Why Reading Genesis Literally is a Liberal Position and Allegory is Conservative

“It is a wretched slavery which takes the figurative expressions of scripture in a literal sense...we must beware of taking a figurative expression literally. For the saying of the Apostle applies in this case too: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6). For when what is said figuratively is taken as if it were said literally, it is understood in a carnal manner. And nothing is more fittingly called the death of the soul than when that in it which raises it above the brutes, the intelligence namely, is put in subjection to the flesh by a blind adherence to the letter...Now it is surely a miserable slavery of the soul to take signs for things, and to be unable to lift the eye of the mind above what is corporeal and created, that it may drink in eternal light”. -Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book III, Ch. 5.

Definitions are hard to come by. I was having a discussion with a friend recently on the nature of a liberal Christian, and she laid out several earmarks of liberalism in the Church; thinking she defined the issue well enough, she left satisfied. I did not.

A liberal to me is someone who accepts their own ideas as opposed to conservatives who accept wisdom from the past. A conservative Christian believes Peter, James, and John have more authority to speak on Christ, because they knew the guy, so as to have Apostolic writings dictate truth to the reader; while a liberal Christian applies their own ideas and dictates truth to the texts, and selects what is true and what is false. Consciously or unconsciously, most Christians strike me as being a mix of the two approaches.

One of the earmarks of a liberal Christian that I was presented with was that liberal Christians tend towards allegorizing certain scriptures while conservatives tend towards literalism. Given the empty accusations literalists make against my view, namely that we fail to read certain passages of scripture literally because we don’t want to, that is we have our own ideas that conflict with scriptural truth and we prefer our own ideas, I can see why they think we tend towards allegory. I want to invert this accusation.

In ancient times, prior to the development of philosophy, there wasn’t a solid distinction between the real and the unreal (Edith Hamilton, Mythology, p 13). They often told stories for the purpose of conveying some higher truth; they taught in parables. It was common place to quote from these stories to get some moral or theological truth. Story-telling was their Zeitgeist, and this was at a time when Genesis was being composed. The hermeneutical blunder of successive generation was to interpret by the letter and not the spirit, the error was to read things at face value and not reflect on the actual message.

Conversely, in our culture, we don’t value poetry in the way ancients did. Everything must be scientific or historical, considered factual, in order to have any value for us. Our way of thinking diverges from their way of thinking. Our ideas about stories differ from their ideas.

When I read Genesis, I see strong indications of the event being poetic and not history. Hebrew poetry is often characterized by parallelism, and the events in Genesis are a giant parallel. On the first three days God first separates light from darkness, the sea from the sky, and then the land from the water. On the next three days God creates the magistrates of those domains, the sun and the moon and the stars, then the creates of the sky and creatures of the sea, and finally the land animals and men and women. Day four five and six correspond exactly to day one two and three, exactly as if a Jewish poet composed the story. Surrounded by polytheistic cultures who worshiped the sun, the moon, the stars, the birds, the land animals as gods, a Jewish writer tells us these things aren't gods, they are created by the one true God. There’s a message in the story.

Our modern mind doesn’t permit us to allegorize, but an ancient mind wouldn’t have even asked the question. When I study ancient thought and look at the relevant scriptures the passages in Genesis scream of the events being poetic rather than historic. When I don’t apply my own cultural presupposition, that everything valuable must be factual, and I let the ancients speak to me, I come away thinking it’s allegory. That is to say, when I approach the texts conservatively and not arrogantly, believing my subconscious idea of literalism is the correct way of thinking, I come away appreciating poetry, loving poetry, and being instructed by poetry.

The thrust of all of this is that the imposition of literalism onto an Ancient Near-Eastern writing, which was developed in a culture that doesn’t share our culture’s devaluation of poetic stories, is a liberal thing to do.