> Maybe, if one doesn't take the Bible literally, but as a metaphor? But then again, for thousands of years the Church said we should interpret it literally.
No, the canon wasn't even set thousands of years ago (so there wasn't a single accepted Bible to take literally or metaphorically), and Biblical literalism as a doctrine is a minority doctrine in Christianity that is only a few hundred years old, originating within Protestantism, and mostly became a big deal with the explosion of fundamentalism in the US even more recently than that.
The Catholic Church didn't even think laypeople should read the Bible until fairly recently, one of the main concerns being the danger of naive interpretation, which simple literalism would surely qualify as.
In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.
In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. "For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression."
Catholics don't really take the bible as literal as many protestant religions do. Some fundamentalist Catholics do but the Catholic Church (capital 'C') does not and has not for a very long time. Pope Benedict XVI in 1993 when he was a Cardinal:
“Fundamentalist interpretation starts from the principle that the Bible, being the word of God, inspired and free from error, should be read and interpreted literally in all its details. But by "literal interpretation" it understands a naively literalist interpretation, one, that is to say, which excludes every effort at understanding the Bible that takes account of its historical origins and development… The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life. It can deceive these people, offering them interpretations that are pious but illusory, instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem… Fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations.”
So because of that it isn't really necessary to logically evaluate it unless you want to poke holes in a Protestant and Fundamentalists cheery picked parts. I want to be careful to not run into a "No true Scottsman" thing here, but Catholics by and large have tried to adapt the Bible to modern problems, not dissimilar to Reform Judaism.
> EDIT: to add to that, evangelical christians tend to embrace a literal translation of the bible
Actually, plenty of Evangelicals I've seen have cited strict literalism as one of the problems in Fundamentalism that Evangelicalism reacted against; while Evangelicals are more likely to view any particular part of the Bible as intended literally than are Christians who are neither Evangelical or Fundamentalist, there are plenty of Evangelicals who don't hold that the Bible is, cover to cover, intended literally.
> I've never understood why it's seen as so important to understand what the original authors of literature meant or intended.
How could you even begin to understand the text without knowing what they meant? Surely not by free association! Recall those ancient epics you've likely read in school. What were they? Translations. Someone rendered the original text into your language for you. To do that, they had to first understand the original text. To do that requires understanding the language(s) of the original text. To understand the language(s) of the original text, you need an adequate familiarity of the culture at the time. This is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish competently because of the breadth and depth of background knowledge required. It is incidentally why there are multiple competing translations of ancient texts (it is said that translations aren't truly possible).
Now consider again the knowledge you need to interpret text in its historical context. If you've just unearthed some text from an ancient civilization no one knows much of anything about, this is going to be damn near impossible and full of speculation even when you manage to produce a plausible translation. There's also the question of the status of the text: what is it supposed to be? In the case of the Bible, you need the continuous Tradition through which to interpret it. You need to interpret it synoptically or run the risk of making ad hoc judgements unhedged by other parts. (This is why Sola Scriptura fails; not only is it self-refuting, as in, nowhere in the Bible is this principle declared, not that this would lend any credence to the claim, but you lack the interpretive apparatus to interpret the text in the first place, leading to all sorts of weird claims and inferences. Not only that, but the Bible itself was compiled in the fourth century in light of this Tradition. How else would you establish the canon if not by drawing on the Tradition?)
> They're fallible like everyone else, and therefore might be wrong.
Yeah? Check out the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The Catholic Church states that Holy Scripture is free from error[0]. So your view is not universally shared.
> In terms of impacting people's lives for good, I definitely feel like religions are at their best when they are inspiratory
What is your view of religion, of Christianity? Its purpose? What is this "inspiration" and what is it for? What does it inspire? If your answer is "to become a better person" or something of that sort, then we must ask: how so? Either some truth is being communicated which makes you better by virtue of knowing it as well as the change it effects in you, or whatever is being said is fraudulent and useless and ought to be discarded (put aside partial truths for the moment). And because Christianity concerns the ultimate things, it means that all of your life is oriented by it, and it means that it must help you with respect to your ultimate end, something you can fail at attaining.
