Of course that isn't what most Christians believe. Our faith is based on the Bible and the stories it tells of God's interaction with this world, as read in the light of the Holy Spirit and within the community of faith. It is the story of God's offer of salvation to a sinful world. Our faith is not based on the literal words in which the writers of the Bible described their experiences but on the God who is both behind those experiences and beyond anything that humans could fully express. Literalism, however, is what militant atheists want others to think that we believe, for it is then easier to attack Christianity. Thus literalism serves the atheists' cause. This is a point that Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic who writes a column and blog for the New York Times, made well in a recent blog posting.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/fundamentalists-and-the-atheists-who-love-them/
As Douthat says, there seems to be a strange symbiosis between Biblical literalists and militant atheists: each insists that the only way to read the Bible is simple-minded literalism. I will assume that the literalists take that position because they don't know any better or are afraid that their faith will otherwise disappear. Along with Douthat, however, I strongly suspect that at least the leading atheists find it easier to knock down a straw person than to engage with religious belief in a serious way.
If we are to get what we believe across to our highly secular region, we must learn to express the richness and complexity of the Bible and the ways to understand it in a fashion that educated people can understand and appreciate. That means, among other things, avoiding simple-minded literalism. As we know, the Bible is a collection of many different kinds of writings, composed at different times over close to a millennium, and edited in complex ways into its present condition. Our confessions provide guidance for understanding it that is quite different from literalism. Douthat quotes both a Catholic catechism and our own Westminister Confession of Faith to make that point. I think that the Second Helvetic Confession is even clearer than the portion of the Westminster Confession that Douthat quotes:
[W]e hold that interpretation of the Scripture to be orthodox and genuine which is gleaned from the Scriptures themselves (from the nature of the language in which they were written, likewise, according to the circumstances in which they were set down, and expounded in the light of like and unlike passages and of many and clearer passages) and which agree with the rule of faith and love, and contributes much to the glory of God and man's salvation. (Book of Confessions 5.010) (Emphasis added)
More recently, in the Confession of 1967, we recognized the effect of the scholarship of the last two and a half centuries on Biblical interpretation:
The Bible is to be interpreted in the light of its witness to God's work of reconciliation in Christ. The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written. They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos which were then current. The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures with literary and historical understanding. As God has spoken his word in diverse cultural situations, the church is confident that he will continue to speak through the Scriptures in a changing world and in every form of human culture. (Book of Confessions 9.29) (Emphasis added)
The Bible is the foundation of a living faith that we must understand and interpret for our time; it is not a set of propositions to which we must give assent no matter how they conflict with each other and with more recent developments. Our call is to share that living faith as best we can despite the obstacles that literalists and atheists put in our way.
