Biblical literalism died when industrialization severed life-experience from agrarian reality

Evidence

Peasants at the time of the English Revolution had a life experience of the land and the seasons that was probably not very different from that of the characters of the Old Testament (or of the New Testament either); it is no wonder it was still possible for them to stage their revolution in biblical terms and to conceptualize it in theological categories. That possibility no longer exists for a nineteenthcentury bourgeoisie within a life-world of factories and artificial streetlights, railroad trains and contracts, representative political institutions and telegraphs: what can stories about pastoral peoples dressed up in exotic costumes possibly mean for such modern Western men and women? A modernist hermeneutic then intervenes to save the day: the biblical narratives, including the gospel itself, are no longer to be taken literally — that way Hollywood lies! They are to be taken figuratively or allegorically and thereby stripped of their archaic or exotic content and translated into existential or ontological experiences, whose essentially abstract language and figuration (anxiety, guilt, redemption, the “question of being”) can now, much like the “open works” of aesthetic modernism, be offered to a differentiated public of Western city-dwellers to be recoded in terms of their own private situations. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 835

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core idea that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing — here theological interpretation itself is causally driven by the mode of production. — connects to: Industrial bread production refutes Christianity more than rationalist critique does.; Röpke saw industrialization as culturally destructive and favored agrarian life — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1347; Biblical literalism reflects fear of change more than theology — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 93
• SEED: Angle for an essay: theological modernism as the hidden pilot case for the whole postmodernism thesis — if scripture needed allegorical recoding under industrialism, what does that presage for all narrative under late capitalism?