Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has seen this quite differently, and has been fearful of what it called “the shifting sands of private judgment.” A popular Roman Catholic commentary on scripture has this view of the Reformation and the doctrine of sola scriptura:
Through Luther, although Calvin seems to have been the first to announce Monobiblicism clearly, the Bible became the arm of the Protestant revolt. A dumb and difficult book was substituted for the living voice of the Church, in order that each one should be able to make for himself a religion which suited his feelings. And the Bible, open before every literate man and woman to interpret for themselves, was the attractive bait used to win adherents. Not the solid rock of truth but the shifting sand of private judgment is the foundation upon which Protestantism was built.7
Such a harsh judgment is not a completely just representation of the situation, but there is within this characterization of Protestantism a painfully familiar glimmer of truth. When the Catholic critics speak of the Bible as a “dumb and difficult book,” they are, of course, not calling the Bible stupid, nor are they debasing it in any way. They speak of it as “dumb” in the sense of silent, that is to say, not in itself capable of explaining itself; and “difficult” because it is not, contrary to popular Protestant piety, clear and revelatory to anyone who chooses to read it. To give such a book the reverence due God, and to submit the Bible to the sovereignty of one’s own reading of it, is to come dangerously close to the kind of idolatry that caused God to despair and Moses to lose his temper in a fit of tablet smashing. The Bible is not God, nor is it a substitute for God, and to treat it as if it were God or a surrogate of God is to treat it in the very way that it itself condemns over and over again. This first danger, giving to the Bible what belongs to God, while an understandable temptation on the part of the faithful, is nevertheless profoundly dangerous. In the name of God, and in the pursuit of good, this danger will cause many to do much harm. We will see just how much harm in the other dangers and temptations associated with the interpretation of scripture: literalism and culturism.
Literalism
“The Bible says what it means and means what it says.” This is a popular defense of the authority of scripture, and it is as dangerous and wrong as it is simple and memorable. We should always be suspicious when a proposition that involves anything as complex as the scriptures is reduced to a mere bumper sticker. We can certainly say that the Bible says what it means, but that presupposes that we know what it says, and, as well, that we understand what it means when it says it. But we must remember, in English-speaking Christendom, that the Bible was written not in English nor by a single literary hand but in an ancient form of Hebrew, in which the Jewish scriptures speak, and in a corrupted form of Greek, in which much of the New Testament is found. Moreover, these languages themselves were translated first into Latin, and then back again, and only thereafter into now very archaic forms of English from which our contemporary translations are descended. So we must approach this question of what the Bible says and what it means with a certain amount of modesty unfamiliar and uncongenial to most Christians who describe themselves as “Bible-believing.”
At the time of the Protestant Reformation it was politically incorrect to suggest that the Bible was too complex and difficult for the average untutored believer to interpret at will. In order to break the interpretive monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church with its doctrines of the papacy, councils, and the exalted role of tradition as the context for understanding the Bible, the reformers had to argue that meaning was accessible and democratic, that anyone who could read could interpret. To place the Bible in the hands of the people was to place the people in charge of the Bible, or so they thought. True, the Holy Spirit was to mediate meaning to the individual reader, but authority was now removed from the community of the church to the conscience and mind of the reader. Since experts were no longer needed, every reader became an expert.
What then would prevent spiritual anarchy and as many readings of scriptural truth as there were readers to read them? A new authority had to be created in the place of the deposed papal authority and the discredited reign of experts. That authority, a phenomenon of a Protestantism carried to its logical conclusion, was not the authority of the individual reader but rather the authority of the literal text to which the reader submitted himself. Literalism offered to the reader the security that numbers offer to the numerate: a reliable and fixed content and meaning. One does not have to be a nuclear physicist to know that 2+2=4. That fact is democratically available to all who know it, and it is always so. Thus, if we can find out what words say, and hence what they mean, we as readers will be able once and for all, aided by the Holy Spirit but on our own, to know what scripture says and means. The words are absolute and fixed. Literalism thus becomes a means of liberation from the tyranny of a churchly and intellectual elite.
By the eighteenth century this power of the ordinary believer to read and understand the scriptures at their only significant level of meaning, the literal sense, would be called “common sense,” and would appeal to the humanistic ambitions of Protestant believers unavoidably influenced by the principles of the Enlightenment. The great irony of the Enlightenment, now so much disparaged by the cultural revisionists of our own age, is that while it did celebrate secular culture and appear to dethrone piety in favor of reason, it, at the same time, made it possible for the pious to be liberated from the tyranny of their intellectual and spiritual overlords. Indeed, common sense was the coin of the realm for the common man. The secular principles of the Enlightenment enfranchised the pious and gave them the ultimate sense of self-confidence that made that “dumb and difficult book” available to the most ordinary of them. Literalism was the key to this newfound freedom; the sovereignty of words now replaced the sovereignty of the church’s interpretation of scripture.
