I came across this section recently in Sallie McFague’s Metaphorical Theology that caught my attention. She writes –
But there is, I believe, an even deeper reason why religious literalism runs rampant in our time. It is not only that many people have lost the practice of religious contemplation and prayer, which alone is sufficient to keep literalism at bay, or that positivistic scientism has injected a narrow view of truth into our culture. While both are true, it is also the case that we do not see the things of this world as standing for something else; they are simply what they are. A symbolic sensibility, on the contrary, sees multilayered realities, with the literal level suggestive of meanings beyond itself. While it may have been more justified for people in earlier times to be biblical literalists since they were less conscious of relativity, as symbolic thinkers, they were not literalists… The claim can be made that our time is more literalistic than any other time in history. Not only were double, triple, and more meanings once seen in Scripture (and Scripture considered richer as a consequence), but our notion of history as the recording of “facts” is alien to the biblical consciousness.
So many of us so-called postmoderns are reacting to the flatness of scripture. We are presented with a truncated and stripped version of the bible that we are told holds meaning merely because it happened. That historical veracity was clung to as the central tenet of our faith until one day when we realized what a hollow construction that belief represented. Some of us walked away from the faith. Others took a fleeting glance back at tradition and discovered there a rich and multifaceted faith seeped in imaginative interpretation and symbolic understandings of truth. Our faith revived and we cherish scripture now more than we ever did before.
And we were called heretics. Accused of throwing out the bible and being enamoured with the new. Labelled as self-centered and rebellious. We were told to save our faith by returning to the flat and the hollow. And when we refused we were cast out as unbelievers.
Aren’t the vicissitudes of history great?