at my cousin's bar mitzvah (i have a pretty diverse family) part of the ceremony is that the torah scroll was handed to him from his grandparents, to his parents and then to him. reformed jews understand that the torah is meant to inhabit different cultures at different times and that the words themselves are never to be placed in the same absolute nature as the G-D to whom they speak.

this is very different from the islamic belief in the absolute nature of the qu'ran. the qu'ran is the very word of allah that is never changing. the real distortion in many forms of biblical literalism in christianity is the belief that the bible is the absolute word of god as muslims view the qu'ran. this is not true at all. the unchanging and perfect word of god is christ alone for whom the scriptures are only a witness. this means that the scriptures are not perfect (as any biblical scholar should tell you if he or she is honest), nor should we devise fancy speculative doctrines to assert they are. biblical infallibility is merely a parallel authority to papal infallibility and both are distortions of the function of scripture as something god-breathed, not verbally given.

once you embrace the limited and flawed nature of scripture as it has inhabited culture after culture only to serve the purpose of being a witness to god alone, you have permission to go deeper into it and understand god more closely. but if you limit yourself to a culturally mediated literalism, you by nature distort the words for the purpose they are to serve. the words in scripture have become your god in this instance, not the god for whom they are a witness. that is at it root idolatry and i am a christian who hacks at this poisonous root often and intentionally.

peace.