Robert Lowery

I have lost track how many times I have been asked this question. The question is neither legitimate nor good; it is vague and misses the point. Why? Because I do not know what the inquirer means by “literal.” In fact, every time I have been quizzed on this issue of interpretation, the person has never been able to offer a correct definition of the word. Why? It is a slippery one. We have forgotten the history behind the word.

In the book Alice in Wonderland, there is an exchange between Humpty Dumpty and Alice over the way that the former has misused a word. Alice challenges him about him using a word incorrectly, and Humpty responds: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” Alice responds: “The question is . . . whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Frankly, when I am quizzed if I interpret Revelation literally, the question is frequently asked in a scornful tone, as if I am some kind of “liberal” (whatever that word means!). Bob, one of the readers of my postings, wrote: “I have tried to scrap entirely the use of the word ‘literal’ in describing the exegetical process. It is shorthand for all kinds of presuppositions about the truthfulness of the text . . . It is a shame that so many think that bland, literalistic ‘left-behind-ism’ could ever offer anything more profound than the depth, color and spatial palate that John . . . actually paint from . . . ” Point well made. I like his use of images!

On those occasions in which I have been asked the question about a “literal” interpretation of Scripture, I decided to offer a bit on the history of hermeneutics (the history of the way Scripture has been interpreted). For nearly a thousand years (during medieval times, roughly 500-1500), interpreters of Scripture said that there were four different senses found in a passage of Scripture:

• literal (the original meaning)
• allegorical (a method in which the characters, events, or places signify “deeper” meaning{s} than their literal meaning)
• anagogical (discovering what the text said about the future life)
• moral (lessons from Scripture we can apply to our behavior)

Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected the fourfold approach and stressed the first level, “the literal sense” of the Bible. I use the word the way they used the word and not the way we use it in our day when we try to differentiate between “figurative” and “literal.” We turn these two words into opponents, like boxers in a ring (a powerful metaphor expressing a truth!). Luther, Calvin, and others emphasized the first of the four senses. The word “literal” means “the sense of the letter.” Therefore, if “the letter” refers to the actual words used by the original authors is metaphorical or symbolic, so be it. Consider this observation by N.T. Wright (see The Last Word, p. 73):

The Reformers were careful to explain this point when arguing for what they saw as the metaphorical sense of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper (“This is my body”) over against what to us would be called the “literal” sense–i.e., the view that (as we say) Jesus “meant it literally,” which would support a rather crude notion of transubstantiation. For them, the “literal” sense was the sense that the first writers intended, which in this case, they argued, was some kind of figurative meaning. . . . We need to note carefully that to invoke “the literal” meaning of scripture, hoping thereby to settle a point by echoing the phraseology of the Reformers, could be valid only if we meant, not “literal” as opposed to metaphorical, but “literal” (which might include metaphorical if that, arguably was the original sense) as opposed to the three other medieval senses. . .

The question of “literal” interpretation must be linked with the issue of genre. As I note in Revelation’s Rhapsody (see pp. 67ff.), John used genres that could express truth in symbolic and non-symbolic ways. An author’s original intended meaning could be expressed in both symbolic and non-symbolic ways!

In a nutshell, when I am asked “Do I interpret the Bible in general and the book of Revelation in particular, literally?” I first explain what I mean by the term and then I summarize by saying: “I interpret a book of the Bible or a passage in a book naturally in light of the book’s genre.”

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1. Do I interpret the Bible literally, especially the book of Revelation?