I am confused, are you asking or telling? The Church has had a lot to say about biblical interpretation in the 1600 or so years since Augustine, and even since Humani Generis.
If you are asking, I would respond that I think that there is ample reason to believe that many, if not all, of the examples you cite are occassions where the plain literal meaning of scripture is not the intended meaning. In fact, in many cases the literal meaning and the “obvious sense” are not the same.
I think what may be happening here is confusion between literal and literalistic. To read something in a literal sense is to read into the words what the author intended to say. To read something in a literalistic sense is to take every word exactly as it appears, verbatim, with no reference to what the author intended to say. This can cause problems as it doesn’t allow for hyperbole, poetic language, and more.
Obviously the two ways of reading can lead to completely different understandings. A literal reading of the Bible does not necessarily lead a person to believe that the flood was world-wide or that Noah actually obtained male and female specimens of every single species of animal in the world.
I agree with you. Language evolves and what is literalistic reading has now become literal reading, but in a forum the two should be used correctly and consistently. You actually support a literal reading. I do, too.
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Most often what our culture means by the phrase “reading Scripture literally,” would be more correctly rendered “reading Scripture literalistically,” that is, taking each word at face value apart from its literary context. Such an approach drains the life out of language; such readers leech the meaning out of Scripture. For example, a literalistic take on the phrase, “Her eyes are as bright as diamonds,” would claim that her eyes provided a similar luminescence as diamonds. Such a wooden reading misses the poetic thrust of the simile — the radiant beauty that flashes through her eyes.
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An interpretation guided by a one-dimensional view of words may not only fail to glean the true meaning, but may reap the tares of a wrong-headed interpretation. For instance, the poetic comparison inspired from romantic courtship, where the poet sings of his beloved’s beautiful hair, saying, “Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead” (Song 4:1), can easily be misunderstood if the metaphor is not read correctly. By comparing her hair to a flock of black goats cascading down a mountain, he is thinking of her rich, black hair; a comparison of color, not scent, is the aim of the simile.1 In this case, missing the metaphoric expression leads to an interpretation that is diametrically opposed to the intended meaning of the passage. I can tell you that it took me some explaining to convince the high school students I taught years ago that this image was flattering!
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Context is crucial, and that is why knowing the literary context of what we’re reading is vitally important. In Scripture, God speaks through men in a human fashion. In order to understand what God is communicating, we must carefully search for the intention of the sacred authors. That is why the Church stresses the importance of knowing the literary genres of Scripture: “In determining the intention of the sacred writers, attention must be paid, inter alia, to ‘literary forms for the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts,’ and in other forms of literary expression” (Vatican II, Dei Verbum, no. 12). In short, we are not to take the Bible literalistically, but literarily.
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Should Catholics take the Bible literally? If by literal we are referring to the intention of the author, then yes, Catholics do take the Bible literally. For such a literal reading respects the author’s intention — it reads poetry poetically, metaphors metaphorically, and history historically. The aim of interpreting the Bible is to discern what the author intended by the words he used. For example, when we read that Jesus says it is better to lose a member of one’s body than to sin, we understand that Jesus is teaching about the gravity of sin through hyperbole. We do not take Him as literally commanding dismemberment. Some misreadings can be more costly than others, which is why Origen’s literalistic reading of these words of Jesus (Origen supposedly castrated himself) is an example of the consequences of interpreting words without regard for their rhetorical genre.”
catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0076.html
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