Metaphor vs. Literal

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it's a bit of a subjective thing, like tone, or voice, or mode. style is hard to quantify. but i think in comparison to the stuff that's arguably history we can ascertain that genesis is not.

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As a writer, I understand style and have had several classes, college and otherwise, requiring us to write in various styles.The impression I get from Faith's answer to me and her posts following yours concerning this issue is that she is not someone who has a literary background.The purpose of my request was to get Faith to be more specific or descriptive about the "way it is written." What specifically tells her that it is historical or factual. I've noticed that what she says and what she means are not always the same thing. What she calls metaphorical is not metaphorical.

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purpledawn writes:

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Not sure how you read a story without making judgments and deciding what it is saying. We make judgments on what a word means and how it is used.

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one wonders how to read a parable. did it happen or didn't it?

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When we read, IMO, we make judgments, whether conscious or unconsciously about a writing's presentation, characters, content etc. and its classification.Also, IMO, it is very unusual for the average person to be presented with a writing with no knowledge of its purpose. IOW, we are handed a history book, a book of poems, article on medicine, fiction, etc. No one hands me a SciFi novel and tells me it is a poem.Parables are presented as parables. Even in a culture where parables are common, the method of presentation can signal the story is a parable.Whether Faith likes it or not, our understanding of what we read is influenced by our experiences, level of knowledge, beliefs, etc.From what I have read about the Judaism, the flood story is considered a foundational myth. I have no problem with that since my church never presented the flood story as history.Since the Jews have expanded versions of the flood legend, they have more to draw from for lessons. IMO, the Bible flood story is condensed.

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"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France

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but the traditional church reads it straight, as history.

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Out of curiosity what is "the traditional church"? You sound like you are talking about one entity. Are you or are you talking about orthodox churches?Thanks

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"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France

I guess I should try to pin it down better. About all I can truly justify by the term is the Protestant churches and thinkers since the Reformation, although I'd really like to be able to trace it earlier than that. I know the Roman Church liked to allegorize much of the Bible especially in the medieval period, but it seems to me there had to be true believers all along who read it literally, maybe in the dissident groups outside the mainstream church. But I'm not scholar enough to have found that information so must leave it with Reformation Protestantism.{Edit: Here are some links to previous posts on the subject of which churches read Genesis literally. I know some of the links don't work and I need to clean them up and consolidate them, but meanwhile I'm putting them here for reference value if there is any.http://EvC Forum: Who to believe , Ham or Ross? -->EvC Forum: Who to believe , Ham or Ross?http://EvC Forum: Why read the Bible literally? -->EvC Forum: Why read the Bible literally?http://EvC Forum: Why read the Bible literally? -->EvC Forum: Why read the Bible literally? }This message has been edited by Faith, 10-01-2005 07:28 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 10-01-2005 07:38 PM

COE? Protestant Episcopal Church? Lutheran Churches? Presbyterian Churches? Methodist Churches?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Lutheran ELCA, Presbyterian USA, COE, and most Episcopal and Methodist churches have gone liberal in the last hundred years and lost their traditional roots, but before that those bodies held traditional views and read scripture literally. Wesley who founded the Methodists, certainly did, the English reformers who died for English Protestantism certainly did, the Presbyterian John Knox certainly did. Missouri Synod Lutheran and Covenant Presbyterian and Presbyterian in America are all traditional and literal interpreters of the Bible I believe.This message has been edited by Faith, 10-01-2005 07:34 PM

One or two things have been learned during the last couple hundred years.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

It seems to me that thus far Faith's arguments boil down to two basic logical fallacies. A version of the No True Scotsman and circular reasoning.We constantly hear statements like this posed in her defense (note the emphasis): She claims this about others but yet fails to see that she is doing the same. As of yet she has failed to show any criteria we could use for defining what is allegory/what is metaphorical. She continually makes references to an “original church” and “true believers”. First, she presupposes an original church still exists and second she defines true believers as those who interpret the text the way she does. She does not give one single objective standard by which to measure the text,Unfortunetly tossing things up to “common sense” is an inadequate definition as what is “common sense” is purely subjective. I, and others, have offered several historical reasons for our position whereas Faith has simply fallen back on fallacious argument and personal opinion.

