Literally Literal

There is no such thing as the literal truth of the Bible. Even the word "literal" itself is subject to interpretation. Do you mean it in the dictionary definition sense or in the legal sense?

All language is metaphor. We are taught in grammar school that "the word is not the thing." Yet, when we apply words in a sentence, we use the words as if they were "the things". If we apply words according to their definitions, we tell a little story about it. The definition is itself a restatement of the word in terms of more words which themselves have definitions. Ultimately, we tell stories about our words that are so far from the actual truth or experience of them that they cannot be regarded as other than metaphor.

The Bible was revealed by God to its authors in such a way that it would be understandable to illiterate ancient peoples. Most of the Bible was handed down from generation to generation in the form of the spoken word or in song. Even after it was finally written down it was subject to alteration, for it was copied dozens of times. Undoubtedly the scribes made errors. No human is perfect.

Then there is the problem of language. We do not have the original texts of the Bible, for the most part. Even if we did, we would have to read them as translations. Actually, we read translations of translations of translations. These are interpretations or substitutions of one metaphor for another in the hope that the basic meaning still will get through.

God chose His words carefully so that ancient listeners and readers would understand and not be confused. He knew that we, as modern literate readers with the benefit of greater knowledge and understanding, could approach the Bible's choice of phrases and wording with the sophistication of informed readers. We are informed by our knowledge of different cultures, of the intricacies of language and by science. God trusts us to be able to use our brains to see past the simplifications and, yes, sometimes the oversimplifications, of biblical accounts.

The sequence of events in, say, Genesis, are laid out in artistic format that would not confuse the ancient listener or reader. The timelines are logical to the illiterate mind but may make little sense to us "moderns" if taken literally in the light of our more advanced knowledge. And, just because events may be listed in a certain order does not necessarily imply that the Bible insists that they actually occurred in that order. It just makes for more orderly prose that might be better understood by the uneducated mind.

God wants us to use our brains and our knowledge to interpret the Bible. Why else would He have given us such big heads? So, the Bible story of creation, for instance, is a skeletal, simplified, perhaps oversimplified account of how things came to be. With the knowledge which God's gift of science to us provides, we can flesh out the skeleton and build an account that is closer to the "literal" truth.

With this in mind, we can see that the Bible's timeline is strongly condensed in Genesis, the presentation of the sequence of events is tailored for illiterate farmers and nomads and much is left out. With our knowing this, God trusts us to see His real purpose and perceive His true Word.

This means that the signs and signals of science can be reconciled with the biblical account of, say, creation in Genesis, for example. And for literary purposes it is not necessary to insist on technical accuracy anyway. The bottom line is whether God manages to get His ideas across.

My bottom line is that there need not be any contradiction between the commonly accepted truths of science, including natural selection, astronomy, cosmology or geophysics and Genesis or any other part of the Bible. God made us Responsible. This means that He charges us with the task of using our boney heads.

He did not evolve for us our big brains for nothing.

FREE GOD !

I jumped for joy because Jesus made me free. We humans use the language of metaphor like this not only to tell inspiring stories like this but also to attempt the reverse: we strive to enslave God. We use words, dogma, doctrine, interpretation of scripture or religious commentary, and even prayer to try to gain control of That Which Cannot Be Controlled. The following section of this chapter will show how language can describe God approximately, but can never enclose His Essence. Only meditation, silent, unarticulated peaceful attention, can even approach God and this we can do only roughly. But even so, we hope our crudely articulated representations of God get better and better with time, over millennia. We trust that God's Revelation to us makes this happen.

Except in our insistent, articulating lexical minds which are slaves to inevitable bad logic, God is unlimited. God is, was and ever will be unbound, whether we like it or not. God does need to be liberated, however. He needs to be emotionally freed from the shackles we place on Him in our own minds and speech. He needs to be freed from the boundaries we place on Him in our irresponsible use of various kinds of languages. He needs to be freed from the wordy prison in which we put Him in order to make Him do as we please. We say He must be our servant or we will never let Him out of our logical dungeon. Sometimes, Christians even try to directly command God by saying “I bind Thee” in public prayer. If this all wasn’t so funny and foolish, it would be blasphemy.

God can be freed by acknowledging that nothing we can say about Him is perfectly certain or one hundred percent complete. The lexical and other linguistic boundaries we try to put on God do not exist. Due to their intrinsic indescribability their very non-existence poses questions and consequent answers that are contradicted only in the Residuum.

There is a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty about articulated statements pertaining to God (and about everything else, actually). Language and even the ideas they represent and the very mind itself generally act in a quantum physical way. If you want to know where a small particle is, you cannot know much about its motion. If you know its inertia, its tendency to move, you can never deduce where exactly it is. There is an uncertainty principle for language. The sum of all our uncertainties is enclosed by the Residuum.

Words and ideas, even images, can not only superpose, interfere and reinforce, they follow a law of irreducible uncertainty that is defined only by how much effort we are willing to put into refining them. There is a point where more effort and more description and more information become counterproductive to improved understanding. One more word, one more noticeable brush stroke, one more sigh raises more questions than it settles. God is freed when we open the door to His cage into the Residuum of the inexpressible and unexpressed plausible unknown.

The best way to open the door is to shut up. Dogma, ritual, doctrine and all artistic representations of truth are all fundamentally limited and uncertain. The time comes when it is appropriate only to be quiet. Conflict and violence over words reduces this time, expands the Residuum of Plausible Deniability. Silence in the presence of God is required or He will not be present. Still and peaceful apprehension must be employed to find Truth. Thus, we can free God and find God Unbound in the Residuum.

By now you may have noticed that the Residuum must constitute a sort of Christian Tao, a compendium of profound unanswered and unanswerable questions having a spiritual or existential component. The Residuum reverberates to quantum statements of Joseph Campbell’s take on Teilhard de Chardin.