult video stores everywhere. There is no evidence that such films have ever existed, but the arguments to show that they do exist (as well as the vehemence with which the arguments are made) are reminiscent of arguments made by fundamentalists to preserve the inerrancy of the Bible.

What I find chilling is that the people who make this case would rather believe that thousands of women are being killed every year to make snuff porn, than that they aren’t. I’d say the same about other people who want to believe that thousands of children are kidnapped each year in shopping malls and sold into sex slavery. There are many other similar legends / fantasies in circulation today, from the "Paul Is Dead" scare to the claims that the Bush administration executed the 9/11 attacks, to the belief that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, to “blood libel” legends which accuse Jews of sacrificing Gentile children and using their blood to make Passover matzos. These have nothing to do with the supernatural, nor with literalism. As with magical rituals, it’s interesting to speculate about the personal and social functions of such beliefs, but they shouldn’t be taken literally. (There’s an interesting discussion of this issue in Pamela Donovan, No way of knowing: crime, urban legends, and the Internet, Routledge, 2004). I suspect that the “supernatural” is a secondary issue here, not the real crux of the problem.

All of this swoops under Kitcher’s radar. I think that if we secularists don’t stop imposing our own misunderstandings on the religious and if we believe that by rejecting religion we are somehow immune to the lure of the legendary, we’re going to get nowhere in a hurry.

More later on Kitcher’s notion of “spiritual” religion as a superior alternative to “supernatural” religion.

*There's an old joke about the seeker who asks someone (St. Augustine, maybe?) what God did in the eons before he created the heavens and the earth. The old teacher snaps: He made Hell for people who ask questions like that!

Living With Literalism

Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (Oxford, 2007) is a nice little book. Kitcher, a philosopher who’s written a well-known critique of creationism and a well-known critique of sociobiology, now takes on Intelligent Design. He does a good job of explaining why natural selection is the best theory we have for the origin and extinction of species, and he’s even decently modest in the claims he makes for science as a mode of knowing. Despite the help he acknowledges from various philosophers and other scholars, though, he gets into trouble on the religious issues. My main beef is his reliance on the straw man of “biblical literalism.”

He tries to hedge just a little: “For many of those who want an alternative to Darwinism, however, novelty creationism is not enough. They would remain shocked by a science curriculum that implied that any (nonpoetic) part of the Bible cannot be taken as literal truth” (page 20). “Nonpoetic” won’t quite cut it, especially since Kitcher doesn’t explain which parts of the Bible are poetic and which are non. Is the Sermon on the Mount poetic? The Nativity Stories? The killing of Goliath by David? The book of Acts? The letters of Paul? Only 20 pages in, and poor Professor Kitcher is already in over his head and sinking fast.

He backs himself up with an endnote (page 170, note 19):

As I have discovered, some well-educated people find this statement incredible. They suppose that nobody takes all the (nonpoetic) parts of the Bible as literal truth. Their reaction is surely based on the fact that all the religious people they know adopt nonliteralist strategies of reading the scriptures. In fact, as any survey of evangelical Christian literature reveals, literalism is extremely important to many Christians. This is apparent not only in the books written in support of “scientific creationism” … but also in the King James Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1983). The Study Bible begins its section on interpretation by reminding the reader that “the Bible is God’s infallible, inerrantly inspired Word (p. xxiiii), and concludes a note on the opening of Genesis with the declaration that “the biblical account of Creation clearly indicates that God created the world in six literal days” (p. 6).

Kitcher seems to think that “infallible, inerrantly inspired” means “literally true.” He’s wrong. Yes, the King James Study Bible declares its belief that Genesis describes “six literal days” of creation – but that is not anywhere close to taking all “the (nonpoetic) parts of the Bible as literal truth.” I think it’s revealing that this is the best – at any rate, it’s the only -- evidence Kitcher provides to support his claim.

Biblical inerrancy is quite another doctrine. It’s a fairly mainstream belief, which conservative evangelicals share with the Roman Catholic Church. And in order to preserve the Bible from error, it’s necessary to interpret the Bible quite non-literally – in one famous example, by interpreting the six “days” of creation as epochs running to thousands or millions of years.

Some basic points:

1. I’ve never heard of a Christian denomination that claimed to take the entire Bible literally. I did once encounter an individual Christian who claimed she did, but when I asked her what she did with passages like Matthew 19.12 (become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven), Matthew 5:29 (if your eye leads you to sin, pluck it out), or Mark 10:21 (sell all you have and give to the poor), she backtracked immediately: well, of course you can’t take the whole Bible literally! I didn’t mean you should take those verses literally!

2. At the other end of the spectrum, the most loudly non-literalist Christians known to me believe that Jesus literally lived in Galilee in the first century, roamed around teaching and gathering disciples, and finally died on a cross in Jerusalem. A few maverick scholars have argued that Jesus was really a mythical figure with no literal existence; Kitcher should look at the scholarly reaction to their work to see how important “literalism” is to non-evangelical, even quite liberal Christians.

