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What does taking scripture literally mean?

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Taking scripture  literally  means, in a nutshell, understanding the words of scripture (a)  in their   common usage   and (b)  in their   appropriate circles of context . A.   Common Usage In order to understand the scripture, a literal interpretation of scripture will attempt to understand words according to their  common usage in speech  (as used by the  original recipients , not the modern readers) unless they have sufficient reason to seek some other interpretation.  This means several things: 1.  It means that the literal interpreter will recognize and  seek to properly understand figures of speech, poetic devices, etc . The simple way of recognizing a figure of speech is given in the general rule – “ If the plain sense makes sense, seek no other sense “. - An example of this is when Jesus says “I am the gate for the sheep” in John 10:7 .  One instinctively recognizes that Jesus is using a metaphor here since it nonsense to think that Jesus is describing himself as