When I use a word,” said Humpty-Dumpty
in a rather scornful tone, “It means
just what I want it to mean – neither more nor
less.” In this brief article I’d like
to suggest another idea to those who say “the
bible must be taken literally and only literally.”
I’d like to begin with a parallel with Alice in
Wonderland. It began when a seven year old girl
peered at the mirror.
At and Into
When Alice peered
at her looking glass she only saw herself, however
when Alice stepped into the looking
glass, she entered another world that ran completely
counter to her natural understanding, a world
of which she had no experience. It was a world
of: bodiless cats, where hookah-smoking blue caterpillars
gave advice and feisty eggs sat on
walls, where rabbits checked watches, crazy hatters
drank tea, people shrank and grew at will and playing
cards played croquet - a magical world of
logical and semantic nonsense, all of it
conjured by a sublime Oxford mathematician.
The rules of the Game
The philosophers
of language tell us that each language
has its own rules, and that you cannot play
another person’s language-game by imposing the
rules from your own language – like you can’t
play cricket according to the laws of baseball,
nor chess by the laws of tennis. Making everything
in the bible literal-to-yourself is
like looking at yourself instead of stepping
into the biblical looking glass. The problem of
biblical literalism is that it outfits the prophets
in the reader’s modern tasseled-loafers, instead
of walking in their ancient, stringy, camel-hide
sandals.
Counter Intuitive
The world of
the biblical prophets is non-literal and counter-intuitive, because it does not conform to
our modern literal intuitions of how things should
operate. In our ordinary world our intuition
informs us of what is ‘normal’ for words and
ideas: we grow up with the rule for understanding
patterns of meanings. Sure we can read much
of the bible history and make sense of it,
but then there are those crazy poetic and prophetic
books that just don’t seem to fit – they
seem to run counter to the way we perceive things to
be. Prophet Land is very much like the wonderland
of Alice, and understanding them begins by
stepping into the looking glass. Here is the literalists’
worst nightmare. It is a nightmare
because the literalist measures ancient, eastern, Hebrew
experience by their own modern, western experience,
and deny anything beyond their imagination
as fiction. Are biblical meanings only literal-to-us?
Let’s take a quick tour of Prophet Land.
Meanings Not Literal
In Prophet
Land male ideas rule. Here men can be worms,
creatures are not animals, and winds aren’t
just air, but it is obvious for a priest to be a
wall. It is a land with only six kinds of wheels, where
above the clouds there is a garden, and clouds
are dust, but chariots are also clouds. It
is an ancient world which foretells of a super-highway
from Egypt to Iran, but strangely no cars
travel thereon. The prophets speak of kings as arms,
kings as dust, foxes and craniums. Here the
dead speak, an army of skeletons arise, and
an entire nation is born in a single day. The prophetic
world is a world without night, where men
have no bodies and suckling babies teach wisdom
before they learn language, while people
are born in middleage, and ears are circumcised. In
Prophet Land a sea can be; a city of many languages,
life, evil, a judgment, the enemy, death, trials,
wicked men, or a river, but it is impossible
for the sea to be an ocean, while it is possible
for men to be islands.
Laws of physics not followed
Here the literal laws of physics do not apply,
and wheels within each other move in four directions
without turning as they move, and in
a time before airplanes, people crossed seas
without a boat and without getting their feet wet,
where unschooled whales act as delivery ferries
for personnel, prophets walk over water like
stone, and meat exists that is not from an animal,
where water flows but not from springs, and
cedar trees grow in desert places, and constellations
are bound together with chains and cords.
Nature breaks patterns
In the
Hebrew prophets the literal rules of instinct
are suspended, and instead of babies women give
birth to dust, while prey sleep blissfully with their
natural predator the lion, and animals break the
laws of speech and speak Hebrew freely, and
instead of one head and two horns, beasts may
have seven heads and ten horns.
Men as Vegetation
In Prophet
Land men are spoken of as vegetation: men
as branches, men as trees, men as fields of wheat,
men as grass, men as seeds, and it is acceptable
for men to become bread, but they should
never become leaven.
Men as birds and Insects
In the
prophets men are spoken of as birds both flying
and nonflying: men as doves and men as ostriches without understanding, men as
owls, and men as pelicans as well as carrion-feeding
eagles and vultures. In this world ants
don the instructional robes of teachers, and men multiply
and devour like locusts and grasshoppers.
Terrestrial: Animate & inanimate
As animals - men as dogs, men as foxes,
men as goats, men as lambs, men as lions, men as
brute beasts, men as cattle and as vipers. In this
wonderland of the imagination men are spoken of
as terrestrial. Here men are high mountains,
men as hills, men as valleys, men as stones, men
as dust of the earth, and men as pits. Here
men are spoken of as walls, men as doors, towers,
men and nations as ships, but countries are women
and there are no sons.
Aquatic
Here angry men are as
violent as wild waves of the sea driven by the
wind, and others as cunning and destructive as
hidden reefs. Unfortunate are those fish caught
in an evil net, and a poor spirit indeed is the
spring without water.
Celestial
Men are spoken of
as beings above the earth: good men as predictable
and reliable, stable as fixed stars in the
firmament, (we still use in the term ‘movie stars’
as high status) wicked men are as falling stars
because they have lost their status, and humbled
men are in the dust of the earth. Here unstable
men wander as planets detached from the
ordained paths of moral cause and effect, and empty
men disappoint as clouds without
rain.
Conclusion
Literalism - The doubting Thomas
of literalism says biblical terms cannot be
figurative, and yet the literature of Futurism cannot
supply us with a uniformly-literal semantic base
for biblical terms. For two thousand years
a must-be-literal and-yet-future perspective of eschatology
has cast a kind of mass hypnosis
over humanity blinding us to the semantic relations
that lie there. Literalism denies Prophet
Land exists. The problem with literalism limits
biblical meanings to its own small literal store.
This prevents further investigation into an
ancient, Eastern civilization that is as far removed
from us as carts are from rockets. To use
another metaphor, hobbles the investigator prior
to investigation by demanding conformity without
any authority. Where is the authority for 100%
literalism? It is a philosophy of men. Futurism
does not just impede semantic research into
the bible, it outlaws semantic alternatives
by dogma - O ye of little faith.
Rational Preterism - Conversely
Rational Preterism uses an inductive methodology
that looks to biblical use to determine
biblical meaning: it measures the logical
relations between the literal claims of
Futurism against the logical relations that exist
in the prophets. The above is a small sample is what
happens when you step into the looking glass
of the ancient Eastern prophets – when you
take off your tasseled loafers and walk in
their stringy, camel-hide sandals. Each of the above terms
has a book-chapter-verse correspondence
to scripture. (It is fun to see how many you
recognize). Prophet Land is either a semanticist’s playground or a dogmatists’
worst nightmare, but all this imaginative diversity
is meshed together as one single, giant,
integrated and unified production of logical
intelligence.
Contact Morrison Lee
"The Sea" by Morrison Lee
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