Should The Bible Be Taken Literally? (November 20, 2005)

More from my son’s letter from college:

“While many fundamentalists make the mistake of taking the Bible too literally (i.e. Genesis), this professor, from what I could gather, didn't think the Bible should be taken literally at all. He pointed not only to Genesis, but to the virgin birth, which he believes is metaphoric. He pointed to how Paul did not talk about Christ as being born of a virgin, because he wrote before some of the gospel writers, and that story was not yet invented. How would you respond to this particular instance, and also, how would you determine when the Bible should be taken literally or not?”

I wrote:

On the general question of when the Bible should be taken literally, my simple diagnostic is, "What was the author's intent?" For example, when Isaiah says, "Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low," he is not envisioning a sandblaster the size of an Independence Day spaceship that will grind away the earth's surface until it is all uniform altitude. He was speaking metaphorically and expected his audience to understand him that way.

You mentioned Genesis. I think the author there flags a metaphorical element when he says, "there was evening and morning, the first day" etc. - though the sun that makes for evening and morning was not created until the fourth day! Literalist John MacArthur writes, "Such a cycle of light and dark means that the earth was rotating on its axis, so that there was a source of light on one side of the earth, though the sun was not yet created." MacArthur believes that God must have created a temporary sun that he knocked out of the sky and replaced with our real sun three days later. That strikes me as nonsense, an exegetical contortion motivated solely by an overly literal reading of the text. It is no virtue to blind yourself to symbol and metaphor. When Jesus said he was a door, he did not mean that he was made of wood and had hinges. One time he even got angry with his disciples when they took him too literally. He said "Beware the yeast of the Pharisees" and they started talking about bread! (Matthew 16:5-12).

With regard to the virgin birth, ask yourself, "Do Luke and Matthew intend to say that Jesus was literally born of a virgin?" If so, then, though you may disbelieve them, you cannot really say, "This is a metaphor with some deeper meaning." No, if they meant to say that Mary conceived without sex, then it is a question of fact rather than of literary interpretation.

Read the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, and you can see that no reasonable person can doubt that they intend their accounts to be taken literally. I would go as far as to say that their literal intent is as obvious as Isaiah's metaphorical intent above, and that anyone who could read deliberate metaphor into their narratives is no more qualified to evaluate biblical genre than John MacArthur. One can err on either side - manufacturing propositions out of pictures (MacArthur), or pictures out of propositions (your liberal professor).

Concerning the point that "Paul did not talk about Christ as being born of a virgin, because he wrote before some of the gospel writers, and that story was not yet invented."

Not so. The only gospel writer that Paul definitely wrote before was John, and John did not mention the virgin birth! The theory of a "late developing story" would make a lot more sense if John talked about the virgin birth and Luke did not - but the opposite holds.

The fact that Paul and Luke wrote at the same time can be established by this quick guide to the dating of Luke:

Begin with Luke's second volume, Acts. Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in the early 60s A.D. The fact that Luke stops before Paul's execution (about A. D. 67), before Neronian persecution in Rome (A. D. 64), and even before James' death (A. D. 62 - Josephus) tells us that Acts was completed before those events occurred. The terminal date for Acts is about A.D. 62 (and it took a long time to research and write!). The first volume, the gospel of Luke, was researched and finished before that, which takes us back to the 50s A.D. - the same time that Paul was writing his letters. Luke wrote within living memory of birth witnesses. Read the first two chapters of Luke, and notice how much of it is from Mary's perspective - what she thought in her heart, etc. I think Luke interviewed Mary herself (who would have been in her 70s) and was able to glean information that other gospel and epistle writers simply did not have.

Also, it is important to remember that Paul and Luke knew each other - note the "we" passages of Acts where Luke himself has joined the missionary team (16:10-17; 20:5-21:18; 27:1-28:16). In Colossians 3:14 Paul writes, "Our dear friend Luke, the doctor, and Demas send greetings," and in 2 Timothy 4:11 he says, "Only Luke is with
me."

Since Paul and Luke were colleagues and writing at the same time, it just plain flies in the face of facts to say that the virgin birth story that Luke wrote about developed later than Paul. Paul knew about the virgin birth. He does not mention it (neither do Mark or John, for that matter) for the simple reason that he never says anything at all about Jesus' birth! The topic does not come up. So what? I've written
over a hundred "Pastor's Pages" on a variety of topics - pastoral, biblical, apologetic - more in volume than Paul's letters combined - and I don't think I've mentioned the virgin birth either. Maybe I have, I don't know. The point is, if I haven't, it would be silly to conclude by my silence that I haven't heard of or don't believe in the virgin birth of Christ.

I'm amazed at the assumption on the part of some that every biblical author must be an encyclopedia of information covering every possible topic, and if some topic is not covered, then it has to be a deliberate omission ("He didn't believe that story!") or evidence of ignorance ("He never even heard that story"). That is just a bad argument, a desperate move employed by writers with an axe to grind. (This is one of my beefs with several left-wing evangelicals - their tendency to tease out doctrines from what they perceive to be deliberate silences.) Beware of that maneuver - it is just a trick.