The Limits of Literalism

I was watching an interview with NT Wright yesterday. He was the bishop of Durham in the early 2000s and a Bible scholar/theologian/historian. He was answering a few questions about the Genesis account of creation and its apparent conflict with what science has discovered regarding evolution. To summarize, Wright says the problem isn't so much with the Bible but the biblical literalism.

Biblical literalism is reading the Bible literally rather than as allegory or symbolic. This came out of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The Reformation denounced the authority of the pope and, to fill the vacuum, Protestants turned to the Bible. During the Enlightenment, the scientific method and the exacting measurements of the physical world as truth led to reading this type of thinking into the Bible.

Because of this, mystical thinking was seen as superstitious and was dropped in the West. There's obvious benefits to literal, exacting truth. It's led to all the technological advances we've made. Useful things come from the scientific method. But, narrowing thinking to just this dimension misses out on beauty and mystery. Things become flat. Two dimensional. Black and white.

Getting back to the NT Wright interview, I read some of the comments. NT Wright is frustrating to literal thinkers, both believers and atheists. They claim he dances around issues and won't give a clear-cut yes or no answer. But that's the whole point of allegory. There is no one either/or answer. It's a both/and. I think our western, scientific mindset has demonized imaginative thinking. Rather than dismissing an idea as literally false, it would benefit us to spend time chewing on something, looking for the deeper truth. Jung talked about this with archetypes. Some truths can't be narrowed down to prepositional statements.

Shortly after this, I listened to an orchestra perform Wander My Friends by composer Bear McCreary. It's fantastic. To try to put it into words cheapens it. It must be experienced. This is how all mystical truths are discovered. They are fingers pointing to the moon. Feelings can be described with words but are never truly known until they are felt. This is one of the limitations with what I'm doing right now with this blog. It's words on a screen, which will never fully capture what's going on in my head and heart. But that should never stop us from trying. Words, though limited, are the only medium we have to connect with each other. So, use words but hold them loosely, knowing that there's always more to experience.