I keep having the same argument.
Someone I love tells me the Bible is literally true, every word, no errors, straight from the mouth of God. And if I question any of it, I’m questioning God himself.
I get why they feel that way. I really do. When someone’s entire faith is built on the foundation that every word is perfect, questioning one brick feels like pulling down the whole wall.
But here’s what I can’t stop thinking about.
What if we’ve been so busy defending the Bible that we forgot to let it change us?
What if the real question isn’t “is the Bible literally true?” but “is the Bible doing what it was designed to do in your life?”
Because I think the Bible is way more than a document you believe in. I think it’s a living thing that transforms your soul when you wrestle with it. And reducing it to a fact-checking exercise might be the very thing that keeps it from doing its actual job.
This Isn’t About Attacking the Bible
I want to say this clearly before we go any further.
I’m not here to tell you the Bible isn’t true. Maybe it is literally true, every word. Fine. I’m genuinely open to that possibility.
What I’m saying is that even if every word is literally true, there’s something underneath the literal that’s also true. Something deeper. Something mystical. And that deeper layer is the part that actually changes your life.
The early Christians knew this. The Jewish rabbis who came before them knew this. Jesus himself knew this.
We’re the ones who forgot.
The Bible Itself Doesn’t Read the Bible Literally
This is the part that stopped me in my tracks when I first learned it.
The Bible reinterprets its own stories symbolically. Not modern scholars. Not liberal theologians. The actual biblical writers themselves.
Paul, the guy who wrote most of the New Testament, takes the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar in Galatians 4:24 and literally says:
“These things are being taken figuratively: the women represent two covenants.”
Paul looked at a Genesis story and said: this is an allegory. It points to something beyond the historical events.
He did it again in 1 Corinthians 10:4, where he describes the rock that gave water in the Exodus and says:
“That rock was Christ.”
This wasn’t some progressive reinterpretation. This was standard Jewish reading. His tradition had always read scripture on multiple levels simultaneously.
And Jesus? Jesus told people he was a door (John 10:9). The bread of life (John 6:35). A vine (John 15:1). His entire teaching method was metaphor and parable. Mark 4:34 says he didn’t say anything to crowds without using a parable.
If Jesus taught almost exclusively in metaphor, why would we insist on reading everything about him with only a literal lens?
The Four Senses of Scripture: How Christians Read the Bible for 1,800 Years
Most people don’t know this, but for the vast majority of Christian history, believers read scripture on four levels at once. They called it the four senses of scripture.
Literal: What happened in the story.
Allegorical: What it symbolizes about Christ.
Moral: What it teaches about how to live.
Anagogical (mystical): What you experience when you lose yourself in the text and find God there.
This wasn’t some fringe idea. This was the standard approach to reading the Bible from the earliest church fathers through the Middle Ages. From roughly 200 AD when Origen systematized it until the late 1800s when fundamentalism started pushing back, that’s about 1,700 years where multi-layered reading was just how Christians read scripture.
Medieval theologians actually considered the literal reading the lowest level. Not wrong. Just incomplete. Like reading the surface of a letter without understanding the love behind the words.
And the Christians didn’t invent this. They inherited it. The Jewish tradition already had its own four-layer system called PaRDeS: the plain meaning, the symbolic hint, the interpretive teaching, and the secret mystical meaning. The word PaRDeS literally means “paradise” or “garden.” Entering the deeper levels of scripture was like entering Eden.
Jesus grew up in this tradition. His audience expected multiple layers of meaning. Add the Jewish layers that predate Christianity, and you’re looking at over two millennia of believers who would’ve found a literal-only reading bizarre. A single-level reading would’ve been foreign to everyone in the room.
Biblical Literalism Is Younger Than America
Here’s the part that surprised me the most.
The doctrine that every word of the Bible must be literally and scientifically perfect wasn’t formalized until 1978.
That’s not a typo. 1978.
A group of evangelical leaders created something called the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. It declared the Bible is completely free from error in history, science, and theology. Many modern evangelical churches adopted this framework, and it became the default position most of us grew up hearing.
But go back before that, and the picture looks very different.
Origen (200s AD) taught that some passages were intentionally written in ways that couldn’t be taken literally, specifically so readers would search for deeper spiritual meaning. He said scripture has a body (literal story), a soul (moral teaching), and a spirit (mystical meaning). Staying at the literal level meant missing the mystical entirely.
Augustine (400s AD) said that if Christians insist on a literal interpretation that conflicts with reason or observable reality, it makes the faith look foolish. He warned against it. Directly.
Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, openly criticized several books of the Bible. He called the Epistle of James “an epistle of straw.” That would be impossible under modern inerrancy doctrine.