As I have written elsewhere, everyone has a religion, so the question is "is it any good?", which is to say "is it true?", and not "do you live by one?". Man cannot do without religion because he cannot live without an orientation or a direction in life, he cannot live without an Ultimate, so much so that he will fill that void with all sorts of garbage. He needs to know at least the necessary part of the big picture and a way of living in accordance with it. You may find bits of pieces of truth scattered among the religions, valuable insofar as they contain the truth especially about ultimate things, but Man does not subsist on religious dabbling. And here the Catholic Church asserts clearly its claim to the fullness of truth.
> and at their worst when they try to impose authority.
This seems to misunderstand the purpose of authority. The purpose of authority is to safeguard teachings from corruption and manipulation and make them available over the centuries so you don't end up with a proliferation of confusion and error. Don't let the centuries of caricatures of the Big Ol' Mean Church fool you!
> I'm 100% atheist but I've considered reading the bible because it's culturally significant. But isn't just a bunch of boring and inconsistent tales? is there really anything to be learned from the bible?
I went to a school that taught ancient Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. With that came loads of bible passages to translate. Having grown up a non-believer (many people tried to literally "cure" that during my lifetime, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to know there is a simple drug I could take to make me normal) I can honestly say it's about what you'd expect from religious texts of those time periods. I found it less relatable than, say, Greek mythology.
What I found interesting is how many parts modern Christians habitually ignore, either because they'd be arrested if they'd follow them, or because those parts don't fit in with their personal beliefs. Of course, the entire corpus of text has also seen numerous redactions, in an effort to streamline it and make it more coherent (with mixed results).
Is it culturally significant? Honestly, I'm not sure. The Bible as an idea sure is, and certain famous passages are. But a given group's or individual's interpretation of it seems more informative, and that's often only losely based on those ancient texts.
Needless to say, I don't think there is anything in there to convince a non-believer of the existence of dieties, much less that one specific pantheon. And to be fair I don't think that's what the authors had in mind. It was probably intended as a shared folklore for groups that already strongly believe. Conversion, I suspect, comes through missionaries, not through the text.
> the Bible is literally the Truth of God, end of sentence. The former groups tend to be the better educated, more literate and more capable of critical thinking in a constructive way.
Your taxonomy is too simple. :-)
There certainly are Christians who seem to focus only on verses in isolation, without considering even the context of the surrounding verses, much less the cultural and historical context into which they were written. But there are others who think that taking the Bible seriously requires taking the historical and cultural context into account; that God did speak, but he spoke to a specific set of people in a specific circumstance; so if you want to hear him speak clearly, you have to go back and put yourself in the shoes of the original hearers. People who take this kind of approach are are both "better educated, more literate and more capable of critical thinking in a constructive way", and believe the Bible to be "literally true" -- at least at literally as the author intended it to be taken literally. :-)
Biblical literalism and fundamentalism are a relatively new innovation developed in the past century and half. Taking a deeply complex work like the Bible and attempting to read it "literally" just spawns more approaches and complications; it doesn't mean that fundamentalists have discovered the one approach that's true to the text.
Not the poster, but as a Christian, no, I find the idea of the Bible being taken literally as rather surprising, and a rather recent invention.
