In thirty years of studying and teaching the Bible, I can't count how many times I've had to guide adults away from an unthinking fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. A century of teaching about the dangers of literalist interpretation seem to have gone unnoticed by most contemporary Catholics.Fr. Raymond Brown, S.S., talked about a "natural literalism" that Catholics have fallen heir to. He said that otherwise sophisticated Catholics often simply haven't thought about the fact that the Bible is a literary work compiled over the course of centuries, bound in time and space to particular cultures and historical contexts. So, if Catholics approach the Bible at all, they consider it to be divine dictation, in the Elizabethan language of King James, communicated from God's mouth to the ear of venerable human authors.
So as we hand down the faith to another generation of Catholics, I urge that we think carefully about how we speak about the Bible. Do we, unthinkingly, talk about the Garden of Eden as a literal place, rather than a symbol of the beauty and fulfillment we strive for but cannot attain except by the intervention of God in our lives? Can we remember to engage the symbols and stories of Genesis 1-11 as we would the parables of Jesus--as instructive fiction that communicates the kind of truth that runs deeper than the factual trivia we read online one minute and forget the next? Without engaging questions that younger children are not ready to consider, can we help them marvel at the wonderful stories that wrap us in God's loving embrace, while at the same time framing the conversation in such a way that they see through the literal level of the stories in much the same way that they see through the costume and know that the grown-up sized bunny at the mall is really a person dressed up?
If we can find ways to help children engage the symbols and stories of the Bible with reason and faith, then perhaps as adults they will not have to unlearn the naive literalism we have inadvertently taught them.
(For the full text of the Pontifical Biblical Commission's 1993 document, "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church," click here or on the image above.)
