How You Read the Bible has Nothing to Do with Your Faith

What you believe in doesn't matter as much as who. Once upon a time, a talking snake tricked a naked woman into eating an apple with the power to curse the entire human race. In order to restore the world to how it ought to be, a sword-tongued, albino Jesus will eventually do battle with a seven-headed leopard-bear and his minions of horse-sized scorpion-locusts. At least that's one interpretation. Another suggests that Jesus' resurrection was metaphorical, his deity illustrative, and his existence more pedagogical than historical. God reveals himself in many different ways, and the Christian religion through its ancient myths and fables is just one of them. Most Christians fall somewhere in the middle. Few take such a rigidly literal approach to cosmogony and eschatology and even fewer dismiss the texts as uninspired allegory. We're all more likely to nuance our hermeneutics according to literary genre and cultural context while accepting Scripture as th