It is deemed fashionable and even spiritual in some interpretive camps to try to figure out what God means, even when He makes plain statements. One of these places is 1 Thessalonians 4:17, where God
says "we shall be snatched away together with [the dead] in clouds." The plain words and meanings seem so fantastic to some people that they simply cannot believe them. And so they seek to impart "spiritual spin" to the plain statements—as if the statements themselves are not spiritual enough, or the event described is not as spiritual as can be.
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These days, reading the Bible "literally" is thought to be unsophisticated, which is to say, "unspiritual." But it's the "let's-try-to-figure-out-what-God-meant" people who display their lack of spirituality (and, really, their naked arrogance) by assuming their thoughts about God's words to be higher than the words themselves.
