Death of the Literalist

My first real crisis of faith began when I was fourteen. To be sure, I’d had my share of spiritually formative difficulties, only minor in hindsight. A common variety was a drawn-out interior struggle with the guilt of having lied to my parents about some trespass, finally relieved by their ready forgiveness after hearing my confession. This is testimony to the loving, Christian environment in which I was raised; I always knew a personal and benevolent God, even as I lay in the dark wrestling with my own depravity.

The crisis was to encounter an idea that challenged the foundations of my reality. An idea I could neither sidestep, nor see past. In my first year of high school, I began to doubt that the early chapters of Genesis were literally true. The thought arose in the context of increased exposure to the methods and discoveries of science, which seemed respectively honest and wonderful. I had an appetite for all of it, especially the big-picture stuff. T-Rex was already suspiciously absent from the Crayola-colored cosmos of my childhood, with its 6,000 year-old earth and parade of mammals going “two by two”. Now there was mounting evidence that the earth was positively ancient, and that its life—hauntingly diverse—was evolving by natural processes. This directly contradicted my fundamentalist Bible, and I was up against it.

For a couple of years I fought back with creationist pseudo-science and textual acrobatics, but I quietly knew this was a losing battle. Two particular influences signaled my rescue. One was a newly-discovered knack for the critical analysis of literature, due to an encouraging English teacher. The second was an articulate preacher friend who handled Biblical texts more like the literature in Mr. Harris’ class. New and explanatory dimensions of the Bible began to suggest themselves. Maybe the early chapters of Genesis were speaking the higher-level language of myth, and the dinosaurs could rest peacefully in their carbon-dated graves.

But the turmoil at the intellectual borders of my faith was to continue for years. Rather than give out completely, the literalist in me had only ceded a little territory. My parochial cosmology was just the first casualty of a fresh approach to scripture, and the game was afoot. C.S. Lewis had said “science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly”. Conversely, if I was to keep both science and conscience, I would have to untwist my “inerrant” Bible. And so I repeated the exercise, from Adam and Eve to Armageddon. Over the years, many books and Bible studies inched me forward, until the work reached a tipping point. My approach to scripture inverted all at once, and the literal underpinnings of my childhood faith melted away.

I wasn’t just out to debunk all the supernatural bits. After all, science was telling me that physicality itself had popped out of the void and danced into dazzling, self-conscious complexity; the universe was founded on a miracle. Nor was I attempting to allegorize away the literal; a real history gave rise to the artifact of the Bible, and it was deeply interwoven with the text itself, even if infrequently corroborated by archaeology. Rather, I was becoming convinced that I should leave my theological preconceptions at the door and try to understand the Bible from the inside out, no matter where that led. I’d begin by asking what was the author’s original intent?, try to honor science and scholarship, and only then consider the implications for belief and action. The approach welcomed the whole toolkit of literary criticism, and though my storybook Bible was coming apart at the seams, the constituent texts were now free to operate on their own terms.

This constituted a shift from the literal to the literary, which is multi-literate: free to echo real history, obscure it in paradox, or ignore it completely. The ordained text became an organic one, not pre-engineered and progressively revealed, but evolving and self-healing. Losing a systematic work, I gained a sincere one. Losing magic, I was left to study meaning. And the meaning I found is no less than key to my own soul and to the cosmos. Here the Word is sharper than any two-edged infallibility, and I am perpetually divided asunder. To share this buried treasure may well be my life’s work. It is certainly the work of this memoir.

I’ll close by addressing a question begged of the budding exegete. If scriptural meaning springs from the literary dimension—where context is key—then why have a canon at all? Well, anthology is literature too, and the Christian Bible’s center of mass is clearly the beginning of the New Testament: that earth-shaking good news that pulled in an entire Hebrew Bible by its own gravity and inspired the trove of epistles that was to enunciate the new religion of the West. As I set off to college, this gospel was still keeping secrets near the center of my faith. Though I could hardly explain it, Christ had made me a Christian first, and only secondly a scholar. But there was more dying to do.