The term "hyper-literalism” refers to an extreme interpretation of religious teachings, taking them overly literally or rigidly. This fairly crude, unsophisticated kind of erroneous thinking is probably behind Trinity misunderstandings just as it is behind poor teaching outcomes in Christian doctrine such as transubstantiation. This is probably how it came to be that Jesus was understood to literally be the word of God and the word of God to be literally God, and hence to (mis)understand Jesus to be literally God. It seems spiritual concepts have been grasped wrongly by unspiritual people and then taught and retaught by similarly unspiritual people over the centuries.
