chapka

Then all you have to do is quote the chapter and verse where it says so.

The passages you cite refer to other parts of genesis, not the Creation story or anything else that happened before Moses. And none of them say anything about it being literal, as far as I can tell. Jesus uses the same simple declarative language to talk about the characters in his parables as he does to talk about Moses. I use them all the time when I talk about Harry Potter with my wife. "Do you remember what Dumbledore said when he spoke to Harry after Harry found the Philosopher's Stone?" I might use that kind of wording in public speaking, too; "Captain Ahab followed a similar policy, and it lead to his own demise." Does that mean that I believe in the literal existence of Ahab or Dumbledore?

But this is really a sort of side question. I'm assuming the sort of person who will take Genesis literally. The question is, why don't they also take the Revelation literally? You've dismissed this question as "obvious," but you haven't answered it. To most Christians, it's just as "obvious" that Genesis 1 and 2 were written figuratively as well.

Toto

This is an interesting assertion.

What it says is

So this claims to be a prophecy of what will take place "soon", but is only a record of the "revelation" given by Jesus through his angel to John.

I think that the primary problem for an inerrantist is the word "soon," or "the time is near."

But the revelation is framed in terms of symbolism:

although it never actually says "this is not really true, it's up to you to interpret the mystery."

pierneef

Aside from the erudite views expressed above, and I agree with most of them, the original poster raises the basic issue of (what I call) Special Pleading in Biblical scholarship. And this is NOT the province only of fundamentalists or (as I prefer to call them) naivists. Many respected scholars are guilty of the same intellectual ingenuousness. For example, they do it with the meaning of words. "In this context the word can be taken literally, but in this context, of course, the word doesnt have its literal meaning but instead means......" A particularly famous example is the arguments you see that the claim that Jesus had brothers and sisters (which challenges the perpetual divinity of Mary" is based on taking the gospel passages literally, whereas the "brothers and sisters" "obviously" refers to, I dont know, "colleagues", "followers" etc, but that these words DO mean "brothers and sisters" when used in other uncontraversial passages.

I use this as a acid test to determine whether I am reading an objective scholar or an apologist.

Ierrellus

"The letter of the Scripture is death." --Paul, who in his literalism formatted the Christian religion.

Ierrellus

KevinE

I think that Toto makes a nice point. There seems to be a reasonable textual basis for interpreting Revelation in a somewhat symbolic fashion, and I would think that an intelligent literalist (I know, some of you will think that's an oxymoron) would want to use textual clues to interpret a passage appropriately according to its genre. For example, in R.C. Sproul's book, Knowing Scripture, I think he says that by a "literal" interpretation, he means an interpretation that is faithful to the genre of the literature that a text belongs to. I can't remember for sure how he ends up approaching Genesis 1 and Revelation, but my hunch is that he would try to argue that there's more literary justification for reading Genesis historically than Revelation. Admittedly, there's likely to be debate about the literary genre and character of different biblical books and passages (and most biblical scholars would probably think that Sproul doesn't accept enough higher criticism to really understand these genres), but if you're really curious about understanding how these literalists think, Chapka, then Sproul might be a good place to start.

Just so you don't get my views confused with Sproul's, I should note that, in my opinion, the result of interpreting Genesis and Revelation faithfully to their genres would result in dismissing both of them as actual history. I'm no expert on these matters, but the days in Genesis 1 are paralleled in a way that seems much more poetic than historical--day 1 involves creation of light, with day 4 creating the sun and moon that provide the light, day 2 involves separation of waters above and beneath, with day 5 providing the fish and birds to live in those areas, day 3 separates dry land, with day 6 providing the plants and animals for the dry land. Similarly, interpreting Revelation appropriately to its apocalyptic genre would presumably involve interpreting it as a judgment on the Roman Empire of that time period, which is what an apocalyptic would be supposed to do, I think.

I should also acknowledge that there's disagreement about what it means to be a "literalist." Some would claim that even Sproul isn't being a literalist, but I don't see how it's even worth arguing with people who take an even stronger position than he does (e.g., claiming that literalism means taking everything written at face value, whatever that would mean).