Quotes About Literalism

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Whether Jewish or Christian, our religions have stressed too strongly the strictly historical aspect, so that we are, so to say, in worship of the historical event, instead of being able to read through that event to the spiritual message for ourselves. People turn to Oriental religion because therein they find the real message which has been closed by excessive literalism and historicism in their own religion and which is now open to them

This is the emancipation of the nigredo from literalism. Like cures like; we cure the nigredo by becoming, as the texts say, blacker than black – archetypally black, and thereby no longer colored by all-too-human prejudices of color.

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, visionary or glib, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images—is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism—a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? The great muscle of the unconstricted throat?

The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.

Remember this: pure literalism always leads to a decrease in meaning. Mythology and sacred texts try to lead us and allow us to have the experience for ourselves. Through our experience we discover that encounter is not only possible but desirable. So often we struggle with experiencing our experiences.

To take the Scriptures seriously is not to take them literally. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning. Most

Essa iconoclastia ainda espreita em toda parte, e o diabo é o literalismo. Quando tomamos as coisas literalmente, aniquilamos o poder dos símbolos de nos fazer percorrer os vários níveis de entendimento.

Christianity is a myth that has been literalised.

If I have a goal, then it is to escape from this literalism. I'll never achieve it; in the same way that I'll never manage to describe what really dwells within my character, although I keep on trying.

All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.

The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long-distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal-mindedness.

The distinguishing marks of fundamentalism in the broad sense are: biblical literalism; total inerrancy, including perfect factual accuracy; revelation as essentially propositional; a profound distrust of biblical criticism, especially higher criticism; premillennial eschatology; and the call to separate from apostate churches.

The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt.

The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.

Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. [...] The first thing to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult to accept as written.

The doors leading out of the prison of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside.

Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.

I would argue that no approach to a text is without method—even what you would call literalism and what I call "vacuous literalism." (In

Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.

The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The

Modern biblical literalism with its emphasis on factuality is not only very different from what "the literal meaning of a text" has meant for most of Christian history; it also has consequences that minimally are unfortunate and unnecessary and more seriously obscure and distort what the Bible and being Christian are about. Indeed, it discredits the Bible and Christianity in the minds of many people.

If there were such a thing as terminal literalism, you'd have died in childhood.

Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith.