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Liberal theologians have a tendency to deride fundamentalist Christians for their habit of subjecting scripture to (ostensibly) literal readings. The fundamentalist tells how Christ’s power was made manifest in his healing of the blind Bartimaeus and the liberal answers, as if defending from a deliberate provocation, that this is merely a figurative expression of clarity and vision. Tom Harpur has gone so far as to suggest that we are drowning in literalness, and must gird our loins, so-to-speak, in the face of this onslaught against, or at least obfuscation of, the truth.

I find the liberal’s defensive posture unconvincing. I suspect that the interpretive deficiencies of literal readings have been overstated. In fact, I would go further and state that there is no way to understand anything, whether scripture or poetry or graffiti or spam, except through a literal reading.

Of course, I don’t arrive at this claim through the most direct path, so I beg your indulgence.

I am about to begin another term at Emmanuel College and will be taking courses in Koine Greek. I already have some experience with classical Greek and minored in Latin as an undergraduate, so I understand something of the philological challenges which await me. Learning a dead language provides a good example of what it means to take something literally. You begin with the rudimentary conjugations and declensions, and alongside this mechanical process, you begin to acquire vocabulary. At first, when you read a strange word, you turn to your lexicon and look up its counterpart in your own language which, in my case, is English. For example, one of the first words I encountered in Greek was doulos. I had no idea what doulos means. It didn’t present itself as the etymological root of any English words I know — not like hippo (horse) or potamon (river) which, when combined, provide the root for hippopotamus. And so I turned to my lexicon and discovered that doulos means slave. And so, for the next week, every time I read the word doulos, I immediately substituted the word slave.

The problem with using a lexicon is that it provides only a rough approximation of meaning. In fact, doulos does not mean slave. As I discovered through New Testament courses, doulos can be understood only by reference to the culture in which the concept (and the word) first arose. When I read the word “slave” in my lexicon, my understanding is conditioned by my North American point of view, which looks to the treatment of blacks in the American south. An 18th century black man did not apprehend life in the same way as a first century Greek man like Onesimus. Blacks had not always assumed they would live in subjugation; they told one another stories of a time when their ancestors had been free. Slavery was a condition imposed from outside. Slavery was never intrinsic to their identity, and from within their oppression, they sang songs of freedom and imagined the possibility of life without masters. It is more difficult for us to apprehend the lives of men like Onesimus. The closest comparison I can draw is to the caste system which existed in India until the middle of the 20th century (and which probably persists today). The untouchables, despite numerical superiority, have never known the possibility of escaping their condition to rise to the ranks of the Brahmins. Like the untouchable, the Greek slave was born into a condition of life, an identity which determined his life even the beyond the grave, to the manner in which he was remembered. There were no shackles because, no matter where he ran, he carried with him the things which marked him out as a slave — matters of personal identity. Slavery was not a condition imposed from outside; but was something that grew up from within one’s being. It is this more complex understanding of “doulos” which cannot be reduced to an entry in a lexicon. Instead, the meaning can be appropriated only by a shift from dispassionate outsider to involved insider. (In the matter of dead languages, one can only approximate such a shift; it is difficult to conceive of how one can truly become an “insider” in relation to a dead culture.) As one shifts from outsider to insider, the need for a lexicon ceases. Doulos no longer means (stands for) “slave”; doulos means doulos. There is no other way to say it.

This shift from outsider to insider, which I liken to a conversion, is impossible to locate in time. It is like reaching into a river to grasp a single drop of water. It reminds me of how my children first learned to talk. In an instant, it seemed, their inchoate babblings became perfectly formed words; in an instant, they were transformed from helpless vessels adrift on a sometimes stormy torrent of words, to well-manned craft steering their own course, often with considerable expertise.

The same conversion can be found in the story in which Jesus heals the blind Bartimaeus. When we conduct our exegesis, we anti-literalists tend to say that physical blindness means, stands for, symbolizes, signifies, a poverty of spiritual insight. Such an exegesis flows naturally from a huge store of visual imagery which includes light and dark (standing in for the forces of good and evil), fire and flames (standing in for both truth or sin, depending upon the context) and stars (standing in for heaven or eternity). But what we call a “literal” reading of the story, one in which Jesus really and truly healed an historically situated man named Bartimaeus, may be the product of a conversion, a shift in the locus of meaning from our outside appropriation to a more direct, inside appropriation of the story. On my account of a literal reading, it is not the fact of blindness (symbolic of an absence of insight) which counts as meaningful, but the entire story. When a charismatic preacher mentions the name, Bartimaeus, all his listeners call to mind (literal) images of Jesus healing a blind man. But the story is a cipher. Everybody knows what “Bartimaeus” means: immediately, it imports a host of understandings, many of which may never be fully articulated. This suggests that such a “literal” approach may, in fact, be aliteral, with referents which have nothing to do with verbal expression of any sort. In the end, to a fundamentalist, the story of Bartimaeus means precisely the same thing it means to a liberal. But a liberal’s ability to assume an insider’s view is hindered by the ineluctable impulse of rationality which refuses to accept the paradox that a believer can simultaneously accept that the historical Jesus really did restore sight to the blind Bartimaeus and presented to the world a new clarity of vision. Moreover, the liberal theologian refuses to entertain the possibility that the fundamental’s aliteral literalness may well be congruent with a rational exegesis.

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