Today I would like for us to think about what specifically goes wrong when we try to take a text like the Bible that was written in another language literally in our own.
If we only speak one language we can imagine that the world breaks down nicely into the nouns and verbs we were taught in elementary school, and that thereafter we can reason our way to truth using those unexamined initial categories as a foundation.
The problem is, literalism confuses the tool we are using to understand the world with reality itself. For example, the Hebrew words for God were usually male and so patriarchal literalists often insist on using exclusively masculine imagery for God. But the gender assignments in Hebrew were much more random than someone who only speaks English can possibly realize. In Hebrew, a chair has a masculine gender but even the stoutest literalist does not insist on calling the chair “he.”
The word for “Spirit” in Hebrew is feminine but patriarchal literalists tend to be just fine with dropping that gender assignment. Why? Because the definitions of language tend to codify the prejudices of a culture and to assume they are features of reality when, in fact, they are the tainted vocabulary of oppressive cultural hierarchies. For centuries, the same Greek word was translated as “minister” for men and “deaconess” for women.
We see the disastrous results of literalism all around us. One humorous example can be seen in European statuary. The term for “rays of light” in Hebrew was “horns” of light. If one travels around southern Europe one can still see statues of Moses with literal horns. That’s what happens when you take the nouns of another language literally in your own.
Because we all begin as children, we must initially learn complex subjects in a simplified form. Growing up means deconstructing our earlier understandings and going deeper and wider into reality. Einstein was incredibly skillful at crafting word pictures that hinted at the profound principles he was actually trying to share, but if people thought they had fully captured what Einstein was saying with their initial superficial understanding, they would not even know to look for the deeper truths he was actually trying to share.
In the same way, we cannot get to the profound principles of universal love Jesus taught if we take his words literally at the surface level of our initial understanding. Literalism assumes that Jesus looked and thought just like the reader does, whereas, Jesus taught in parables that point to larger truths than can possibly be captured in any one culture’s vocabulary.
The image of God as a white male sitting on a throne is a European image, not a Hebrew one. Literalism codifies our initial immature understandings. We cannot grow into universal love if the symbolic insights of scripture are mistaken for theological definitions and historical facts. Jesus said his teachings were like seeds. We usually don’t eat the seeds themselves. We put the seeds into the soil and let them grow into food and shelter. Jesus said:
“The Way of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which someone took, and sowed in a field; which indeed is smaller than all seeds but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31–32)
Faith is not holding onto comfortable old beliefs in spite of new discovery. Faith is not a fear of outgrowing our initial understandings. Faith is trusting that radical authenticity will lead us to the newer and deeper understanding of the universal love the world desperately needs us to mature into.