The following dovetails our cover piece for this month. It’s from a Facebook post written by Jeff Turner who gives a challenge to hyper-literal interpretations of Scripture. What’s beautiful about this writing is how he still seeks to illuminate the life-changing wonders hidden in the written Word of God. You can find Jeff on Facebook here. 

If I send someone a heart emoji via text message, they know that I am expressing an emotion of love toward them. If I sent them a photograph of a literal, human heart, however, it could very well be perceived as some kind of a threat. This is why you never literalize mythology. Myth does not equal out to “lies” or falsehoods, and those who claim they do likely do not have a very good grasp on what myth is.

Myth is truth spoken in such a way that it is far truer than literal truth, in that it has the power to penetrate into soul and psyche. Whereas literal truth, unless one is attempting to study and to document literal, objective, historical facts, will do little to move us one way or another. Myth is the careful use of symbols that humanity has been carefully storing and curating in the grand library of the collective unconscious, and working diligently at assigning meaning to in the name of communicating truth.

The simple, childlike depiction of a “heart” is just one such example, as it consists of no more than two penstrokes, and yet is powerful enough that it can transmit the deepest and most profound of emotions. To literalize the image would be to destroy it, and cause revulsion, a sense of threat, or, at the very least, confusion, when something quite the opposite was intended.

And it is in this way that literalism is quite literally the enemy of truth when it comes to reading and wrestling with sacred texts.

The second wave of the early 2000’s “new atheist movement” (many of whose voices I have great respect and admiration for), as well as the denizens of fundamentalist religion, both trip over this same stumbling stone. Both make the category error of reading scripture, or whatever sacred text they are approaching, as literal, historic truth, when it is often attempting to tap into collectively understood imagery in order to communicate eternal truth.

This is nothing new. The early fathers of the church knew this, and taught and wrote quite extensively along these lines. Not all agreed, but then, when did they? Eliyahu Zutta, in a Midrash, states: “When the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, He only gave it as wheat from which to extract flour, and as flax wherewith to weave a garment.” In other words, Scripture provides us with symbolic, raw material from which literal meaning can be drawn.

To flip it around, though, we end up crushing what could become our “daily bread” into un-gatherable crumbs, and tearing our would be garments into unwearable threads. We miss out on what could be by scorning the material from which it could be constructed. To assume it is broken, unusable, or deficient, because it does not arrive at our doorstep fully constructed, packaged to our 21st century specifications, and wrapped with a bow, is to reveal our ignorance of the thing we claim to be so enlightened concerning.