When someone asks whether you take the Bible literally, the best answer starts by questioning the question. It assumes the Bible is one kind of writing that you must read in one setting. It is not. It is a collection of narratives, laws, poems, proverbs, prophecies, letters and visions. So the honest reply is this: I read each part according to the kind of writing it is, and that tells me when a passage is meant literally. This guide helps you test that answer rather than just repeat it. You can work through it alone in one sitting or with a group over one or two meetings. Each section includes a short task, and the discussion questions near the end work best after the practice.
The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Kristie Anyabwile, a writer who trains Bible teachers in her local church. Anyabwile’s ordering is simple: “every book of the Bible can be studied and should be studied literarily according to its literary genre.” Genre comes first. The literal question comes second, and it often answers itself once the first question is settled.
Map the question before you answer it
A question can be unfair without being hostile. It is unfair when every answer it allows depends on a premise the person answering does not accept. The question Do you take the Bible literally? usually carries three premises, and most people never notice them.
- The Bible is one kind of writing, so one reading strategy fits all of it.
- Reading a passage literally means believing it is true.
- Reading a passage figuratively means believing it is not true.
Put those together and you get a trap. Answer yes, and you seem committed to reading a poem like a police report. Answer no, and you seem to be quietly giving up on the Bible’s truth. Both answers accept the premises. The way out is to examine them.
Task. Before reading on, write the three premises on a page. Next to each, mark whether you think it is true, false or partly true. Do not explain yet. You will come back to this page at the end and see whether anything moved.
First observation: three passages, three ways of telling the truth
Read these three passages slowly. For each, answer two questions: What is it claiming? How is it making that claim?
Luke 15:11 opens a story Jesus tells: “A certain man had two sons.” Isaiah 55:12 promises that “all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” And Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
Now test the premises against what you found. Jesus’s story of the two sons is a parable. Does the truth of what Jesus teaches about the father’s welcome depend on whether a particular father with two sons once lived in Galilee? Most readers see at once that it does not. The parable tells the truth about God without reporting an event. The trees in Isaiah do not have hands, and no reader thinks the prophet has made an error. The image carries a real claim about the joy of God’s restored people. In both cases, a figurative reading is not a denial of truth. It is the reading the writer intended.
That is a counterexample to premise three, and one solid counterexample is enough to break a universal claim. If even one passage can be figurative and true, then “figurative means false” cannot stand as a general rule.
The proverb is a harder case, and we will return to it.
What Anyabwile adds: a prior question
Anyabwile admits that she grew up without thinking about genre at all. When she learned it, she defined it plainly: “a genre is basically a category, it’s just how you group things together.” She then lists the questions a reader asks of any passage: “Is it a story, should it be read as historical fact? Is it a parable?” Is it poetry, full of images, emotive?
Her contribution is not that some of the Bible is figurative. Readers have always known that. Her contribution is the order of operations. Historical narrative, she says, you do want to read literally. Poetry and wisdom literature use metaphor and image, and for those she says “it’s not meant for that,” meaning a flat literal reading. Then comes her summary: “you can’t read it literally, but you can read it literarily.”
Notice what this does to premise one. If genre is a real feature of the text, then no single reading strategy can fit the whole Bible. The question Do you take the Bible literally? is then like asking whether you take a newspaper literally. The news reports, yes. The political cartoon, no. The crossword, not in that sense at all. The useful answer is not yes or no. It is “Which page?”
She also warns against a tidy version of this idea: “there are elements of narrative in other books too.” Genesis and Exodus contain long stories even though they belong to the books of instruction. So genre is something you notice passage by passage, not a label you stamp on a book once and forget.
Test case: when a literal reading of the wrong genre does damage
Go back to Proverbs 22:6. Read as a universal promise, it has a strict logical form: every child trained this way will remain faithful. One faithful parent with a wandering adult child would falsify it. Read as wisdom, it has a different form: training a child well is the path that generally leads to a faithful life. A wandering child does not falsify that claim, any more than one heavy smoker who lives to ninety falsifies the link between smoking and illness.
Lisa Fields describes Proverbs as “principles, not promises.” She draws the practical consequence: “people will throw the Bible away because they don’t understand literary context.” Anyabwile traces the crisis inside a believer. A parent asks, “what’s wrong with me and my faith?” or what is wrong with the child, or with God. Her answer names the genre: “that’s not a promise, that’s not a command, it’s proverbial wisdom. It’s generally true, but it’s not a guarantee.”
Here is the logical point worth slowing down for. The parent who reads the proverb as a contract may think they are taking the Bible more seriously. In fact they are attributing to it a claim it never made, and then holding God to that invented claim. Jude 3 Project holds that Scripture is fully trustworthy in all it intends to teach. The phrase intends to teach is where genre matters. You cannot know what a passage intends to teach until you know what kind of passage it is.
