Literal or Metaphorical? Who Decides?

If you’ve spent any time around Christians who read the Bible seriously, you’ve probably witnessed a version of this scene: two people, both of whom love Scripture, both of whom believe it, sitting across from each other with completely different understandings of the same passage. One says Genesis 1 describes six literal 24-hour days of creation. The other says it’s a poem — ancient Israel’s theological answer to questions of meaning and origin, not a science textbook. Both of them can quote scholars. Both of them believe they’re being faithful to the text.

From the outside, this looks like a contradiction. If the Bible means what it says, how can it mean two completely different things?

The answer is that “what it says” and “how to read it” are two separate questions — and the second one is harder than it looks.

We’re all doing interpretive work.

Here’s a passage from the Sermon on the Mount: “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29, NRSVue).

Almost no one reads that literally. Christians across nearly every tradition understand Jesus to be using deliberate hyperbole — an extreme image designed to make a point about how seriously we should take the temptations that pull us away from God. The instruction is not ophthalmological.

But notice what just happened: we made an interpretive decision. We read that verse as something other than a straightforward literal command, and we did it based on context, on what we know about Jesus’ teaching style, and on what the passage as a whole seems to be doing. We weren’t wrong to do that. We just did it so automatically that we didn’t notice we were doing it.

That same kind of interpretive work is happening everywhere in the Bible — including in the passages where people disagree most loudly about whether the text is “literal.”

Why the disagreements run so deep.

Take Jonah. Did a man actually live inside a large fish for three days? There are serious, faithful, deeply committed biblical scholars on both sides of that question. Some read it as a historical account — an extraordinary miracle, but a straightforward one. Others read it as wisdom literature — a theological story, in the tradition of the parables, that makes profound points about repentance, mercy, and the reach of God’s love, without requiring its audience to treat it as a true report.

Both readings take the text seriously. Both are trying to understand what the passage is doing. The disagreement isn’t really about whether the Bible is true. It’s about what kind of truth this particular text is conveying.

Or consider Genesis 1. The question of whether the creation account describes six literal days has divided Christians for longer than most people realize — this isn’t a new fight brought on by modern science. Augustine, writing in the fifth century, argued that the “days” of Genesis might not be literal days at all, because God exists outside of time. He was a faithful, rigorous theologian, and he was raising the interpretive question sixteen hundred years ago in De Genesi ad litteram.

The disagreement persists not because some people believe the Bible and others don’t, but because genre, context, and original intent are genuinely complex questions — and because the stakes feel high. When a passage seems to touch something central to faith or identity, the pressure to read it a particular way can make an interpretive question feel like a theological one.

Sometimes it is. But not always.

What this means for you.

If you’ve felt confused watching two people you respect read the same text in opposite directions — that confusion is appropriate. It’s not a sign that the Bible is broken or that faith is incoherent. It’s a sign that you’ve noticed something real: reading Scripture faithfully requires judgment, and judgment isn’t always simple.

The tools that help — genre, historical context, attention to what the original audience would have understood, awareness of interpretive tradition — don’t always produce the same answer. But they clarify the question. They show you what’s actually at stake in the disagreement, and they give you language for sitting with the tension honestly rather than pretending it isn’t there.

We’re all still learning how to do this. The question of how to read the text is, in some ways, the question the text keeps asking us. That’s not a bug. It might be a feature.

If you want to keep going with these questions, the Wannabe Disciples blog and video library are good places to see the interpretive tools in action — passages worked through, disagreements named honestly, context provided.

And if you’re ready for something more structured — a real foundation for reading Scripture well, from how the Bible came to us through what it means for the Gospel — Built on the Word is a 10-course program opening this fall. Learning to ask “what kind of writing is this?” is exactly where it starts.

You don’t have to know everything. You just have to begin