When Augustine wrote a literal interpretation on the book of Genesis, one of the earliest examples of early Christian understanding of the book of Genesis, he did not mean sola literalist as if the literalist interpretation alone was the only way to read scripture for this misses the deeper and more important spiritual and allegorical meanings of scripture.
Early Jewish hermeneutics had four senses of scripture that parallels the four senses of meaning that the ancient church and Catholic church has today. Modern Evangelical conservative hermeneutics in their desire to protect and defend the Bible have focused on the literal meaning of the biblical text as the only true meaning of God's Word while confusing and collapsing together biblical authority with certain biblical understandings and interpretations of Scripture.
I have come to the conclusion a long time ago that approaching biblical issues as either/or issues is often a mistake rather than a more holistic both/and approach. The Bible has literal and spiritual meanings and multiple layers of meaning. Anytime we pit these meanings against one another or ignore or silence the multi-voices of the Bible is always to do damage to what Scripture actually gives us----God's Word in human words and language.
In the end, asking the question "do you believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible?" as if there are no figurative, symbolic or spiritual meanings of Scripture is just as much the wrong question as "do you believe in a symbolic understanding of Scripture?" if that means one can not believe in any kind of literal connections and literal meanings of scripture.
These kind of dichotomous questions shuts down fruitful interactions of language that comes to us with multi-layers from the literal to the figurative and from the historical to the spiritual meanings and intersections of the biblical text. If we keep asking the wrong questions of the biblical text, we will continue coming up with the wrong answers.
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