The Spirit Kills, the Letter Gives Life: The Literal Sense and the Enlightenment University

In eighteenth-century academic contexts, you have the puzzle of non-literalistic literalism. That is, biblical interpretation was characterized both by metaphysical discipline (a strict view that words correspond purely to the artifacts of human culture) and by speculative reconstructions of the biblical world that extended far beyond the plain sense of the Bible.  Emerging higher critics championed this version of the literal sense, rejecting its traditional uses in the formation of doctrine and the reinforcement of confessional identity. The literal sense among academic interpreters stood opposed to allegorical and typological interpretation, representing a set of self-imposed hermeneutic constraints that were designed to cultivate, in an Enlightenment context, political irenicism and in a slightly later Romantic context, a sense of historical immediacy designed to circumvent culture and tradition.