Lex Rex

Sorry guys… I know I am a bit late here….

Sean hits the nail on the head, which is to ask about the Sermon on the Mount.

But it’s not surprising after a fashion that Jacobs shouldn’t. He’s a secular Jew. It’s not a huge shock that the Bible, for him, should be a book of funny stories about people from olden times plus rules — lots of rules — for how to live your life. What else could it be?

If he had taken the time to try to understand Christianity, especially from the angle of Luther and the prism of Law/Gospel, then of course he’d have had to confront the Antitheses of the SOTM, and later St. Paul’s reflection on the Law in Romans and Galations. But that would have rendered Jacobs’ whole zany “year” pointless, and would have made him scrap his next book idea.

Aside from Sean’s point, I admit to just being really embarrassed when I hear people talk, usually with a certain smugness, about “how they don’t take the Bible literally.” My Cathedral dean writes a lot about that.

It’s embarrassing because it reveals a really shallow understanding of language and what it means to read — not just Scripture but read anything. Most of the time what the person means is NOT that he doesn’t take a particular Bible passage literally, but that he doesn’t view it as Binding or Authoritative (or possibly, if it is in the declarative and not imperative mode, that he thinks it is untrue).

So for example, when he deals with a Leviticine command not to eat cheeseburgers (meat mixed with milk) what he presumably means when he says he doesn’t take it literally is that this is a ceremonial rule not binding on him (as opposed to ethical law of the 10 C’s). But what he doesn’t mean is that there is some deep allegorized cheeseburger that really is truly forbidden, if only one had the proper nonliteral sight to see it.

In other words, most of the time that he says he isn’t taking it literally, he knows and accepts the literal meaning — he just means what the Bible plainly says is what he doesn’t plan to obey.

Not taking a Bible passage literally should in my view by reserved for plain cases of metaphorical language (I am the vine and you are the fruit of the vine), or where the whole genre is wildly poetic (as in Revelation) or mythic (Genesis 1-3); and even in these cases “not taking it literally” should not be code for not taking it seriously.

It embarasses me to see this in my old left-wing mates because this is stuff they should have learned just by learning how to read. They look like idiots when they say stuff like this. I want to run and take the mike from them before they say anything more.