Word: literalistically
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...scheme of redemption. When Portia confounds Shylock by allowing him his pound of flesh but condemning him to death if an iota of blood be spilled in its excision, the reaction of the Venetians is such that it seems a cheap trick rather than a masterly example of a literalist hoist on his own petard. At this point Graziano alone expresses the vulgar view of what is going on; his taunts are, significantly, not echoed by anyone else. Yet here their silence condemns the bystanders; and the final touch to the mishandling of the scene comes when the Duke pronounces...
Most United Presbyterians are backing the doctrinal updating. "We decided in the 1920s that we would not be a fundamentalist church, but a conservative, Biblically oriented church that was not rigidly literalist," says the church's chief administrative officer, the Rev. Eugene Carson Blake. And predestination? "No, I don't believe in predestination, that gloomy theory that contradicts one of Christianity's chief wellsprings-hope," says Louis Armstrong, United Presbyterian layman and Denver businessman. Dowey eloquently sums up the spirit of the renovation: "The Reformed Church, if the name means anything, must always be willing to reform...
Both approaches have their dangers. Theologians tend to emphasize the divine inspiration and the factual truth of Scripture, and can fall into literalist absurdity -believing, for example, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, even though Deuteronomy tells of his death. Scholars can be tempted to forget that the Bible...
First topic on their agenda: THE HOLY BIBLE, ITS AUTHORITY AND MESSAGE. So far has the pendulum swung from literalist respect for the authority of the Bible, the bishops feel, that even some professing Christians are tending to look upon it as a collection of fairy stories. To combat this tendency, the bishops hope to educate the public to interpret Biblical statements and events in terms of the thought forms of the people who wrote the Scripture down. Said one bishop: "The Bible mustn't be thought of as the Koran is thought of. It hasn...
...Swiss Painter Paul Klee, as unfettered as a yodeler on the Matterhorn, gave his fellow artists some advice. If a literalist should look at one of their portraits, he told them, and say, "But that isn't a bit like uncle," the disciplined artist should reply, "To hell with uncle! I must get on with my building...