The Hyperreality of Sacred Writings

Concerning Biblical literalism and the view that every single letter of scripture is God-breathed

I know a few people — not many, but a few — who are even more inclined to extremes than I am. They say, “it must be this way, or everything is entirely different.” These are the only people who arrive at a view as extreme as Biblical literalism, but their reasoning has a kind of logic to it. Perhaps it even has the most logic to it. The text must mean exactly, precisely, and only what it says — or else it can mean almost anything, and we cannot actually know what it means!