What does taking scripture literally mean?
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