Is Allegorical Religion better than Fundamentalism?

[JairCrawford]

As someone who used to be much more fundamentalist as a child, who is now much more open to allegories, I’d say, yes to the OP. But I probably couldn’t be more biased in saying so. lol

I'm curious how far you take the notion of allegorization. After all, even hardcore fundamentalists think that some things in the Bible are allegory.

Some modern Christians deem Jesus' miracles to be allegory. It makes sense when you consider things like the "feeding many with a few fish." Obviously meant by the author to convey some sort of basic fact about community, compassion, and sharing. At least to me anyway. What's your take on that?

Some Christians I've spoken to see the creation story and the "wilder tales" listed in the Bible as allegory, but insist that "the death and resurrection" are historical occurrences. Where do you lie on that scale, if you don't mind my asking?

It’s a very good question, but one that is surprisingly hard to answer right now as it tends to shift to some degree almost daily. For most of my youth I was a YEC but then at around 17 I became more open to theistic evolution. Over the next ten years I stayed relatively stable with my views, with the exception of taking certain things in the Old Testament allegorically (for example Isaiah’s statement of God “creating evil”, or my interpretation of God sending plagues, I was becoming more Pentecostal therefore no longer believing God had anything to do with diseases.) but then at the end of that ten year period, I dove in head first into textual criticism, thinking it’d be easy to debunk and well… it wasn’t. I dealt with a major deconstruction and over the past five years I’ve been in a period of reconstruction when it comes to my faith and how to apply it. I’ve become much more fideistic in my theology of faith, as opposed to the past where I would point to the Bible as ‘hard core evidence’ (a concept, which ironically, I don’t think is even scriptural). So… it’s kind of hard to explain. I can tell you that I choose to embrace faith in Jesus Christ wholeheartedly but the way I do so now is so different than before, I don’t really know where I fit on that spectrum because it changes a lot.

Edit: I can say that I still hold to the view that the death and the resurrection are real. But I embrace that view now more out of a decision in faith, than simply because ‘the Bible says so’. Also I’m more willing to acknowledging differences in the accounts of the death and resurrection between the gospel accounts. I’m not nearly as fixated on harmonizing everything as I used to be.