I thought the Memorial Day message on Isaiah 2 was a harmless little piece of encouragement for Christian believers.  I was somewhat taken aback when I heard the response of some extremely fundamentalistic visitors who said something to the effect that preaching was obviously not my calling and that I was a deceiver and a liar and if I was honest I would leave the ministry.

Wow.  And thanks for sharing…

What upset these folks was my failure to interpret Isaiah “literally”.  I preached that Mount Zion being raised above the other mountains was a symbolic way of saying that the God of Israel would one day be worshiped all over the world (cf. John 4:21-24), even by pagans who used to worship their own false gods on various mountains.  But these folks insisted that if Isaiah says that Mount Zion will be “established above the mountains” then it could only mean that seismic activity would one day raise Mount Zion over 27,000 feet into the air to make it higher than Mount Everest because that’s the literal interpretation of the prophecy.

These folks also believed one day people will literally “beat swords into plowshares” and “spears into pruning hooks”.  It didn’t bother them that armies today don’t use swords or spears and that most equipment is no longer built by hammering things out on anvils.  To my surprise they acknowledged these facts and said that what Isaiah really meant by “swords and spears” was “tanks and machine guns”, and they would be melted down and turned into “tractors and farm equipment” (not necessarily only plowshares and pruning hooks)!  It never dawned on them that this was NOT literal interpretation!

Scholars of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries introduced “literal interpretation” as the only correct way to interpret the prophets because they believed that such interpretation was reasonable and scientific, and a scientific approach would create a result about which there would be absolute certainty.  Absolute certainty about the future has become a fundamental of the faith for many Christians, and fundamentalism in general has come to regard certainty based on scientific interpretation of the prophets as one of the key values of Christianity.

Is Christianity about scientific certainty – or is it about faith?  Faith isn’t the substance of things which are there to be observed and seen, but “of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).  If something can be seen and known for certain, proved exhaustively and conclusively, no faith is required.  One then simply KNOWS.  The thing that makes faith great is not the overwhelming evidence for a thing, but the overwhelming size of the gaps between the evidence.  It is the gaps in our knowledge which force us to believe rather than to know beyond a shadow of a doubt.  And I think that some fundamentalists want the certainty of knowledge, not the certainty of faith which lives with enormous gaps, with lack of knowledge and certainty.  I think some fundamentalists are afraid to believe.  They MUST know;  they insist on being certain – or they will NOT believe.  And they insist on literal interpretation of the prophets to safeguard that certainty;  they couldn’t have faith without it.

This despite the fact that Jesus and the apostles didn’t consistently use literal interpretation when explaining the prophets.  But that’s another can of worms for another time…