The Knot
On one hand, people want to interpret the Bible literally, as opposed to figurative or abstracted readings; the literal sense provides a bulwark against caprice and an assurance to humble readers. On the other hand, people want to distance themselves from literalists, who read the Bible too literally. As a result, interpreters devise elaborate defenses of what counts as “literal” (in a good sense) that’s nonetheless different from what’s literal (in a bad sense); they ascribe figurative force to the literal sense (“at this point, the literal sense is a metaphor”) and locate the determinative qualities of this literality in the text, even though the literalist is making the same appeal to “the text itself.”
It needs to be this way, because such readers insist that it can’t be that the Bible’s meaning is underdetermined, that the communicative gestures represented in a Bible might plausibly be apprehended differently by different readers who weight the different aspects of the representation (and indeed, “different representations”) differently.