I am not a Biblical literalist. I have not read the equivalent of The Bible for any religions other than Christianity, though I am very interested in doing so (I imagine it to be a huge undertaking). But based on the contradicting statements and conflicts that arise between people using scriptures from their faith’s written word, I think that to take the Bible literally would mean to live with inner conflict and confusion my entire life, particularly in reconciling the vast difference in practices and law between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
I think to take religious written word literally is to approach it with immaturity, and I don’t mean to offend literalists with this statement. I only mean that when we read a scripture and apply it to the world that surrounds us, we are doing something that we’ve practiced since childhood. We learn what is right and wrong at an early age because someone teaches it to us–if we are religious, that moral foundation of right and wrong is reinforced by what scriptures teach us: “Thou salt not steal, Thou shalt not kill, etc…”
Unfortunately, not everything in the Christian Bible is as straightforward as the ten commandments. There is a lot of other stuff to sift through, including a full history of the Isrealite people, a creation story, a flood story, a gospel story, a history of the founding of the church, and a revelation of what the end times will be like. As a child, it was easy to believe the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth. In my imagination, it was entirely plausible for God to create a man and a woman in paradise and to tell them that they could eat from any tree except for one. And, of course, it made sense to me that a talking snake could come slithering up and tempt them to eat from the forbidden tree, giving them knowledge of sin, and thereby forcing God to banish them from paradise forever. It made perfect sense to young me because God (the authority figure) told them not to do something, and they did it, so they had to be punished for it.
As an adult, it is quite obvious to me that the Christian creation story is not how it literally went down. So, the question becomes, how can I, an intelligent adult woman, get any sort of new meaning from a story that so imaginatively taught me, as a child, about original sin and obeying God?
I think the answer can be found in entering into the spirit of the author. Instead of thinking about Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark, and the history of the Isrealites as being outside ourselves or as being something that happened thousands of years ago, we can step inside the mind of Moses and critically think, “What message was he trying to convey with this story? Why would Moses choose to write about history in this way and what was he trying to teach people about God and themselves?”
If we think like that–if we step into the spirit of Moses and all of the authors of the Bible–and realize that these written works were how they prophesized and how they taught people about God in relation to themselves, the scriptures of the Bible become clearer and more applicable to the human spirit and the presence of God among us.
Through the spirit of Moses, Adam and Eve becomes not a story about the very first humans on Earth, but an allegory for the birth of every single one of us. Just as God forms Adam from clay, our bodies are products of the earth and of evolution, but we are also born with the spirit of God inside of us (God breathes life into us). We are born into paradise, but, through the “forbidden fruit” of our experiences and our choices, we are given knowledge of good and evil. Once we have seen and experienced evil, we are “banished from paradise”–it is impossible to return to an innocent mindset where there is no evil.
But we can try… And I think that is what living with God is all about. We are born into paradise with the spirit of God inside of us. Our first experience with evil opens our eyes to the darkness that’s also inside of us. And we have a choice to make: The more we practice in the light, the closer we return to paradise. The more we reject the light inside of us, the further we get from paradise during our lifetime. But no matter where we end up in life, no matter how far or how close we end up coming to paradise, when we die, the dark, destructive, “human nature” side of us dies, too and becomes the dust of the earth. But the light–the breath of God–inside of us returns to paradise.
(This post was inspired by the writings and ideas of George Fox and the early teachings of the Religious Society of Friends.)
Church of Autumn 