In late-twentieth-century America the vast majority of those Christians who would define themselves as Bible-believing, largely drawn from the evangelical and fundamentalist movements of Protestantism, actually believe that they believe in a literal reading of the Bible. In fact, they are not literalist, at least not wholly or consistently literalists, but they espouse literalism because they believe that it liberates them and the text from obscurantism and secret knowledge not readily accessible to any believer, by the use of common sense. Why the literalists are not really literalists I will address later on, but the appeal of literalism and its contention with other means of interpretation are as old as scripture itself.
Literalism is not meant to be a source of license or of liberty. Paradoxically, it is meant to be a source of authority to safeguard both the text and the reader from error, and even modern literalists believe that they are protecting scripture from the ruination of false interpretation and the individual reader from error. For the literalist, what counts is not what the reader brings to the text but rather what the reader discovers that the author brought to the text. Americans will recognize this intellectual principle in the doctrine of original intent, as it applies to the federal Constitution. The issue, framed in American constitutional discourse, is not what you and I might think the Constitution means; nor is it what the Supreme Court, at any given point, thinks it means. The only valid line of inquiry, according to the doctrine of original intent, is what the authors, the framers, had in their minds when they wrote what they wrote. It is the business of the courts to interpret the Constitution on that basis, and the business of the legislature to legislate with that intent clearly in mind. It is no small point of cultural coincidence in contemporary America that those who find security in the authority of the text and its authors’ intent in scripture, will be equally anxious to submit themselves and others to the same authority in constitutional discourse.
The fact that the Constitution of the United States was written in English a mere two hundred years ago by men of whom we know a great deal and whose political philosophy and worldviews are familiar to us, does
not mean, despite that proximity, that our constitutional process has been any easier to understand. We know, for example and fact, that the framers took no constitutional cognizance of women despite Abigail Adams’s plea to John to “remember the ladies.” We also know full well their view concerning the African-American slaves. Most of us would not want to reconform our country’s civilization to these original intents, even though we know what they are.
In biblical interpretation, however, it is the combined fear of errors and experts that gives literalism its claim to legitimate authority on the part of those who would take the scriptures seriously. “We don’t need experts to tell us what God wants us to hear” is a familiar and impassioned cry in favor of the accessibility of the scriptures, yet there is an equally passionate desire to make sure that what we hear, or read, is in fact what God intends. If we cannot be certain of the fact, then not only is there an intellectual problem, but of even greater significance, there is a moral problem, for how can we do God’s will if we are not certain what it is?
Among the most public and bitter moral debates of our time is the debate over abortion. The Bible is silent about abortion, but the religious zeal of the protestors at abortion clinics is based upon what they believe to be the plain and clear meaning of Exodus 20:13, where in many English translations the familiar commandment says, “Thou shalt not kill.” The moral energy of the anti-abortion movement is fueled in large part by this clear and unambiguous commandment, which it claims is violated with impunity every time an abortion is performed. One has only to listen to the chilling justification of his action by Paul Hill, the minister convicted of first-degree murder at a Pensacola abortion clinic, to sense the depth of conviction based upon the moral force of this commandment. The English is clear and unmistakable, but what the English says is not precisely what the Hebrew says or means. The older translators got it better when they translated the Hebrew ratsach in Exodus 20:13 as “Thou shalt do no murder,” and the distinction between murder and killing is not a small one. Murder, in the Hebrew language and culture, refers to the premeditated taking of a life outside the womb; killing had to do with the ritual slaughter of animals for sacrifice. The words are not interchangeable because the concepts to which they refer are quite distinct. Not only is the Bible therefore silent on the question of abortion, but the one text used to justify opposition to it is wrongly construed in English. There are strongly held moral opinions on abortion, and there are many valid and moral extra-biblical grounds for an opposition to abortion, but the literal, and commonsense, reading of Exodus 20:13 renders a weak and inadequate proof text against it.
Literalism is dangerous for two reasons. First, it indulges the reader in the fanciful notion that by virtue of natural intelligence the text is apprehensible and therefore sensible. Despite genuflections to the notion of original or authorial intent, meaning is determined by what the reader takes out of the text, and this meaning the reader attributes to the author. Thus, what the reader thinks is there becomes not merely the reader’s opinion, but the will of God, with all the moral consequences and authority that that implies. When Paul Hill and other zealots murder in the name of God, this terrible danger becomes incarnate.
