The dirty little secret that not even the biblical literalists will admit to is that even the biblical literalists do thier share of interpreting the Bible.
F’rinstance, they seem to pay a lot of attention to Leviticus 18:22, which excoriates homosexuality, but completely ignore the large chunks of that book devoted to how unclean pork and menstruating women are. The biblical literalists love “an eye for an eye,” but seem to forget all about “thou shalt not kill” much less that other bit about turning the other cheek. They focus on all the things deemed sin and very little on all the ways to get forgiven.
Selecting which verses are more worthy of repeating than others is interpretation, plain and simple. The so-called biblical literalists, then, only take literally that which is politically or personally expedient, so they can resume their pork-eating-living-with-menstruating-women-non-jubilee-observing ways guilt-free.
But the Bible is a difficult document. Contrary with what the (so-called) biblical literalists claim, as a moral guide, the Good Book is sketchy at best, at worst full of downright bad examples. Incest, cowardice, deceit, pillage, and double-dealing are common—and that’s just among those God has chosen to do His work. The rest of the text can be contradictory, abstruse, opaque, and just downright out-of-line with all that we now think is holy, like the destruction of Jericho, which looks a lot like genocide to me.
Under the influence of contemporary scholars like Marcus Borg of the Jesus Seminars, religious historians like Karen Armstrong, and the late student of mythology Joseph Campbell, as well as retired professor of religion Paul Wiebe, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that the Bible represents part of the history of the Jewish people’s debate about the nature of God. These ideas and arguments were expressed in stories, law, histories, rhetoric, poetry—the full panoply of literary devices.
Such a view not only explains the division and contradiction within the Bible itself, but turns it into a document full of struggle and confusion, full of politics and philosophy, poetry and high-minded invective. In other words, the Bible by this view is a distinctly human document that happens to concern spiritual issues. And I can relate to that. I myself am human: flawed, contradictory, in constant struggle with issues of meaning and soul. It may sound heretical, but I’m beginning to think that the only way for the Bible to be truly inspired is for it to be a flawed, difficult, human document.
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