Christians have believed the Bible is inspired for 2,000 years. The idea that every detail must be literally and scientifically perfect started with a handful of Princeton Seminary theologians in the late 1800s, reacting to Darwin and modern historical criticism. It gained momentum through American fundamentalism in the early 1900s. And it wasn’t officially codified until 1978.
That’s the timeline. Two millennia of multi-layered reading, then about 150 years of increasing rigidity, then a formal doctrine that most of us assumed had always existed.
So which one is the “traditional” view?
“The Letter Kills, but the Spirit Gives Life”
Paul wrote those words in 2 Corinthians 3:6. And I think most people skip right past them.
He was saying something pretty direct: staying at the surface level of scripture, clinging to the letter without letting the Spirit animate it, produces death. Not life. Death.
That sounds extreme until you watch it happen.
I’ve watched people who know every verse, who can win every theological argument, who have every doctrine nailed down perfectly, and their lives are rigid, judgmental, and afraid. They can quote scripture all day but they can’t sit with someone who’s hurting without trying to fix them with a verse.
That’s the letter killing.
And I’ve watched people who don’t know the original Greek, who couldn’t pass a seminary exam, who sometimes get the details wrong, but they sit in the presence of God and it pours out of them as love. You can feel it when you’re near them. Something in them is alive.
That’s the Spirit giving life.
Jesus saw the same thing. The Pharisees knew scripture better than anyone in Israel. They followed every law perfectly. And Jesus looked at them and said: “You clean the outside of the cup, but inside you are full of greed and self-indulgence” (Matthew 23:25).
The most biblically literate people in the story missed the entire point of what they’d been studying.
That should terrify anyone who thinks knowing the right answers is the same thing as knowing God.
What If Literal and Mystical Are Both True?
Here’s where I want to say something that might surprise you.
I don’t think you have to choose.
The ancient readers didn’t choose. They held both. A story could be historically real AND an inner map of consciousness at the same time.
Whether Adam was literally the first human being requires faith. But the fact that something in you wakes up when you become self-aware? You don’t have to believe that. You’ve lived it. Whether Moses literally parted the Red Sea requires belief. But the experience of being trapped in patterns that enslave you and then finding a way out? That’s not a belief. That’s Tuesday. Whether David was a literal king is a historical question scholars still debate. But the experience of being deeply flawed and still finding your way back to alignment with something bigger than yourself? You know that’s real because you’ve done it.
The literal might be true. It might not. That question requires faith either way. But the mystical is true right now, in your body, in your life. You don’t need anyone’s permission to verify it.
Which means Jesus can be the literal Son of God and also the pattern of love, truth, and wisdom we’re all meant to grow into. The voice that emerges when all the other voices inside you (the wounded ones, the angry ones, the frightened ones, the ones that won’t stop arguing with each other) finally quiet down enough for something deeper to speak.
Paul called it “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). Not Christ out there somewhere that you believe in. Christ in you. An interior experience. A mystical reality.
When he said “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14), he was pointing at something beyond the literal mind. A faculty of understanding that you can’t get to through argument or intellectual assent alone.
You get there through the Spirit. Through presence. Through letting scripture read you instead of just reading scripture.
The Real Question Behind the Argument
Every time I have this conversation with someone who insists the Bible must be only literal, I notice something underneath the argument.
Fear.
The fear that if one thing isn’t literal, everything collapses. The fear that questioning is the opposite of faith. The fear that if you loosen your grip on the words, God himself will slip through your fingers.
I understand that fear. I’ve felt it.
But here’s what I’ve found on the other side of it.
When I stopped trying to defend the Bible and started letting it work on me, something happened that no amount of doctrine ever produced. Love showed up. Not the theological concept of love. Actual love. In pockets. Not all the time. I’m still learning, too. But it was there. In my body. In my relationships. In the way I respond to people who disagree with me (sometimes, lol).
And that’s what scripture actually promises, isn’t it? The fruits of the Spirit aren’t “correct doctrine, impressive arguments, and airtight theology.” They aren’t belief. They’re love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
Those are experiential qualities. Not doctrinal positions. You can’t think your way into patience. You can’t argue your way into gentleness.
You can only receive them.
The Bible Isn’t Supposed to Agree With You
Here’s something I think we need to talk about honestly.
A lot of Christians say “the Holy Spirit confirmed this to me” when what actually happened is they read a verse that backed up what they already believed. That’s not the Holy Spirit. That’s confirmation bias wearing a religious costume.
And I say that with love, because I’ve done it too. We all have. You go looking for a verse that supports the position you already hold, you find one, and you feel a little rush of certainty. “See? God agrees with me.”