The second danger of literalism is that the power of private judgment may well obscure the meaning of a text by paying attention only to what it says. Literalism thinks that it is freeing the text from layers of early Christian antiquity and medieval exegesis. Allegories, typologies, and symbolic interpretations are to be avoided in favor of the pure and uncorrupted word. Literalism does not want the text held hostage to these devices, but literalism itself is hostage to the eighteenth-century illusion that truth and meaning are the same thing, and that they are fixed and discernible by the application of the faculties of reason and common sense.
The debate between what words mean and what we think they mean is as old as language itself. The positions are clearly depicted in the colloquy between Humpty-Dumpty and Alice, in Through the Looking-Glass:
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ Alice said.
Humpty-Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—’til I tell you.”
“I meant ‘There’s a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty-Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty-Dumpty, “which is to be master-that’s all.”8
They argue on, although each confesses to much confusion. Humpty uses the word impenetrability, and Alice, no longer sure of English, asks him what it means, and really what does he mean when he uses it. Humpty gives such an impossible answer that Alice replies, “That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” and Humpty-Dumpty says, “When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra.”
Language is not an end but a means, and the end is communication with meaning and significance. The language of the Bible is meant always to point us to a truth beyond the text, a meaning that transcends the particular and imperfectly understood context of the original writers, and our own prejudices and parochialisms that we bring to the text. Literalism is not part of the solution to this problem—literalism is the problem.
Culturism
How can one not live in one’s own time? How can one not be a part of the culture that frames one’s experience? It is almost impossible to transcend one’s own particular place in the world and in time, for we are who we are and where we are. Culture is the world in which we find ourselves, and out of which we make meaning for ourselves. Christians have an inherited culture problem, however, for we are called to transcend this culture in which we live for one to which we belong by virtue of our baptism and our faith, but which has not yet established itself among us. Jesus is understood as the one who was to introduce the new age, a new and radically different culture from the one in which he lived and died, and his resurrection was the unambiguous sign that the new age had begun. All who followed him were citizens of that new culture. Saint Paul tells us as much, when in Romans 12 he writes that we are not to be conformed to this world, but “be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Earlier, we have cited Paul’s invocation of the superiority of things that are unseen over things that are seen, for “the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” Saint Augustine’s enormous classic, The City of God, is an account of how the Christian is to live in two worlds at the same time, the visible and the invisible, coping with the one while hoping for the other. That tension between what is and what is to be is an unavoidable one in a Christian faith that takes seriously Old Testament prophecy and New Testament experience.
This is a problem, but it is not the problem of culturism, and it is to that problem and its relationship to scripture to which we now turn. Culturism—I confess to its coinage for purposes of this discussion—is the notion, more often unacknowledged than not, that we read scripture not only in the light of our own culture but as a means of defining and defending that very culture over and against which scripture by its very nature is meant to stand. In other words, scripture is invariably used to support the status quo, no matter what the status quo, and despite the revolutionary origins and implications of scripture itself. Under the rubric of culturism, scripture, rather than a critique of culture or a vision of another way and day, is chiefly understood as the justification for what has been and what is, a divinely inspired apologist for whatever presently obtains. An early twentieth-century African proverb puts it well: “When the missionaries came,” it says, “they had the Bible and we had the land. Now we have the Bible and they have the land.”
In reading and interpreting the Bible, the great temptation is to use it as the moral sanction for our own culture. In making an idol of the culture we seduce the Bible into its service, and
reduce the will and word of God to a mere artifact of things as we know them. American Christians for most of the twentieth century were pleased to describe the Soviet Union as an oppressive system because it was ruled by godless atheists. These same Christians, however, were not so quick to point out that one of the most conspicuously Christian countries on earth, South Africa, justified its oppressive regime of apartheid, and the brutality necessary to sustain it, as the work of the Bible-believing Christians who were simply fulfilling God’s will.
This understanding of scripture as a force for the preservation of the existing culture is not foreign to the United States; indeed, we might say that such a hermeneutical principle is as American as apple pie. It does not take any effort to find at nearly every instance of our national history scriptural justification for whatever it was we wished to do. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth in the winter of 1620 and found both cleared cornfields and the local Native Americans enfeebled by sickness and plague, they saw all of this as an act of divine providence, likening themselves to the children of Israel entering into the Promised Land, which inconveniently had been previously occupied. The Indian wars of the next two centuries were sanctioned on not much more exegesis of scripture than this. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the notion that it was the will of God that America should civilize the continent from sea to shining sea, is a reading both of scripture and of history in overwhelming favor of the nationalist appetite for territory.
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