A popular target of liberal religious criticism is the “literal interpretation.” This is an idea which is easy enough to dispose of—“literal interpretation” is incoherent since, by definition, if something is interpreted, then it’s not literal. The liberal points a finger at his more conservative neighbour and ridicules her belief in everything from floods to raptures, but it doesn’t take much to demonstrate why such beliefs, as outlandish as they may seem to mainstream interpreters, are anything but literal.
Consider the Book of Revelation, a great hotbed of interpretive activity. Who is the Whore of Babylon? A liberal exegesis might approach the text with some historical tools in hand. The Book of Revelation was probably written between 92 and 96 C.E. (Brown) and may or may not have been written by a man named John who was exiled to the island of Patmos. Whoever the author, exile was uppermost in his mind. The historical interpreter would consider the fact that more than 600 years earlier, in 586 B.C.E., Nebuchadnezzar’s armies had captured the Kingdom of Judah, destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and deported the Jews to Babylon.
In his lifetime, the author of the Book of Revelation would have witnessed the Roman occupation of what was called the province of Palestine and the destruction once again of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. There would have been a strong correspondence in his mind between Babylon and Rome and between Nebuchadnezzar and Caesar. The Whore of Babylon would have been a conveniently cryptic shorthand for Rome. In other words, John of Patmos intended that his writings be read allegorically as an exhortation to his fellow sufferers that a day would come when the oppressors would fall and Israel would taste freedom once again. They had survived Egypt; they had survived Babylonia; they had survived Persia; they had survived Assyria; so they would survive Rome too. The end of time, as figured in the Book of Revelation, should be understood as a state of freedom from oppression.
The so-called literalists take the same book and offer a different gloss. John may well have been writing about Rome, but the whore is the Roman Church and the anti-Christ is the Pope. Of course, Catholic literalists suggest something different. Maybe the whore is America and the anti-Christ is the president. Or the whore is the middle-east and the anti-Christ is bin Laden. Or the whore is China and the anti-Christ is Hu Jintao. Whatever the gloss, it’s always allegorical, never literal. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of a single theologian who believes that John was writing about an historical woman who rode into town on a beast and turned tricks for dinarii.
The dispute between interpreters and literalists is illusory. The only dispute you’ll ever encounter in the theological arena is the dispute between one school of interpreters and another school of interpreters. Each seeks the primacy of its own gloss. And there is only ever one motivation for asserting the primacy of an interpretation—power. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the recent trend amongst conservative Christians to assert that America is a Christian nation. The natural corollary of this assertion is the claim that their brand of Christianity has a greater entitlement to influence political outcomes.
I would like to push this further by suggesting that not only is the idea of a literal interpretation incoherent, but also the idea of literalism itself. Literalism is an expression of an ideal. Like a hoped-for freedom from oppression, literalism is a hoped-for freedom from all the mediating clutter that introduces distortions between a symbol and its meaning.
My wife’s uncle used to lead a youth group at our church, and he said on more than one occasion that he believed that once we die, we can communicate with those who have gone before us, but it won’t be communication through speech. It will be by direct thought transfer. Without bodies, there won’t be the same limitations. Tom was a medical doctor and spoke with great authority, so as teenagers we were inclined to accept his view of things. Now, in middle age, I think of his conviction as a twofold expression. Tom was lamenting our fallen state. Perhaps as a doctor he was more keenly aware of the limitations which our bodies impose. He was also expressing a hope for a recovery from that fallen state, an ideal state which includes perfect unmediated communication.
In its grand sweep, this is the story of the Bible. It is an epistemological quest narrative. It begins with exile and ends with return. It begins with fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. At the instant the fruit is eaten, humans become self-aware; they experience the trauma of consciousness. It is the lament of our separation from a perfect knowledge. And the quest ends with the unlocking of all the seals. Sandwiched between the Garden and the Kingdom are the stories of Babel and Pentecost—confusion and perfect understanding. It is John (not John of Patmos) who makes explicit that this whole story is about knowledge and about language as the mediator of that knowledge: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
To put it in its grandest terms, the Bible is the story of the ultimate triumph of literalism.
However, because we live in a fallen world, or (since I reject literalism) because the idea of undistorted meaning is just as incoherent as the idea of literal interpretation, I choose to receive the word, in whatever form, as necessarily multifarious, muddled and indeterminate. In fact, when we approach literature, multifarious, muddled and indeterminate describe the virtues of every classic ever composed. We celebrate the poem that yields up a vein of rich thought. We groan at puns and double entendres. We delight in textured works that support multiple—sometimes contradictory—readings.
A simple example is George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Ostensibly a children’s tale, it is also a celebrated critique of Stalinism. Ironically, it supports an allegorical reading, just like the Book of Revelation. But other works can support even more complicated readings. A classic example is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. With each turn of the screw, we see the governess in a different light until we’re not sure what to make of her. Is she a concerned child-care worker? A sexually repressed neurotic? A psychotic? How do we decide which is the correct interpretation? The answer is: because The Turn of the Screw isn’t scripture, no decision is required. We can defer our decision indefinitely, or simply savour our state of indecision.
Imagine if I could justify putting you to death because you insisted that the governess is a psychotic! And yet people have given their lives for less. There is something about scripture that compels people to resolve indeterminacies to a single point and to impose that point on everybody else.
In the end, there is no such thing as literalism. The activity we describe as literalism is the privileging of the most obvious interpretation. Animal Farm is really about barn yard animals. Moby Dick is really about the mechanics of whaling. Frankenstein is really a Gothic horror story. There’s no great harm in literalism. As a literal reader, you may miss the critique of Stalinism, or the allegory about evil and cosmic forces, or the meditation on the shortcomings of rational science, but you’ll still get some pleasure from your reading.
More dangerous than literalism is the impulse to resolve indeterminacies. It does violence to the text and ultimately to people. It insists on privileging a single purpose. It is a self-serving politic. And it bastardizes the claim that the pen is mightier than the sword.
Perhaps the way to avoid conflict is to rethink the Biblical narrative. As long as we assume that the end (telos) of history is a perfect knowledge, then we perpetuate conflict by trying to resolve the irresolvable. The belief in a single irreducible perfect “I am” is the belief in a positive claim. But the rejection of such a possibility doesn’t necessitate a negative claim. What if the end (telos) of history is not resolution but silence? What if the only intelligible answer to Babel is not Pentecost but solitude?
Disputes between literalists and their liberal detractors are rendered pointless because both proceed on the assumption that “What does it all mean?” is a legitimate question to which the Bible is an intelligible answer. But if we reframe the question, if we view the end (telos) of history as, for example, living in right relation with each other and everything else, then a better question might be: “What must I be?” To such a question, silence may be the only answer.
We can then set aside the Bible, preserving it as an historical and literary curiosity, or at least as a convenient doorstop.