Is Allegorical Religion better than Fundamentalism?

[vulcanlogician]

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.

Being conflicted about what is actually true is a mark of honesty in my book. I dig your reply. And I can relate.

It's interesting that you associate harmonizing with fundamentalism. An allegorist can harmonize too. Leo Tolstoy was almost a pure allegorist but he sought out and extensively explored the harmony of the disparate messages of Christianity. Even if Christ is merely a symbol of forbearance and surrender you can try to find a harmony between that and the rest of the Christian corpus.

I'm the opposite personally. I perceive a great disharmony between the disparate parts of the Christian corpus. Loving your neighbor and hating your neighbor at the same time. It doesn't gel with me.

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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?

@vulcanlogic, you are still thinking allegory and historical accuracy are either/or as opposed to both/and. It could be that historical event have greater or lesser degrees of significance. As such a recounting of them coveys both historic information and also have didactic use or symbolic import.

It's mighty convenient to find them both lumped in together then, isn't it? That just sounds too good to be true. Jesus not only fed people, but did so in a way that conveyed a message through time. Allegory doesn't work like that. Somebody comes up with an allegory. (Like Plato.) They think about the allegory then they use the best of their storytelling talents to present it well. Plato's allegory of the cave doesn't need actual people trapped in a cave to be true. That would be utterly superfluous to Plato's allegory. The truth of what Plato says in his allegory is entirely dependant on the truth value of the allegory itself. Not whether it actually happened.

It's true that an actual happening doesn't subtract from the allegorical value of an event. But anything it adds is superfluous.