Is the Bible Literally True? What Genre Has to Do With Truth

Here is a sentence that would get me side-eyed in certain church lobbies: the Bible is not all literally true.

Before anyone drafts the email, hear the second sentence: the Bible is entirely true, and some of its truth is not the literal kind, because God is a better writer than we are readers.

Somewhere in the last century and a half, large stretches of the church absorbed an assumption so deep we no longer notice we hold it: that “true” and “literal” are synonyms. If a statement is true, it must be literally, technically, and journalistically true. If it is not literal, it is soft, suspect, probably the first step down the slide to liberalism. That assumption feels like faithfulness. It is actually a surrender, because it lets the modern world define truth for us, then grades the Bible against the definition. The Bible was telling the truth in poetry, parables, and visions for three thousand years before the modern fact-checker was born, and it refuses to be shrunk to fit the spreadsheet.

Start with Jesus, because he settles this fast. Jesus told parables constantly; Mark says that for a stretch of his ministry he “did not say anything to them without using a parable” (Mark 4:34). A parable is a fiction. There was no actual prodigal son with a name and an address. There was no literal Samaritan on the literal road that literal Tuesday. Jesus made them up, on purpose, and nobody has ever accused him of lying, because everyone understands what a parable is doing: it is telling the truth in the form of a story. The truth of the prodigal son is not in whether it happened. The truth is in what it reveals, that the Father runs, that the older brother’s obedience can hide a heart as far from home as the younger brother’s rebellion. If your definition of truth cannot handle the teaching method of Jesus, the problem is your definition.