No, I'm reading it as one should read simple English, taking it as written and believing it simply as written, imposing nothing on it. A believer is somebody who believes it as written.But it's not worth arguing with you about this.

ok, find me where it says the exact date (to the year) that israel got his name.this is really what it's about, and why genealogies don't function to make something "a history." they don't tell you when the events happened. histories are accounts that have dates in them. genesis is a collection of stories and genealogies. it's not the same thing. alright, let's do a test then. i'll pull two books of my shelf, and you tell me which one is a history. i've chosen them not so much for their ambiguity but for dry wording -- so there's no dead give away for the fictional work.

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Sample One

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By the middle of the first century A.D. Christians were sufficiently numerous, their disputes with the Jews sufficiently noisy, and their practices and public deportment sufficiently eccentric that the pagan world had become concious of them and their singularity. Therefore, when two thirds of the city of Rome was destroyed by fire in 64 A.D., and Emporer Nero himself was suspected as an arsonist, there was some plausibility to his accusation of the Christians, who were expecting instantly a second coming of Christ and the destruction of the world by fire.

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Sample Two

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They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun. So the Germans let them have four sheds, though one shed would have held them all. And, in exchange for coffee or chocolate or tobacco, the Germans gave them paint and lumber and nails and cloth for fixing things up.

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now, no one else answer this, even if you recognize a sample and like the book. i'll credit them after faith tells me which one is a history and which one is a work of fiction.

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אָרַח

that's part of the problem. like i said in an anecdote earlier, education in literature tends to make people look at the bible a little differently -- especially if that literature is ancient. well, i've outlines one hard objective standard. a history must have dates. she could effectively argue that the genealogies of genesis are histories in an of themselves. they are. but they do not make genesis a history as a whole, because they do not give reference to when events happened. right, but we could probably figure out that "blade runner" was not a poem upon reading it. we could figure out that "catcher in the rye" is not a history (whether or not we could tell if it were factual). i would also agree that genesis is not a (collection of) parable(s). but compare it to a book like edith hamilton's "mythology" of the ancient greeks, and it's remarkable similar. is it possible that genesis is merely a scholarly documentation of a culture's mythos and we're just reading it out of context?

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אָרַח

The exacting specificity of the dating and the details in the account of the Flood is not something one finds in fiction, at least not ancient fiction. Modern fiction may ape that sort of thing insofar as the flavor of reality is prized, but ancient fiction doesn't.Neither of your samples reads like the simple no-nonsense factual Bible. Way too much spin on the words. Novels ape reality and even histories these days are written with novelistic style so a modern example is useless.But I don't want to play this game.

no, it's really not. like i said at the start of this thing -- the only place you find a date in genesis is in the flood story. it's hard to find something that reads like ancient literature other than ancient literature. i'll give you a hint, then. i did not choose a work of fiction that pretends to be a factual account. that'd be far too tricky of me. it's pretty clear that the fiction is indeed fiction, although set in a historical backdrop. for instance, nero really did fiddle as rome burned, and ww2 really did happen. if you don't answer, you're not gonna live it down. can you really not tell which one is the history? i think it's pretty obvious.

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אָרַח

I would guess that #1 is the history and #2 the fiction.It isn't just the dates, it's the extremely specific year counts in the genealogies and the specific details of the story of the Flood that are not typical of fiction.

I'm thinking the samples are a bit short to make a judgement on. I'm n not sure it's a fair test.My guess is the first is fiction.

and you would guess correctly. the first is an excerpt of "the history of the romans" and the second is a paragraph from "slaughterhouse five."i used slaughterhouse five as an example because most of it focuses around a real event -- the firebombing of dresden germany in the second world war. and the author, kurt vonnegut, really was a pow in ww2. but the book is still a fictional account. if you wanted to arguing that genealogies themselves are a form of history, i would agree. the problem is that they do not make the other material in genesis, or genesis as a whole, a history.but detail is not an acceptable standard.

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אָרַח