(Robin)
There be a strawman or two in your critique of those reading the scriptures literally! It is true, that idioms, and compound Greek words, and hapax instances are troublesome .. it is also very true that there are serious questions about which source texts (and variants) are to be used ...But, in reading over your so-called objections to a literal reading, I did not see any factual points to the ... rant?
Perhaps if. you were to give us a couple specific examples of where the literal reading is troublesome ... where it causeds people to not take the scriptures seriously; where people misunderstand Figures of speech are being literal, and then join the wrong church?
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Yes ... the literal reading has its problems ... but to just discount the process of being literal, accomplishes nothing ... For instance your example about the "trees singing" ... I mean really, do you actually know of anyone in particular that has heard an oak singing about its nuts? The hills are alive ... and moved into the city for better breakfasts! What does "reading the Bible seriously" really mean to you?
Be specific!!!
First of all. I am not against literal means in the New Testament. But understanding the book of John for instance introduces an entirely new and original context for Jesus. The "I am" sayings are both literal and poetic leveraging late onset Greek infatuation with the word logos.
When Jesus says "if you see me, you see the father." If literal it means God looks exactly like a 33 yr old Jesus. On the other hand, if my son said "if you know me, you know my father" we would not image the person talking to you believes that he and his father were literally the same person.
When Jesus says "Pluck Out Your Eye or Cut Off Your Hand" (Matthew 5:29–30; Mark 9:43–47) — Rather than commanding actual self-mutilation, Jesus used extreme hyperbole to show the seriousness of sin and the urgent need to cut off bad habits at their root. I know of nobody who reads this literally. Hate Your Father and Mother (Luke 14:26) - literally? Jesus said Eat My Flesh and Drink My Blood (John 6:53–56) is accepted as a literal command by over 50% of Christians and "symbolic" by the other 50%. But when Jesus said Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Matthew 8:21–22) everyone agrees this is not literal, but why?
Some read Trampling Serpents and Scorpions (Luke 10:19) as a literal universal statement.
Be Perfect as Your Heavenly Father Is Perfect (Matthew 5:48) is generally read as hyperbole. Some weave Calvinist theology into it. (God made the saved "perfect" before the earth was created," thus using it as a literal meaning.
Passages in Genesis, Psalms, and Job describe a flat Earth surrounded by a solid dome (firmament) holding back upper waters, with celestial bodies set directly into that dome. Apologists struggle over whether to read this as a non-literal "phenomenological view" (how the sky looks to a human observer) or as ancient mythological science that the text actually assumed.
The Song of Songs (Song of Solomon) features explicit, uninhibited erotic love poetry between lovers. For centuries, this forced rabbis and church fathers to allegorize every line into an abstract symbol of God's love for Israel or Christ's love for the Church just to make the plain text palatable.
Scholars debate whether Gospel writers utilized accepted ancient Greco-Roman literary devices (such as telescoping events, rearranging chronological orders like John moving the temple cleansing, or compressing dialogue). Apologists split sharply: some (like Mike Licona) argue these were standard ancient compositional conventions, while others (like Dr. Lydia McGrew) panic that admitting to any flexible chronological arrangement ruins inerrancy and turns history into fiction
Statements like Jesus saying "I thirst" in John's Gospel or dramatic dying declarations create friction between interpreters who view every single syllable as a strictly transcribed tape-recording versus those who recognize heightened theological symbolism and structural framing.
Parables and Similes: Jesus frequently taught using parables—extended stories or similes using everyday earthly scenarios (like a sower, a shepherd, or a hidden treasure) to convey spiritual or moral truths. These are universally recognized by mainstream theologians as figurative rather than historical events. Whereas the parable of the fig tree and the burning of the unfruitful while deemed metaphoric still invokes chills.
Books like Revelation and Daniel use dense, bizarre animal symbolism, cosmic catastrophes, and scaled-up numbers that defy a simple newspaper-headline style of literal forecasting. Thus, each denomination interprets these two books as an unagreed upon mixture of symbology, metaphor, apocryphal meaning and future imaginingings. It was not until the 1830's that the End Days theology was invented but is now widely believed and is the foundational identity to a wide swath of denominational and non-denomination theology.
"He who believes and is baptised will be saved" statement by Jesus results in major denominations and their spun off non-denominational clones totally reject the literal meaning of this statement by Jesus. Why? Because it violates a perception that Martin Luther had that no physical action means anything to your salvation. Today, we cover our fears by baptising only people already "saved." A clear prioritization of creed over both the literal and figurative understanding of the verse.
Then there is the Prosperity Gospel based on literal understandings of key biblical verses. 52% of Protestant churchgoers report hearing messages that financial/charity giving brings God's blessing, 45% believe they must perform specific actions to earn material blessings, and 76% believe God explicitly wants them to prosper financially. There are plenty of literal biblical interpretations that are driving this trend.
Martin Luther's original proposition that one can come to salvation simply by reading the bible (absent James, Jude and Revelation) has proven a poison pill to Christian unity, harmony, witness and effectiveness. For people under the age of 50, Christianity in North America is a thing of the past. Millions have fled all connection with the "church." Across the major denominations perhaps as many as 40 million Americans have left or stopped attending Christian and other religious institutions, coinciding with a drop in the U.S. Christian population from roughly 90% down to between 62% and 65%. The percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans (known as "nones") grew sharply from about 6% in 1990 to roughly 28% to 29%. he share of mainline Protestants plummeted from over 50% in the late 1950s down to about 10%.. Over the last 20 years, the number of Christian bookstores in America dropped from roughly 7,000 to around 1,800, meaning over 5,200 stores have closed. Religion remains the largest recipient of charitable dollars overall ($151.58 billion), but its total share of American philanthropy has dropped to 24.6%, down from roughly half of all charitable dollars in the 1990s. This means that while a church's total annual revenue might look healthy, the middle class of donors is shrinking. Nearly 37% of regular churchgoers donate nothing at all, leaving local church budgets vulnerable if a handful of major donors who will relocate or retire, with experts projecting that 100,000 churches may close or be repurposed over the next decade.
I mention these statistics as a means of being real about the impact and effect of the way Christianity is playing out in North America. We have hundreds to thousands of competing and often bitterly competing Christianities being marketed. Each has their unique identity established by their unique understanding of the bible and thus Jesus and God. It is not working.
