One of the strangest assumptions in modern literalist readings of Scripture is the idea that the Bible should be treated as if it were a single kind of document with a single interpretive key. As if it were a legal contract where every clause must be enforced uniformly, or a scientific paper where every sentence is meant as a precise empirical claim, or a recipe book where the point is simply to follow instructions exactly as written.
But it is none of those things.
It is meant to guide, to be interpreted, to be reflected on. It contains poetry, historical records, stories, metaphors, prophetic visions, and deliberate hyperbole. Even the sayings of Christ often rely on parable, symbolic reversal, and imagery that clearly demands interpretation rather than mechanical application. It still baffles me how you see Jesus talk so often in parables and still decide that the Bible is somehow to be taken literally.
The Psalms are not engineering notes. The prophets are not technical reports. The Gospels are not courtroom transcripts. And treating them as if they all function in the same literal register does not make the text clearer, it makes it thinner and often, bad. It gives material to atheists to just go ahead and "prove the contradictions".
At that point, something important gets lost: the Bible’s internal diversity of voices and genres, which is precisely what allows it to speak about God, humanity, suffering, and meaning in more than one register at once.
And this is where the uncomfortable part begins. Because once you flatten the text into a single mode, you also end up elevating your own reading of that flattened text into the final authority. Your interpretation, inevitably shaped by language, culture, education, and personal assumptions, becomes “the obvious meaning.”
So the question becomes hard to avoid: if the text is this layered, symbolic, and multi-voiced, why assume that any single, modern reader’s interpretation is automatically the correct and final one?
Literalism often presents itself as humility before Scripture. But it can easily turn into arrogance: confidence that one’s own reading of a complex, ancient, multi-genre text is not a reading among others, but the reading itself. The one way to interpret it. And once that happens, the Bible is no longer being heard in its full range. It is being reduced to a single voice that sounds suspiciously like the reader.