Great regret has been expressed regarding Nick Clegg, our Deputy Prime Minister, who said in a keynote speech last weekend,
It makes people so incredibly angry when you are getting up early in the morning, working really hard to try and do the right thing for your family and for your community, you are paying your taxes and then you see people literally in a different galaxy who are paying extraordinarily low rates of tax.
If these people are literally in a different galaxy they are not, of course, liable for UK tax of any sort. Literally none. This is the kind of linguistic torture that many a public speaker (Guilty, m'Lud) inflicts on words. Someone colourfully described it as AVD - Adjectival Vomiting Disease!
Literally, for Nick, meant nothing of the sort. In fact it means the opposite - metaphorically in a different galaxy, perhaps.
For all who claim to be Bible believers the word 'literally' is a heavily significant one. The problem is that it is a word that serves us less well than we think. For example,
"Do you believe there was a literal Good Samaritan?" is a fairly irrelevant question, though sometimes asked, compared to the more sobering, "Do you literally do what Jesus taught his hearer to do?"
Huge controversy surrounds the question, "Are the days in Genesis chapter 1 literal 24 hour days?" yet this is hardly a question at all. Richard Dawkins, for example, believes that they are. It's just that he inconveniently thinks that they are wrong. Literal interpretation is not the same thing as faith. Others believe that they are literal days in a piece of poetry. Others believe they are not literal 24 hour days but believe they describe literal eras of creating. Others believe that there were indeed seven 24 hour days but then have to wrestle with how the Word that spoke life to the dead in a moment took a whole 24 literal hours to create (or how the other 23+ hours did not constitute literal rest (which belongs to day seven)). All of which is to say that literally is literally one of the more difficult words and concepts.
There are places where it is THE word however;
1 Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain 3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. 9 For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them— yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11 Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.' [1 Corinthians 15]
The Apostle is not vomiting adjectives; he is listing evidences. It would reveal so much less if he had written that Jesus was literally risen from the dead. Instead he shows how this must have happened, how we can know it happened, why it happened and why it matters. Without a risen Saviour everything else about being human is ultimately useless. Literally.