Task. Rewrite Proverbs 22:6 twice in your own words: once as a guarantee, once as wisdom. For each version, write one sentence describing what would count as evidence against it. Which version is the text actually claiming?
Test case: describing is not commanding
Genre also governs a second question: does a passage tell me what to do, or tell me what happened? Lisa Fields notes that “people sometimes take descriptive as prescriptive,” and gives the example of someone who reasons that because David had several wives, polygamy must be acceptable. The argument has a missing premise: whatever a biblical figure did, God approved. The narratives themselves refute that premise again and again.
Anyabwile adds a quieter version of the same mistake: “sometimes we put ourselves in the wrong place in the story.” Readers of 1 Samuel 17 want to be David facing their own giants. She suggests they are closer to the ordinary Israelites who needed a king, and that David’s kingship points ahead to a greater King, Jesus Christ. Her diagnostic question is short: “Who are you in this story?”
That question is a genre question. A command addresses you directly. A narrative places you somewhere in relation to what happened. Get the place wrong and you will draw a conclusion the story does not support, even if every event in it is read literally.
The strongest objection: is genre a way to escape the hard parts?
A thoughtful skeptic, or a cautious believer, will press here. If a reader can call a passage poetry or symbol, what stops that reader from reclassifying anything uncomfortable? Genre would then be a license, not a discipline.
The objection is serious, so test it rather than wave it away. A method is a license only if the reader decides the outcome. It is a discipline if the text decides. So ask: what in a passage signals its genre? Parallel lines and repeated refrains. A speaker who announces a story, as Jesus does in Luke 15:11 (“A certain man had two sons”). Named places, sequences of events, rising action and a climax, the features Anyabwile teaches her students to trace in narratives like Ruth and Esther. Short, balanced sayings collected together. Visions introduced as visions.
If those signals are real and observable, then the method binds the reader in both directions. It forbids making a poem into a report, and it equally forbids making a report into a poem because the content is difficult. Anyabwile’s rule that historical narrative should be read literally is part of the same principle that frees the poetry.
There is a limit, and it should be admitted plainly. Signals can be read differently by careful people, and some passages mix forms. Genre reading narrows a disagreement and ties it to evidence in the text. It does not guarantee that every disagreement ends. Faithful Christians still differ over some passages, and the method tells you what kind of argument to have, not who wins it.
Practice: the reclassification test
This practice turns the objection into an exercise. It takes about twenty minutes alone, or longer in a group.
- Choose one passage you have found confusing or hard to defend. Write down the genre you have assumed it to be.
- List the signals in the text itself that support that genre. Count only what you can point to on the page.
- Now write down what you would need to see in the text to change your mind. If you think it is narrative, what would make it poetry? If you think it is symbolic, what would make it a report?
- Read the passage again and look for those signals. Note whether you found them, and whether your first assumption came from the text or from somewhere else, such as a sermon, a worry or a wish.
- Finally, ask the genre’s own question. A story asks what happened and where you stand in it. A poem asks what it is naming about God or the heart. A proverb asks what pattern of life it describes. A command asks what it requires.
If you are working in a group, have two people do step three for the same passage and compare lists before anyone defends a conclusion. The goal is to see whether the group can agree on what evidence would matter, even before it agrees on the result.
Discussion questions
- Return to your three premises from the start. Which one did you find hardest to give up, and what kept it attractive?
- Can you think of a passage where reading it literally would actually lead you away from what it teaches? What made the literal reading tempting?
- Anyabwile says historical narrative should be read literally. What do you think separates a historical narrative from a parable, and how confident can a reader be in telling them apart?
- In the reclassification test, did your genre assumptions come from the text or from somewhere else? What does that tell you about how you have been reading?
- If someone accused you of using genre to avoid hard passages, what would a fair reply include, and what part of their concern would you grant?
- Think of a verse you once treated as a promise. Does reading it as wisdom take something away from it, or give something back?
For anyone leading a group: question two and question six can touch real disappointment, especially for parents. Let people answer in general terms if they prefer, and do not press anyone to tell a family story. The aim is clearer reading, not disclosure.
What the better answer protects
So, back to the original question. Someone asks whether you take the Bible literally. You can now say something more accurate than yes or no: I take each part as the kind of writing it is, and I let the text show me which kind that is. That answer is not a dodge. It accepts a stricter burden than either simple answer, because it commits you to reading signals carefully and changing your mind when the text requires it.
Anyabwile is clear that the point of all this is not technique. “This isn’t an academic exercise,” she says, and the tools are not ends in themselves: “they’re meant to free us so that we can read the Bible well.” Freedom here has a specific meaning. A reader who knows what a passage is doing no longer has to defend the Bible against claims it never made, and can attend to the claims it does make.
Look one last time at your page of premises. If any of your marks changed, write one sentence explaining why. If none changed, write down what evidence would change them. Either sentence is a better answer to the original question than the one you started with.