Taking Scripture Seriously -- Andrew Sullivan's response to Sam Harris

Andrew Sullivan is having an interesting Beliefnet "debate" focused on religious moderation. It's Harris' view that religious moderates are being disingenuous about their professions of faith, because by not taking the text with strict literalness they don't take it seriously. Sullivan offers a very reasoned and straightforward response that undermines Harris' rationalist positions, and shows them to be in what my mind is a straw man.

As for the charge of not taking the text seriously, Sullivan writes:

Blogger, please. In many ways, the source of much of today's religious moderation is taking scripture more seriously than the fundamentalists. Take the Catholic scholar Garry Wills. Read his marvelous recent monographs on Jesus and Paul and you will see a rational believer poring through the mounds of new historical scholarship to get closer and closer to who Jesus really was, and what Paul was truly trying to express. For me, the deconstruction of a crude notion of Biblical inerrantism is not a path to a weaker faith but to a stronger one, unafraid of history, of truth, of the past, or the inevitable confusion that the very human followers of a divine intervention created after his death and resurrection. I find in this unsatisfying scriptural mess very human proof of a remarkable event - the most remarkable event, in my view - in the history of humankind.


Sullivan is exactly right -- it is in taking Scripture as a text with a history and context that Moderates take the Bible with great seriousness. Marcus Borg speaks of taking the Bible seriously but not literally, I think we can modify this a bit so that it reads as one Biblical Scholar suggest, taking it seriously but not necessarily literally. The question is really whether all of Scripture should be taken metaphorically or not. One thing to note of course is that historically the church has tended to read much of the Scriptural text in non-literal ways -- allegory, for instance, was foundational to medieval readings of Scripture. The Reformation pushed a more "literal" reading, but even they knew that not everything could be taken that way. So, I give my points to Mr. Sullivan!

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