But look at how scripture actually works when you read it honestly. The prophets didn’t show up to confirm what Israel already believed. They showed up to wreck it. Nathan told David a story that made David furious, and then said “you’re the guy in the story” (2 Samuel 12:7). Jonah was sent to love the people he hated most. Jesus told the religious experts that prostitutes and tax collectors were entering the kingdom of God ahead of them (Matthew 21:31).
Every single time, scripture disrupted the bias. It didn’t confirm it.
The Bible works more like an ancient koan, one of those old riddles designed to break your mind out of its usual loops. It’s not there to make you feel right. It’s there to show you where you’re stuck.
If your reading of the Bible consistently confirms everything you already think, I’d gently suggest that might be the one reading you should be most suspicious of. The text was designed to crack open your assumptions, not reinforce them. To reveal blind spots, not cover them up.
That’s what the mystics understood. The Bible isn’t a mirror that reflects your existing beliefs back to you. It’s a fire that burns away everything that isn’t true until only love is left.
The Mystical Truth Is Definitely True
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to.
Maybe the Bible is literally true. Maybe it isn’t. That argument has been going for centuries and I’m not going to settle it in a blog post.
But the mystical truth? I know that’s true. Not because someone told me. Because I’ve experienced it.
When I sit with a passage of scripture and stop trying to figure out if it happened historically, and instead ask “what is this revealing about my soul right now? What voice inside of me does this character represent?”, something shifts. Something opens. The text becomes a mirror instead of a textbook.
And what I see in that mirror transforms me in ways that believing the right things never did.
The Bible stops being a document I defend and becomes a force that reshapes me.
Augustine had a test for biblical interpretation that I think about more and more. He said: if your interpretation doesn’t produce love of God and love of neighbor, you haven’t understood the text yet. No matter how “correct” your reading is.
I think he was right.
Maybe God Meant It This Way
Consider this possibility.
What if the Bible passed through all those human hands, all those editorial decisions, all those translation layers, all those centuries of copying and recopying, and God was fine with that?
What if God didn’t want to give us a perfect textbook? What if he wanted to give us something we’d have to wrestle with?
Jacob wrestled with God all night and walked away with a limp and a new name (Genesis 32:24-28). The wrestling was the point. The struggle itself was the transformation.
What if scripture is designed to do the same thing?
Not a document you accept or reject. A living thing you grapple with. And in the grappling, something in you changes. Something gets renamed. Something that was locked starts to move.
The Jewish tradition has a word for wrestling with scripture. They call it midrash. And they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Because they understood that God reveals himself not in certainty, but in the struggle toward understanding.
A Challenge for My Literalist Friends
I’m not asking you to stop believing the Bible is true.
I’m asking you to consider that “true” might be bigger than “literally factual.”
A parable can be true without being literal. A poem can be true without being a news report. And a mystical experience of God’s presence in your life is true even if you can’t prove it in a courtroom.
If the mystical reading of scripture produces love, if it draws you closer to God, if it transforms your character and softens your heart and makes you more present with the people around you, then it’s bearing good fruit.
And Jesus said that’s how you recognize truth. “By their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:16).
So before you keep reading, I want you to pause for a second and honestly look at the fruit in your life right now.
Not what you believe. The actual fruit.
Are you more patient than you were five years ago? More gentle? Do you have real peace, or do you have a theology about peace that you hold while your stomach stays in knots? Are you kind to the people who disagree with you, or do you just feel right about why they’re wrong?
Because if years of defending the literal Bible haven’t produced the fruit that the Bible itself promises, maybe the reading isn’t working. Not because the Bible failed. Because something in the approach isn’t letting it do what it was designed to do.
And look, I’m not writing this from some mountaintop of spiritual achievement. I struggle with the same thing. I’ve had mystical experiences that changed my life, moments where the presence of God was so real it rewired how I see everything. And when someone tells me that doesn’t count, that my experience isn’t “real” because it doesn’t fit their doctrinal framework? My blood pressure spikes. I want to argue. I want to prove I’m right.
Which means I’m doing the exact same thing I’m asking literalists to stop doing. Defending my position instead of letting the Bible keep working on me.
We’re all in this together. Every one of us is holding on too tightly to something.
So here’s my challenge.
Take a passage you know well. Something you’ve read a hundred times. And instead of asking “what does this literally mean?”, try asking: “What is this passage showing me about my own soul right now? What voice inside of me does this character represent?”
Sit with it. Don’t rush to an answer. Let the Spirit do something with it that your mind can’t predict.
You might be surprised what opens up.
Because the kingdom of God, according to Jesus, isn’t somewhere you go when you die. It’s something that’s already here. Already within you (Luke 17:21). Already at work. Already closer than your next breath.
You just have to stop defending it long enough to feel it.
If you’re curious about what happens when you read the Bible as a map of inner transformation rather than just a historical document, you might enjoy my Bible Mystic series, where I read the entire Bible through this lens.