Thoughts on Scripture, Truth, and Symbolism
This is a response post, and it pains me that it is necessary. Maybe it is where I was born (It takes unbelievable restraint to prevent me on going on a chaotic diatribe about how much I dislike Nigerian Protestant Christianity), but I hold out faith that what I see portrayed as Christianity in this country is still reformable, and is still inherently good. I am always the odd one out. I have rejected the dichotomy between faith and reason, that science or scientists are some sort of establishment working against the bible and faith, and that science has anything at all to say against the truth of Scripture or the revelation of Jesus Christ. Safe to say, for the word of faith people, I reject the compartmentalization and radical separation of "sense" and "revelation" knowledge; or in other terms, I reject the separation between revelation and reason as two separate things. I hold that "revelation" is the truest form of reason, and all true reasoning is already revelation. All true knowledge is God given knowledge. The "senses" taste and see that the Lord is Good, and any "special revelation" is simply a radical intensification of this truth. That the truth of Creation's finitude and fallenness can be grasped by other faiths and philosophies other than Christianity is proof enough for this.
For Scripture, I reject the idea that one can get to the "direct meaning" of the text without interpretation. There is no such thing as the "plain text". Even the translation is already a form of interpretation. Infact, the original penning down of the words is exactly an interpretation. It isn't bare fact of whatever is being said. There are no bare facts, facts are always already interpreted. The sooner we can get out of this incoherent delusion of the sufficiency of the text as "plain" apart from any interpretation in the life of the church, the better for us.
Related to this is my rejection of the "literal". The acceptance of the fact of the "literal" rests on an impoverished understanding of what is "real" and what is "true", and most especially, what it means to say an event "occured". This "literal" understanding of events is precisely atheistic, because it assumes meaning is reduced to bare "event", inherent to the event, and implicitly separate from God who enables such events to occur. There are no "bare events", all events occur in a particular cultural context with its own symbols and worldview. The word "occur" means many things to many cultures, and our meaning tends to be reductionist. I don't argue literal interpretations, or any separation between it and some thing called "symbolism" apart from the literal, because such a divide is a backdoor to atheism.
How do I conceive of the "symbolic nature" of scripture then? Well, for one, We start with why we consider those books scripture in the first place. The first and highest of our scriptures are the Gospels. They tell of the man Jesus of Nazareth, who is revealed as God incarnate. How do we know this story is true, how do we verify? The freeing thing is that we do not verify, there is absolutely no way to verify this claim. Sure there is agreement that a man named Jesus lived in the first century of this millenium, but that tells nothing about whether the Christian claim is true other than that the person they worship walked the earth at one time. We can't verify the resurrection, we can't scientifically investigate whether this man is God, that is ridiculous (and if you think you can, then my friend you don't understand what the word "God" means), God isn't scientifically investigatable. We have faith because we see the Church express this truth, we believe because we have been seized by the beauty of the message. The message expressed in word and deed is exactly how we are saved and seized by God. If this brings to you fears about "grounding your faith in facts", then good, because you're realizing what the atheists realize but don't truly understand:
You can't verify everything. Many things, especially the deep things and foundational things, are taken by faith; not blind faith, but faith, trust in the faithfulness of God that what you see is true.
This doesn't mean that what we believe is incoherent, but that its coherence is not in the realm covered by verificationism. All our anxious search for a way this or that field of science can verify whatever story in the bible we want to be "historical" is a lack of faith. If you want to search, fine, just don't say such "facts" are prerequisite for faith.
With this in mind, we can see scripture as Christ read it: a story about him. Christ is saying it is all symbolic of Him, in fact that they are His "words", a part of Him, the supreme symbol. If I were to rephrase this, I'd say this:
I reject, based on who Christ is, that there is a separation of the "Symbolic" and the "Literal". Christ reveals, in his preferred mode of revelation to His church and world (gospels as history written in symbol, allegory and poetry, indeed as the history of histories), that reality is itself symbol, and that the bare material occurrence is a lie. If you will not understand the philosophical root of the annoyingly persistent recurrence of our obsession with the "literal", then you will understand when I say that you, who hold such an understanding, are not taking scripture literally, or seriously. You already read it based on your context and tradition, and compared to another tradition, it isn't very compatible. You always read it symbolically. In fact you read all things "symbolically", something always means something else.
How does this compare to the way I read Genesis? It starts from the fact that Adam and Eve are real, they are every single one of us. The statement "this occurred" does not mean the same in all circumstances. The flood is real, it occurs every something is destroyed. It occured when Israel was conquered, whenever anyone is conquered. It is the caving in of creation, seen in the way the flood of death ultimately overwhelms us. Therefore it is true, far more real than any bare "literal" historical occurrence. In fact, the ultimate flood story is that where Christ, the fulfillment of creation, is submerged in death, and death itself couldn't hold Him, the waters had to recede, to the point where the book of Revelation says "There shall be no sea", the sea of death is conquered (indeed, those same word "there shall be no more..." is used for death in scripture). So yes, the flood occured, it occurs again and again, in various forms, but like God promised after the waters receded, the promise realized in the resurrection that will be revealed at the second coming: "I will no longer flood the earth". That this is controversial shows how far we have fallen and how much we have swallowed the inherently atheist propaganda that scripture can only be true if the events described occur "literally". I will not argue Christian doctrine with an atheist based on any "literal" story that actually doesn't exist. I don't ground God in history, history is grounded in God, and here, the imagination is far more real than the "literal", the occurrence of Christian myth is "pan historical", in all of history. The story of the fall occurs every day, the flood occurs every time someone dies. The resurrection that happened 2000 years ago happens everyday, and every sunday especially, where and when the Eucharist is administered. It occurs every time the story is told, in shadows or light. If anyone want to still say I don't hold to a literal meaning, that this approach makes the bible (including the gospels) "mere symbol", let me say now: No I don't, I never again want to hold to any "literalism". More pertinently, "mere symbol" is exactly what your act of dividing between "literal" and "symbolic" does to symbols.