Sunday, January 27, 2008

Do your two eyes expose your disbelief in the Bible?

I have been meaning to post on Biblical literalness for some time, but I was finally inspired to do so when I read Todd's recent post fuming about the LDS supposed irreverence for the Bible. After ranting about the LDS "sly agenda" (I am still not sure what the sly agenda is after reading carefully) toward the scriptures, he quotes the following paragraph from this recent press release on lds.org about the LDS view of the Bible:

There is a broad range of approaches within the vast mosaic of biblical interpretation. For example, biblical inerrancy maintains that the Bible is without error and contradiction; biblical infallibility holds that the Bible is free from errors regarding faith and practice but not necessarily science or history; biblical literalism requires a literal interpretation of events and teachings in the Bible and generally discounts allegory and metaphor; and the “Bible as literature” educational approach extols the literary qualities of the Bible but disregards its miraculous elements.

Todd follows this with some preaching, but I am honestly not sure which parts he is taking issue with. At any rate, this paragraph seems pretty benign to me and serves as a good launching pad for my questions about literalness and inerrancy. It seems to me from talking to Todd (a committed inerrant), that the literalness of the Bible becomes a fundamental componenet of his view of the Bible as inerrant.

When it comes to a story like Noah and his ark, I would argue that a person may legitimately claim to believe in the Bible even if the absolute literalness of the story is in question. Did all animals have to fit on an ark 6 thousand years ago in order for the Bible to be God's word? I say no, since I believe in the Bible and yet maintain that the Noah story is absurd if taken in absolute literalness. However, it seems that the whole point of claiming inerrancy is to say that the story is literally true in every aspect. If inerrants allow for other interpretations, they lose the concreteness that is at the heart of their view of the Bible.

So, it seems to me that inerrancy requires strict literalness. But this is where my questions start to pile up. What are we to make of a scripture like this one from our Lord Jesus Christ:

29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. (Matt 5:29)

If you really take the Bible so literally, why haven't you plucked even a single eye out of its socket? Am I to believe you've never been offended by thine right eye? Or do you simply lack the faith to follow the teachings of Jesus?