Literalism

In my experience, Christians who think they read the Bible literally often don't, in particular neglecting genre as a key element of understanding the Bible. The reading of Genesis is a common example. Christians have an unnerving tendency to make origins the main subject of the first few chapters, arguing ad nauseam about whether the Creation was instantaneous or prolonged, whether it could happen with or without intervention, and so on.

But what they miss—I think by forgetting the genre—are striking pictures of the person and work of Christ.

Adam is a type of Christ, for example, and Eve a type of his bride, the church. And so when Adam is naming the animals, we see that none was found sufficient as a partner for him. And so Eve is formed from a part of Adam, as we are formed from Christ; as she was made for Adam, so we were made for Christ.

Adam typifies Christ in eating from the tree; unlike Eve, who was deceived, Adam knowingly ate, choosing Eve over God. In the same way, Christ knowingly took our sin burden, alienating himself from God to be with us.

It happens again when Adam and Eve form their own clothing from fig leaves. Their own works (the fig leaves) are insufficient for covering up their sin. God establishes a precedent in Genesis—the death of the innocent in place of the guilty—when he sacrifices an animal and clothes Adam and Eve in skins. The picture is clear: our own works are insufficient to fix the sin problem; God must take it upon himself.


All of this is there (without even mentioning the cursory nod to the prophecy of the Messiah in 3:15), and mostly ignored by people who are so intent on figuring out problems with populating the earth, Cain's wife, the longevity of our ancient forebears, origins, and so and so forth. These are worthy issues to discuss, and not without interest; but Genesis isn't a cosmology textbook and doesn't speak very effectively to molecular biology.

If we took three minutes to take the mythic¹ genre of Genesis into account, I think we'd have a more refined picture of how it fits in with the rest of Scripture.

In my experience, plenary verbal inspirationists have a bad understanding of what it means to read the Scripture literally. I want to make clear that while I absolutely believe in plenary verbal inspiration², I don't think as a consequence that it permits us to change the scope of Scripture. We otherwise tend to co-opt the Bible for temporal concerns and lose an eternal perspective of what is contained in it.


[1] Myths are not necessarily false.

[2] There are many consequences to plenary verbal inspiration which I don't have much time to write about in this particular essay. There are also several definitions of "literal" that should be examined. I've hinted already that a literal reading incorporates more than just the facts, but also, for example, genre.