Banned Questions About the Bible

Q.

How can we begin to take the Bible literally?

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In college, I was often in classes with a certain poor girl who was a fun-

damentalist Christian and believed the literal word of the Bible. Incidentally, I

don’t consider her to be a “poor girl” because she was a fundamentalist Chris-

tian! I felt sorry for her because she kept taking classes that frequently ren-

dered her distraught. Here’s how class went pretty much every day for “Jane.”

Classmate: If the total population of the world was Adam, Eve, Cain, and

Abel, and Abel smote Cain and then had the “mark of Cain” put on his

forehead so that all the rest of the people of the world would know the

awful thing he did, who are the rest of the people? Mom and Dad?

Jane: (confi dently) No, the heathens.

Classmate: It doesn’t say anything about God creating heathens.

Jane: (less confi dently) Yes it did... when he created the beasts.

Classmate: Did you just call all the non-Christians “beasts”?

Jane: (tearing up) Well... yes...

At this point, the class erupted and she burst into tears. In every class I

had with her, the waterworks would start up at least once a week. Her supe-

rior critical thinking continually butted up against her literal belief in the

Bible. The interesting thing was that she could easily have made it through

college without taking those courses, and yet she kept signing up for them.

I’ve always wondered if she managed to reconcile the two sides of herself.

Scriptural References

Genesis 1, 2; Matthew 1:18—2:23; 5:21–48; Luke 2:1–20; Hebrews 4

Suggested Additional Sources for Reading

• Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God (Ballantine, 2001).


• Marcus J. Borg, Reading the Bible again for the First Time: Taking the Bible
  Seriously but Not Literally (Harper San Francisco, 2002).

Suggested Questions for Further Discussion/Thought

1. Do you think it’s possible to take parts of the Bible literally and leave out
   others?


2. Does fi xating on literal interpretation limit God?


3. How are you learning to live with the inconsistencies in the Bible? What
   does that look like, feel like, for you?


4. Can two statements that seem to contradict each other somehow both be
   true? If so, how?

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