Please Don't Give Me That Old Time Religion

I'm with Leonard Pitts, Jr.: literalism has no place in interpreting the Bible. In an op-ed column recently published in the Omaha World-Herald, Pitts recounted an email exchange he had with a reader named Al, who informed him that criticizing the death penalty was criticizing God. Al went on to note that this was not a good thing.

Pitts responded by noting that the Bible also condemns to death people who curse their parents and people who commit adultery. Al's response to that was that those people should be put to death too, "if one wishes to accomplish God's will in the matter."

Pitts dryly added that people like Al scared him. Me, too. [Well, I have my reasons for thinking that condemning adulterers to death might not be a bad thing, but I am willing to take a larger view in light of the greater social good. Financial thumbscrews are punishment enough for adulterous swine.--Ed.] [That last was said half in jest, to all you literalists out there who do not get my sense of humor.--Ed.]

Pitts' main objection to interpreting the Bible literally is that the people who insist on it so that they can, for example, condemn homosexuals, will not even admit it applies when quoted passages from Scripture exhorting us to "love our enemies," "turn the other cheek," and not "store up treasures on Earth."

In other words, he rightly points out that too many literalists/fundamentalists miss the forest for the trees. The larger message of redemption as carried in the New Testament comes by "sacrifice, redemption, and love," in Pitts' own eloquent expression.

He even broke the news (to me, at least) that the venerable Billy Graham has of late rejected the extremes of both left and right, and has chosen instead to accept God as "a loving mystery." He quoted Graham as saying that people of faith can absolutely differ on the details of theology: "I'm not a literalist in the sense that every single jot and tittle is from the Lord. This is a little difference in my thinking over the years."

Amen! I have maintained for a long, long time that on the one hand there is God, and on the other there are the churches and the Bible and other works of man, and there is no inherent contradiction in accepting The One while at the same time rejecting the other.

Pitts concluded by noting that Exodus (35:2) condemned those who work on the Sabbath to death. He said he'd like to ask people like his email correspondent, Al, where his church's leaders stood on that one, but he was afraid to--implying he feared the answer.

I don't blame him.