In which we all already know that literalism doesn't work
I grew up in religion, so it was both lifestyle and a priori. Even when struggling with doubt, Seventh Day Adventism was my starting point, and a relentlessly needy and clingy one. I was born into the same duty as everyone I knew: to share and reinforce the gospel truth, as we interpreted it. As such, one of the things I was morally obligated to do, was to believe the bible at least as literally as the people around me.
If you grew up under similar circumstances, you'll read that last sentence and be instantly familiar with the exact amount of wiggle room that does (and does not) imply. It was a curve grading. We're all human - it's difficult to literally believe we can move mountains with our brains (or some more precise phrasing where God does the heavy lifting, and we're involved... somehow), and we know it's hard to believe that kind of thing, because we've all struggled to find the line of what we take as literal or not.
What's implicit here is that a hardline literalist point of view is socially and logically untenable. We all effectively "edit" the bible through interpretation. Those edits vary wildly from church to church, and person to person, but we all do it, because we all know it's necessary. In fact, trying to be an absolute literalist will not only give you a roaring headache (as it robs you of critical tools to reconcile personal experience with doctrine), it'll out you as a dysfunctional weirdo in the congregation.
Every word of God is flawless; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.
~ Proverbs 30:5, NIV
The Word of God is God’s authoritative message to us. It is [the] infallible Book.
~ Billy Graham
We don't bat an eye when people in the church, or our holy texts themselves, claim that those holy texts are entirely literal truth, perfect through and through. I know when I was in the church, I didn't even stop to question whether that was in conflict with the way we practiced our religion. Such endorsement of literal truth, really just ends up being a self-congratulatory part of the same literalist message that we're all taking with a grain of salt.
(Please note - I do intend to cover in depth, in a dedicated future post, whether it is possible to live a literalist lifestyle. So if I seem to be glossing that over, under the assumption that the majority of Christians will grudgingly agree that they've interpreted scripture out of necessity - well, you've read me like a web page. Glossing over the readily agreeable is exactly what I'm doing here!)
Introducing the chasm
We can imagine this problem as two lands, with a chasm in between. To the West, we have literalism, fundamentalism, and I would argue that sinkhole thinking (per previous post) is especially entrenched here. To the East, we have our model of the world as molded by personal, direct experience. The chasm is a bit wide - when we try to straddle it with our legs, putting a foot on each side, we tend to end up injured.
God says he answers prayer, and that he is stronger than things like leukemia, but my child still died.
...or...
Mary walked boldly into the alley, fist full of enlightening tracts and pamphlets. She had absolute faith that God would protect her, right up to the moment the knife slid in between her ribs.
The fact is, we've all had experiences (or observed the experiences of people close to us) where God did not live up to a literalist or naive view of the divine. Clearly, the fault cannot be with God. He's divine. But a flaw is in here somewhere, and we need to find it. The consequences otherwise might be trivial, or very dire indeed. We can't afford not to learn from these experiences, and doctrine can help guide the lesson.
Measured expectations
This is how we start building escape hatches. When God doesn't live up to our ideals, we have ways to explain why that happened. Usually not praying hard enough, insufficient faith, not knowing the exact magic words "Get behind me Satan," or that God has chosen not to answer the prayer with a yes (perhaps a "no" or a "wait"). As long as we have these, we can coexist between the prescribed truths about God, and our personal experience (which will otherwise be in conflict).
These also help inform and guide our behavior. By having a feel for what we can and can't expect of God, we can rely on him at appropriate times. While many of use are doctrinally prescribed to rely on him always, do you know anyone who does that? Does that seem to play well with God's behavior in practice? And yet we often feel guilt that we don't rely on him always, as we're told to do.
God helps those who help themselves.
~ Popularized by Benjamin Franklin, but it's common-sense enough to date back to the Greeks
To get back to the original metaphor, we've built a bridge across the chasm. This is where Christians generally live - in fact, I expect exceptions are rare if not impossible. To be entirely on the literalist end is to be constantly injured by God behaving contrary to your expectations. And imagine being exclusively informed by your limited personal experience - if you only had that to go on, would you be able to rediscover your doctrine from just those experiences? Would it be enough information to tell you that God cares for things as small as sparrows? There's a reason the Bridge is the most comfortable, comforting option.
From here on out, we'll be examing the Bridge concept in more detail, and eventually make some comparisons. Hopefully we're on the same page so far, about such compromises being inherent in (or at least the dominant portion of) modern Christianity, even if you have some objections to the connotations of the word "compromise".