Just on the face of it, there are 'books' in the Bible meant as history, books meant as 'self-help', despondent mullings on the meaning of life, a love letter, personal recountings, letters written to others...these are all kinds of authors and approaches here, and so it strikes me as silly to take all of them literally. I mean, Jesus is quoted as saying "Go tell that fox", when speaking of Herod; there is no other mention of Herod being anything other than human. Clearly, if the Christian message is to be taken as truth, it shows that God is able to speak in metaphor (as well as interesting translation differences; for instance, the word for 'day' in the creation story is a word with a number of translations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom )
So, how do things that seem antiquated apply now? Well, some parts of it -are- antiquated, in that they were meant for a specific time, and not now. Chesterton had a number of beautiful assertions in his book Orthodoxy, to the effect that Christianity is necessarily paradoxical, because -people- are paradoxical. To take that here, from my perspective (and there are many) morality can be both absolute and relativistic; what is 'good' is absolute, but what is treated as 'good' at a given time is relative to that time. You know that slavery is evil, but could you go back 4000 years and convince people of that? No. You would just alienate them, and likely get yourself killed. But you -could- convince them to at least treat their slaves better. You could design a moral code that would in time lead to them stopping slavery, by just introducing the idea that slaves are humans, with rights. If we credit the idea there is a God, and that evolution is a thing that that God uses, then the idea of allowing a moral idea to evolve into a fuller fulfillment of itself, over time, as people think, and talk, and develop, is an unsurprising thing for that God to do.
As to stoning adulterers, and a number of similar things; don't misunderstand what was a legal code with a moral one. Yes, it was influenced by morals (same as our own law is), but the punishment was a legal code to be adopted by a people, and was a symptom of the time. No Christian but the most fundamental would say we, now, should adopt stoning as the appropriate punishment for adultery. Interestingly, the Bible makes it clear "the wages of sin (is) death", but that that's a moral issue between man and God. Any actual judgement indicated to be carried out between men is toward a legal system, and its rationale is much the same as our own, to prevent people from doing it and/or to allow for carrying out some semblance of imperfect justice (since flawed man judging flawed man will necessarily be imperfect).
Similarly, many of the Old Testament rules were particular to the context of the time, and can only be understood in understanding the culture at that time. For why not wearing a diverse set of fabrics, have a look here - https://www.gotquestions.org/different-types-of-fabric.html
No, most Christian scholars throughout history have been literalists. But, they also recognize that certain portions of the Bible are not meant to be literal. All of the literalists I know of take this view. In fact, to think that everything is literal is not taking the Bible literally, since Jesus and the Apostles explicitly use metaphor themselves.
> If a word only exists once in the source text, and in the corpus of contemporary(*) documents, inferred meaning has to be highly conjectural.
Maybe, but you've got a body of tradition to lean on. You cannot interpret text, perhaps especially Christian texts, without drawing on tradition. This is a major flaw in sola scriptura and hence the reason why over forty thousand Protestant sects exist in the US alone. Without that continuous tradition, you have to reach for some other hermeneutic, some other interpretive lens, likely you're own undisciplined and unacknowledged implicit one of the day.
> Do you ever struggle with the parts of the bible that feel outdated in the modern context?
Just to add to the excellent comment above. More days than not I am amazed at the relevance of the ancient scriptures. My daughter was caught out last week telling a fib. It made me smile that the next day my bible reading was a 3000 year old proverb about the importance of not telling lies.
Others days, yes, I find it hard reading from a very different age. I sometimes have to delve into my study bible's commentary to get some historical context.
Sigh. This post is what happens when someone with no background or knowledge of religion or Christianity writes a "gotcha!" blog post, thinking they've vanquished the stupid and their illogical opinions. And I say this as someone who isn't even a Christian. Where to even begin..
- The idea of taking the Bible literally is itself a modern phenomenon which arose out of the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation and specifically the American Second Great Awakening.
As with other texts, there are numerous ways of interpreting the Bible and the idea that a book itself should only be understood in a literal sense is a really anti-intellectual modern opinion. For example, in the Middle Ages, there was a four-fold method of interpretation. This is not a new topic.
- Many of the "Nagging Questions" are ill-formed and deeply ignorant of most of Christian theology, philosophy, religious history, and basically everything else.
Needless to say, this is a topic which has been written upon and studied for thousands of years. Suggested reading:
- Christianity: The First 3,000 Years
- A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
- The Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible (quite large, but full of footnotes that highlight the extreme complexity of the topic)
> I don't know many people who read the bible as a series of disconnected logical propositions
It's common to quote short passages (1-3 verses) in society, either to prove a point (often missing context) or in a "thought for the day" manner. Many homes have wall hangings with scripture that the owner has never read in the bible.
