Literally Illiterate

To suggest that this text is in any sense the “literal Word of God” is to place extreme limits on both its truth and its power. Out of our sincere religious need to possess in some written form an infallible source of truth, we run the risk of reducing our treasured book to irrelevance. If the religiously alienated, which in many cases includes our own children, can ridicule our sacred tradition by an appeal to our own sacred Scriptures for which we have claimed too much, then we will have little to offer the world. If those elements of organized religion are allowed to claim for the Bible such words as “inerrant,” “infallible,” “the literal Word of God,” so that it is their limited understanding that becomes the only perception of Christianity in the public arena, then the Christian church, so heavily burdened, will not be able to speak with power to our own generation. – Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism By John Shelby Spong pages 54-55