Scripture: When The Literal & Non-Literal Seamlessly Blend

Most Christians - at least in the circles I roll - do not think that Adam and Eve were real people. This is quite a rational viewpoint: human evolution has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, and given that any so-called speciation that would make proto-humans distinct from humans would have occurred at the population level not at the individual level, it is highly unlikely that there were two first humans.

What's interesting though is that when one holds this view, they are struck with a corollary question: how far should our belief of non-literal people extend in the Old Testament? What about Cain and Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, Job, David and Solomon? Anyone who believes Adam and Eve are not literal people must then ask themselves something like this - "Which of these do you think are literal people, and if you think some are and some aren't, where is your conceptual cut-off point?"

If we read the Old Testament from Genesis to, say, to 2 Chronicles, then if taken all literally we can more or less map the genealogies from the Adam figure to the David figure. But in not taking it all literally we then find ourselves having to engage in some conceptual demarcation, and this involves getting right to the heart of that tapestry of conveyance and maybe sorting through various lenses of conception simultaneously.

When reading the Bible, do you have to assume a point at which symbolism becomes history? For example, if taken literally the genealogy of Adam can go all the way to Joseph, which includes Abraham and Isaac - the 'seed' that leads to Jesus. Also, you can read into the scripture that Moses is the 7th generation from Abraham. Some will say they believe it is literal from Abraham onwards, but what about Terah his father, and Nahor his father? One can't just cut it off at Abraham without considering the rest of the lineage that preceded him. It's easy to say we believe x is non-literal and y is literal, but if we take the Old Testament in book order we need to consider what it is we're doing.

So, how do we manage our reading of the Old Testament and conceptually demarcate our history from our non-history? I have a suggested answer - one that points to a few truths that are bound to seem utterly strange to a post-Enlightenment person steeped in the logic of the Greeks and the empiricism of Bacon, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

Part of the understanding required is the understanding that in ancient traditions, particularly oral traditions, the narrative being conveyed is a blend of fact and fiction, where profound truths are disseminated in a way that requires interpretative qualities beyond the headlights of the kind of rigorous historical and scientific analysis we moderns are used to. Given that life itself is so richly analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden it is no wonder that we are insistent that a deep understanding of the Bible won't come to anyone who trivialises its dynamic nature and is blind to its analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden power.

Thus I would contend that Old Testament figures like Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, Job, David and Solomon are such an agglomeration of history, myth, legend, analogy, metaphor and theological aetiology that we can't hope to pin them down to simple historical/non-historical analyses. That's not to treat them all the same, of course - there are evidently different extents to which the above applies to Adam than, say, David.

What's clear, though, is that while God 'breathed' His influence onto the writing of scripture over the many centuries of its composition, He allowed His word to be subjected to the limitations of creation, and the concomitant human fallibility that comes with it. The Bible is, of course, a created artefact, not to be seen as co-equal with God - and as such, the very notion of scripture being God's word is abstractly analogical to illustrate His power and influence over the written dispensation of Divine truths in language we can understand.

Don't Put The Cart of Religion Before The Horse of Morality

On the BBC's The Big Questions last week, human rights activist Peter Tatchell proclaimed that while religion has done some good in human history its overall contribution to society has been negative. Even if that is true, which I doubt, that's not the question I want to address here (I did once write something roughly to do with that issue here in this article). No, what I wanted to address was what a religious commentator (I forget her name) blurted out by way of response: she reproved Peter Tatchell by insisting that humans depended on the Judeo-Christian religion for the processes of moral codifications to be created at all, and that all of contemporary humankind has religion to thank for the fact that our morality evolved in such a developed way.

It's a common view posited by many people of faith, but it just isn't true - and such claims give a bad impression of theists' ability to understand the evolution of morality. It is impossible for religious codifications to be the basis of morality because, as anyone who understands the problem of the criterion would know, it is not possible to construct any kind of moral codification without an already existent evolved moral awareness by which to judge those constructs. Or to put it another way: you can't assess the rights and wrongs of ethical codes without first having an understanding of rights and wrongs.

Even as a person of faith I repeatedly find myself reminding fellow believers that morality is a humanly constructed phenomenon that evolved to aid us in survival and reproduction. It's true that religion did get in first in our historical attempts to codify that evolved morality into a set of ethical laws and practices, but it's rather misjudged to suggest that without it we wouldn’t have evolved all the refined notions of rights and wrongs. Of course we would - as humans continued to culturally evolve we would always further enhance our moral philosophies and ethical sensibilities - it's part of our natural assent towards bit-by-bit improvement. It's through understanding that morality is a human construct that we have the best chance of understanding why Christianity is something altogether superior to mere morality.

How Can We Forgive People Whose Crimes Are This Bad?

Have a good look at this group of men above. This is the convicted gang who raped and abused babies, toddlers and children under five in attacks that were then streamed on the Internet for other paedophiles to watch.

There’s no doubt that this is some of the most repulsive and wicked behaviour imaginable. Just thinking about it makes one go through the predictable gamut of emotions: anger, disgust, outrage, sadness and hate.

As expected, the mass reaction to this on social media has been an outpouring of vilification, expletives and calls for these ‘horrible scummers to be tortured slowly until they die’. As a human being I have no trouble seeing the appeal to these criminals getting their just deserts. With such horrific crimes, it’s easy to feel an ‘eye for an eye’ mentality well up inside of us.

