Interesting topic, Pat, and one I'm sure all of us freed WT slaves have had to struggle with and answer to our own satisfaction.
As an orthodox Christian now (Episcopalian), I subscribe whole-heartedly to the essential teachings of the historic Church, as summarized in the Apostle's and Nicene Creeds. And as an Anglican, I believe, as our Prayer Book says, that the Bible "contains all things necessary for salvation." (Which is different from believing all things in the Bible are necessary for salavation.)
However, we Anglicans have always based our understanding on what is called the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. (I believe churches in the Calvinist tradition add a fourth leg, Experience.) Each leg balances and illuminates the others.
So, speaking strictly for myself, I don't see a need to consider every word and punctuation mark of the Bible as coming directly from God. It is not "inerrant," as the many variations in the text from one ancient manuscript to another make clear. However, only a tiny fraction of thousands of variations affect the sense of any significant passages: on the whole, the main thoughts still come through clearly, Bible scholars say.
So leaving inerrancy aside, what about the question you raise of "literal" meanings? Again, my own view coincides with that of C. S. Lewis, who in his book "Miracles" expressed it better than I can here: it depends on which PART of the Bible you are talking about.
Remember, the Bible is not one continuous manuscript; rather, it is a COLLECTION of 66 books, written by many men over many centuries. Some of those books were meant, at the time of writing, to be factual histories, like I and II Samuel, I and II Kings, I and II Chronicles; some were meant to be poetic song lyrics, like Psalms and Song of Solomon; some were the record of phophets' deeds and visions, like Daniel, et al. And so on.
In the NT, you have the Gospels and Acts, which detail the activities and speech of Christ and his disciples; letters written by various Apostles to individuals and churches; and the apocalyptic vision of Revelation, deliberately written in metaphors and symbols.
So to ask, "Should the Bible be taken literally?" is meaningless unless you are specifying which chapter and verse you mean. Some parts were never meant to be taken literally (the number 144,000 especially springs to mind), while others were.
Taken as a whole, the Bible comprises a collection of books, selected out of many others written in ancient times, which shows the history of God's dealings with mankind and the outworking of His promise to send a Messiah, a Savior, who Christians believe was Jesus, the Christ.
Nevertheless, Christians, in my view, are not under obligation to take every passage literally. To use only one example, Origen, an early Doctor of the Church and a great intellectual, wrote in the 2nd century to the effect that "no thinking Christian can believe such an old wives' tale as that the earth was created in only six days."
I don't feel a need to regard the six days of Creation, or tales like that of Jonah and the whale, as being literally true--they simply embody in metaphor a certain truth about God or man or matters of the heart. In the same way, the patriotic song lyric that goes "Thine alabaster cities gleam" does not mean our cities are literally made of a soft white stone--it's merely a poetic way of expressing a certain view of or truth about America.
As Mr. Lewis puts it, the earlier parts of the Bible are often real history mixed with a good amount of myth or legend or metaphor. (That there was a real flood of some kind seems to be confirmed by a parallel account in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, for example--but probably not literally covering the entire planet.) When we come to the recorded sayings and deeds of Christ and His disciples, we are on firmer ground.
At which point, I'll stop, because to go further would get into questions of doctine beyond what your original question asked. Besides Mr. Lewis's book, I can also recommend the short overview, "Introducing the Bible" by William Barclay, a scholar of the Church of Scotland, and an entertaining writer.
Also recommended are Barclay's commentaries on each book of the Bible. He brings in a great deal of history, archaeology, and social customs to enlighten the meaning and context of each Bible verse, and is very good at bringing out the poetic meaning of passages that are sometimes mistakenly understood literally.
For me, it all comes down to Matthew 22:40 and 25:31-46.
Peace,
Bill
"If we all loved one another as much as we say we love God, I reckon there wouldn't be as much meanness in the world as there is."--from the movie Resurrection (1979)
