Reading the Bible literally is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
A recent article in The Huffington Post, by David Lose, the Director of the Center for Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary, offers four arguments why the Bible should NOT be read LITERALLY. Here they are:
1) Nowhere does the Bible claim to be inerrant.
2) Reading the Bible literally distorts its witness.
3) Most Christians across history have not read the Bible literally
4) Reading the Bible literally undermines a chief confession of the Bible about God.
Read HERE the entire article, in order to understand the argument of the author.
What do you think?
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Find HERE an interesting discussion of this article from an unbeliever.
so there is no fix point as archimede was asking 4?
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al reading is interpretation
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however there are parts of it that must be read literally, isn’t it? I guess you are talking about ‘interpret’ it literally?
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This reminds of a famous joke we were saying during communism.
The story goes that a group of policemen were tested for their level of skills and intelligence.
The test was quite plain. They were presented each with a plastic rectangle slate from which a square, a circle and a triangle were cut out. They were simply asked to fit each geometric form in the respective hole from which they were cut out.
The test proved that the policemen can be divided in two categories:
1. policemen that are very very intelligent
and
2. policemen that are very very… strong.
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Applying this to Bible interpretation, as I have explained above, literalism is to me like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It may in fact work, if you are… strong enough.
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