The Christian faith encourages a radically different response – one that, it has to be said, causes lots of discomfiture. We Christians are instructed not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good. As St Paul says in Ephesians, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you”. In saying this, St Paul is echoing Christ’s commandment that in loving God we are compelled to love and pray for our enemies.

I can’t deny that, in cases like the above, it is difficult to write an apologia calling for these people to be shown love, grace and forgiveness. Many of you will think their crimes are so heinous that they are beyond forgiveness; many others will insist that it’s not for us to forgive, as only victims and people personally affected by it can really do the forgiving. Others, perhaps even many Christians, will be adamant that forgiveness can only take place when the perpetrators are truly sorry for what they’ve done. In all likelihood, many of you reading this will assert that even sorrow isn’t enough for these wretched individuals to be forgiven.

For all of the above views I have sympathy. Furthermore, I can’t be in the least bit sure that I will be able to justify your forgiving the perpetrators of those awful crimes. But I’ll have a try – not in a way that demands you are compelled to forgive them, but simply in a way that tries to explain why I think the God we see in Jesus endorses our forgiveness.

The condition under which we Christians forgive others is on the basis that we have all been forgiven by God. As much as it punctures our ego to hear this, in the eyes of God we are loved no more or no less than the men you see in the article above. In the eyes of human beings it is easy to see that most of us are not anything like as dangerous and perverted as them. But through God's eyes there is a brokenness to being human that can only be fixed by the power of God's forgiveness - forgiveness that comes from the fact that God is love and keeps no record of our wrongs. Christ forgave all those who beat Him to within an inch of His life and then finally killed Him on the cross - and He impels us to mirror that response. In doing so it will do us little good if we pick and choose who qualifies for that forgiveness and who doesn't.

At a human level every single one of us can come up with some kind of personal gradation for our ability to forgive. Tony can forgive burglary and vandalism, but not murder. Diane can forgive murder, but not rape. For Jessica, most things are forgivable, including rape, but she just won't extend that forgiveness as far as Hitler and Stalin. Christ encourages us to throw away all our attempts at gradation and forgive everyone - not just for the benefits it confers on us, but for the benefit it confers on the world. The challenge that comes with that - and I warn you it's a big challenge - is twofold.

In the first place, it's a challenge of forgiveness on the basis that in terms of human brokenness we are all capable of just about any act of evil given the wrong circumstances (for more on this see my blog posts here and here) - and that in relation to God's awesomeness none of us can claim to be any better than anyone else. That is to say, the best of us and the worst of us are all equally forgiven sinners benefiting from the love and grace of Christ on the cross. Any attempt to set ourselves apart from those we consider the worst people in the world is simply to construct an illusory version of ourselves that is easily shown to be deceptive the moment we start to examine what lies unchecked beneath the outward personality we reveal to others.

In the second place, and this is really a development of the first point - the reason awful people can be forgiven is because love and grace are the main qualities that transform us from our awful state to a better one - just as an absence of love and grace is so often the main catalyst for turning people bad. Nobody is born bad - they are made bad; by the weaknesses and brokenness of other humans, and by their own failings. Picture those men above as new-born babies. You would not be calling for those babies to be 'tortured slowly until they die’.

The babies are only tiny humans awaiting the mix of goodness and badness that is going to befall them. All babies will grow up to sin, but equally, like us, they will all grow up to be forgiven sinners. Due to an absence of the qualities that lead to goodness, some of those forgiven sinners will go on to be pretty wretched adults. But the antidote to their wretchedness is never going to be to respond with even more of a lack of goodness - it is only by showing them love and grace that they can see how much of a solecism their wretchedness is from human goodness.

Perhaps the key to this difficult issue is the realisation that as we get older and wiser we see more clearly how people's selfishness, thoughtlessness, perversions, and, let's be frank, down right wickedness that we observe on the outside is down to the subterranean hurts, fears, guilt, weaknesses and insecurities that lurk beneath on the inside. It's the historical legacy of pain that we never get to see. Think about the things you've done in life that make you most ashamed. I'll wager that when you did those things you were not at your best. You were fighting inner battles that the rest of the world never got to see. And if anyone was going to judge you on those actions, wouldn't you rather that they had access to the whole picture - the picture that can add proper extenuation to the guilt and shame you were compelled to face?

As it happens, this is the access to you that God has - but not only the full access to the inner self, He also knows all the extenuations and the indictments of which your inner self is not even aware. If with this omnipotence His decision is to forgive us all our sins, and suffer and die for us as a man in order that that forgiveness can be tangible to everyone who will ever live, it's a pretty good bet that when He tells us to forgive everyone, we are actually hearing perfect advice. Instructions from God are the only times that we ever do get perfect advice.

My hunch is that those awful men in the above picture would have turned out very different if they had been shown more love when they were growing up. Forgiving them doesn't for one second trivialise the absolutely disgraceful things they have done, it simply strives to avoid dehumanising them in the way that they have dehumanised their victims and been dehumanised by those who let them down.

It’s no use insisting – as one might be tempted to insist – that many of us have been hurt and damaged by others but we don’t go on to be paedophiles. For it is no doubt the fear, pride, insecurity and ignorance that prevents them from responding as you or I might that necessitates our love and grace towards them – it is the medicine of agape that counteracts the poison of their evil.