Where Christians differ is in which parts of the Bible to take literally and which to interpret figuratively. Once again we see someone distorting a difference of degree into a degree of kind, opening up a gulf between people who are not really that different from each other. A philosopher should know better than this.

3. Non-literal interpretations are not necessarily correct. Often they’re used to get around passages that are false or otherwise embarrassing. For example, three of the gospels report that Jesus predicted he would return with power before the generation then living had died. Since this is false, it can’t mean what it says, so Christians have found various ways to interpret it in such a way that it is no longer false. Albert Schweitzer, who was not only a humanitarian doctor (the Mother Teresa of his day) and a Bach specialist but a New Testament scholar, argued in in The Quest for the Historical Jesus (first edition 1906; first English translation 1910), that Jesus expected the Kingdom to come right away, and so was mistaken. In the mid-20^th century, an Anglican scholar, C. H. Dodd, developed a theory of “realized eschatology” in The Parables of the Kingdom (1935; revised edition 1961) which reinterpreted Jesus’ teachings to say that the Kingdom of God had already arrived, so no Second Coming was necessary and Jesus was right. Understandably, a number of respectable theologians who didn’t like to think of Jesus as a wild-eyed apocalyptic preacher liked Dodd’s interpretation, but it doesn’t seem to have held up well. Schweitzer’s general argument remains strong, but it’s a stumbling block for many Christians who want Jesus to be inerrant, so scholars continue to try to find ways around it.

Or consider Jesus’ teachings about the family. Though he opposed divorce, he didn’t mind if his followers abandoned their families to follow him, and the gospels show him at odds with his own family. When his mother and brothers came to see him in Mark 3, they couldn’t get through the crowds around him, and Jesus brushed them off. Who are my mother and brothers? he asked rhetorically. These (meaning his disciples and other followers) are my mother and brothers; whoever does the will of God is my mother and brothers. On another occasion (Matthew 8:21f) Jesus forbade a disciple to return home for his father’s funeral, ordering him to leave the dead to bury the dead. He also said (Matthew 10:34ff) that he had come not to bring peace, but to bring division, to set people against their families and their families against them, and that anyone who came to him and did not hate his family was no disciple of his (Luke 14:26).

This was reasonable (if not particularly attractive) behavior for an apocalyptic cult, or for any new cult that needs to lure converts away from established religions to build up its own numbers. So some interpreters borrow Schweitzer’s arguments just long enough to get rid of (or at least explain away) Jesus’ anti-family teaching: well, Jesus thought the world was about to end, so of course he had a sense of eschatological urgency and thought people had to get rid of anything that might interfere with their salvation. Of course Jesus was mistaken in thinking that the world was about to end, but these sayings express Jesus’ sublime sense of eschatological urgency and trust in God – but that was then and this is now, so of course you shouldn’t hate your family! These, again, are non-fundamentalist Christian arguments, the kind of thing I found in the work of distinguished theologians like Rudolf Bultmann.

I suspect that the reason Kitcher wants to brush aside the importance of Biblical inerrancy among fundamentalists is that he wants to draw a sharp line between bad, low-class literalist Bible-thumpers and good (or at least not-so-bad) decent non-literalists. (He even thinks the Gospel of Thomas is the neatest thing since sliced bread. Very trendy!) So far (I’m about halfway through Living with Darwin), Kitcher doesn’t mention that there are two different creation stories in Genesis, which, if read literally, contradict each other thoroughly. (There are also different versions of Noah and the Flood, which differ on many points.) Fundamentalists nowadays try to harmonize them by putting the verbs in Genesis 2 into the past perfect tense, so that it describes God creating Adam and then, in a flashback, describes the other things he had created before. It doesn’t work very well, and the only English translation I’ve ever seen that supports this interpretation is the New International Version, a fundamentalist-friendly translation that often distorts its translations for theological-apologetic reasons.

I’m not sure that Kitcher’s distortion of this basic issue hurts much of his argument. Does it really matter if someone takes all the Bible literally, or just some of it? Maybe not for the purposes of a discussion of evolutionary theory, but still, it grates on me every time Kitcher talks about “literalism,” which he does fairly often. It may matter more when I read the rest of the book, in which he’s going to address the role of religion in a scientific world. He’s trying to be nice, to distance himself from angry cranks like Richard Dawkins, but if he can so fundamentally misunderstand the people he’s trying to talk to, he’s not going to reach them. But I suspect too that this book is, in this respect, like early Christian defenses of the faith which were ostensibly addressed to Roman rulers: it’s highly unlikely that anyone but Christians ever read them at the time, so they mainly made Christians feel good, but didn’t have much effect on non-Christians who were skeptical about the new cult. Similarly, Living with Darwin seems unlikely to reach conservative evangelicals. Judging from the customer reviews on Amazon, it’s being read mainly by non-believers who want to feel good about rejecting Intelligent Design, and can then say, Take that, you superstitious literalists, you!

More on this, I hope, after I finish the book. I'll try to add some links later, too, with more information for those who want it.