Indeed, some points were a bit unclear. This is literalism in the sense of "God is real, created the world, Jesus lived and died to save you from your sins", not "there is no figurative language in the bible" or "the Bible is a bunch of stories about how to be a good person."
One important phrase in interpreting Scripture is "let Scripture interpret Scripture." (cf. 1 Cor 1:18f, Romans 11:33-35, 2 Cor 10:5 - our reason is not capable of fully understanding God, so we interpret it as his Word says and leave it at that.)
I should point you toward the Council of Jerusalem for part of the early history of the church, and I'm not really sure where you're coming from with the rest.
As for the rest (mostly about the history of biblical manuscripts), could you please put what I missed into a couple more clear questions?
> Physical presence of a book doesn't make it scripture. And that's exactly what Christians believe the Bible is: scripture. And it is held to a very different set of standards than what is not scripture.
Not all christians agree on what is and isn't in the bible. There is no single Christian bible. I have no doubt there are some sects out there that don't have a bible, for a couple of hundred years no christians did.
> Do you ever struggle with the parts of the bible that feel outdated in the modern context? I never read the bible by myself
I used to, but it becomes more practical and timeless the more I read my Bible. I read a version with cross-references in the center-line so reading slower and checking these makes it make a lot more sense. The way I'd recommend reading is Mark, Luke, John, Matthew, Acts and Romans (all in the New Testament) while periodically reading the cross-references as you go. This covers basic beliefs and how Jesus taught following the spirit of the Law, why Gentile Christians don't follow the full Jewish Law (Acts 15) and how those before Jesus aren't condemned (Romans). Then I'd recommend Genesis and Exodus to understand the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob family line, and the establishment of the Law. Follow with 1st/2nd Samuel and 1st/2nd Kings for most of the rest of the historical side of context. Psalms and Proverbs can be read a little at a time, at any time.
> read a section of the Bible's Old Testament, Psalm, Proverbs and New Testament.
This is also the way I read, and it's super helpful. Old/New Testament for spiritual growth, Psalms for worship, and Proverbs for ordinary day-to-day advice (there's also 31 Proverbs so its easy to pickup whatever day it is).
> I went to Sunday school for 9 years and I remember struggling as a child to conciliate what I was being taught at school and at chruch, and specially ignoring the hipocrisy of the people lecturing
A lot of Sunday school is way too boiled down. There's hypocrisy everywhere and the church is no exception. People try to justify their own sin and resultant problems by ranking it against others--part of the reasons Christians are told not to judge others (especially outside the church), but instead help others in the church with their problems and be open to correction. It's supposed to be handled internally, but occasionally isn't, and I've moved to a different church when I've found it's entrenched and not fixable.
Biblical Literalism is a biggest plague on modern Christianity. Nothing else has done as much damage. It drains the Bible of its real meaning, and forces Christians to choose between rejecting reality and rejecting faith.
It is a relatively recent development; in the Middle Ages, the literal interpretation was only one of four levels of interpretation, and generally seen as the least important one. It's about the last 2 or 3 centuries that Biblical Literalism became big.
> it's so full of contradictions and unclear complexities that you can make a good case for any number of incompatible interpretations
I think this is exactly what makes the Bible such a powerful and popular book!
Intelligent, charismatic people can easily use the Bible (which has implicit authority as the "Word of God" in many people's minds) to convince people to move in a particular direction. This makes it a very powerful tool.
No, the canon wasn't even set thousands of years ago (so there wasn't a single accepted Bible to take literally or metaphorically), and Biblical literalism as a doctrine is a minority doctrine in Christianity that is only a few hundred years old, originating within Protestantism, and mostly became a big deal with the explosion of fundamentalism in the US even more recently than that.
The Catholic Church didn't even think laypeople should read the Bible until fairly recently, one of the main concerns being the danger of naive interpretation, which simple literalism would surely qualify as.
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