Bible Literalism and various Literary Genres

Posted: February 14, 2009 - 21:36 CT

As the number of readers on our website grows, we're getting some folks linking to our articles and others using them in discussions of various topics.  We would like to thank all those who choose to utilize our material and encourage others to do so.  We only ask that you link back to any material that you use.  If you print stuff out to use for a class, please email us and let us know how the class went. 

We received an email from a reader, Tim in San Antonio, who alerted us to someone who posted some material from our Bible Genre Analysis section to a forum discussing whether Adam and Eve were real persons or fictional characters.  A person had posted his or her opinion that they were fictional, based upon the belief that the entire Bible was merely a series of metaphors.  Another person then quoted our material, stating that the Bible's inclusion of so many literary types apparently supported the first person's erroneous theory about the Bible containing all metaphors. 

Unfortunately, the person quoting our material misunderstood the Bible author's use of the various literary types in two basic ways.  First, the use of so many genres by the authors was necessary to more fully describe God's revelation to us.  This is not to say that God is fully described in Scripture, but excluding the various genres would have strictly limited God's revelation.  It took the full range of all literary types to maximize our understanding.  So the use of various genres points to the divine authorship, authority and inerrancy of the Bible, rather that to the view that it is only metaphors.

Second, the poster misunderstood the meaning of Bible Literalism as handed down by the Reformers.  This  view held that the "literal" sense of Scripture was the sense that was intended by the original authors, according to the rules for the type of literary forms used by the author.  That is, the literal meaning of a passage is what the author intended it to mean, and if this meaning included hyperbole, allegories or metaphors, so be it.    For example, interpreting a passage as a literal statement when the author wrote it as hyperbole would actually violate the intent of the "literal sense" of Scripture, since the reader did not interpret it using the rules of the proper literary form intended by the author, but interpreting the passage as hyperbole would be consistent with the "literal sense".

Confusion over the word "literal" arises when one attempts to to apply a non-literary definition rather than a literary one.  Recognizing this, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics of 1982 was formulated to clarify language used in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy of 1978.  Article 15 of the Biblical Hermeneutics statement reads:

We affirm the necessity of interpreting the Bible according to its literal, or normal, sense. The literal sense is the grammatical-historical sense, that is, the meaning which the writer expressed.  Interpretation according to the literal sense will take account of all figures of speech and literary forms found in the text.
We deny the legitimacy of any approach to Scripture that attributes to it meaning which the literal sense does not support.

Theologian Norman Geisler, who holds to the inerrancy of the Bible, comments:

The literal sense of Scripture is strongly affirmed here.  To be sure the English word literal carries some problematic connotations with it.  Hence the words normal and grammatical-historical are used to explain what is meant.  The literal sense is also designated by the more descriptive title grammatical-historical sense.  This means the correct interpretation is the one which discovers the meaning of the text in its grammatical forms and in the historical, cultural context in which the text is expressed.

Therefore, we must conclude that, instead of being mutually exclusive, the practice of  properly interpreting the Scriptures according to the proper literary form used by the author is in harmony with the practice of interpreting the Bible in a "literal sense" when the literary meaning of "literal" is properly understood. 

We have also added a "Bible Literalism" chapter to our Bible Genre Analysis section to avoid this misunderstanding in the future.
 

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