It is as if hermeneutics began with Schleiermachen and Dilthey.
2. Read and Interpret the Bible Literally“An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” – Matthew 12:39-40 Did Jesus use this example of Jonah allegorically? Absolutely not! He referred to Jonah's literal time in the belly of the great fish to foretell how long He would be in the grave. Jesus interpreted the Scriptures literally. And so should we.
What an odd choice to make this point when it expresses the most common symbolic pattern found in scripture.
Contemporary Christianity still struggles with its reconciliation with Modernism.
Lol yeah, I think a better one for this one would be to check whether a sentence or passage is intended to be literal or figurative, and sometimes it can be both literal but also symbolically representing a theme or something figurative
I think a lot of people get confused on what is meant to be taken literally and what is meant to be taken symbolically, the parables are easy to pin as figurative but there are some grey area texts that it takes careful discernment
for example when Jesus was saying he was not going to drink wine again until the Kingdom of God had come, be meant that the kingdom of God had already come and there are verses from earlier in the book about him saying that the Kingdom of God had come because he was casting out demons- this is like both literally and symbolically ? but the Pharisees wanted to know when the literal physical kingdom was coming
so yeah discerning between what is meant to be taken literally and what is symbolic is definitely the most complicated part of proper interpretation of the scriptures
I personally cannot trust literalism as it is nothing more than an attempt by 19th century protestants to reconcile scripture with a new world view that is inherently mechanistic and materialist.
Literalism concerns itself with the accuracy and measurement of a text in a Copernican-Cartesian Cosmos where space is horizontal and time is linear. As you have stated above the literalist places scripture in a historical context in an attempt to understand where and when the author may have found himself so that the meaning of his words may be more accurately understood or measured. At the least this is how the 19th century Evangelicals and Fundamentalists read during the Great Awakenings. I take issue with this reading when observing where this history is located, it is not a history in the biblical cosmology but instead the Copernican-Cartesian cosmology. Such a method of interpretation therefore removes scripture from its own cosmology where time is cyclical and space is vertical.
I prefer to read scripture in its own context, a context that assumes that the cosmology laid out it Genesis is in fact real. I do not view this as controversial because it was the common method of the church fathers, mothers, and saints prior to the 19th century going as far back as Origen if we only consider Christianity. It seems natural that if we are to believe that Scripture is the word of God that it be a self contained system whose meaning is contingent on understanding its own cosmology.
If you are a secularist it is advisable you read literally as it reconciles scripture with the secular worldview.
