(May 4, 2012 at 2:50 pm)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: @Ryft and @ChadWooters...your reasoning is that symbolism and literalism are exclusive. If an account is has lots of symbolic imagery, then it wasn't meant to taken as if anything in the account actually happened in history...show me that the creation story was meant to be taken symbolically but not also literally.You are right to say symbolism and literalism need not be exclusive. Legends are often built on real people and historical events. And I think the ancients were aware of the temple plan symbolism just as Medieval master builders designed cathedrals to in cross-shaped plans according to sacred geometry. Before people knew that the earth was round and in orbit around the sun, they said 'sun rise' and 'sun set'. They took flat earth cosmology for granted because is matched their daily experience. Today, we know better, yet we still say 'sun rise' and 'sun set'. The actual cosmology is not important to what we mean to express. The scriptures take the form they do because the writers were more concerned about 'why' than about 'how'. The took the factuality of the creation story was of secondary concern to the ancient Hebrews and Isrealites, otherwise they would have produced essays like their Greek counterparts.
The New Church acknowleges the reality that religions are corrupted over time as our understanding migrates away from the spiritual import of the text and increasingly relies on the material surface meanings. For this reason additional revelations (like those through Swedenborg) are needed to remind us of life's spiritual dimension. And this is accomplished primarily through symbols that correspond to spiritual realities.
A post-modern culture like ours believes in the 'open interpretation' of symbols. We think any text can be read to mean pretty much anything we want it to mean. When talking about bible symbolism, we face a challenge because in our minds symbolic meanings are so plastic. Why should we take biblical symbols anymore seriously than those of Greek mythology? New Church theology makes a distinction between arbitrary symbols and those that correspond to spiritual realities. No doubt the mythologies of other cultures do reflect many of the some spiritual realities and even a good secular novel can too. Biblical symbolism is different because it is so dense. With study it reveals it's consistency and applicability, so much so that to me it strongly suggests a divine origin.
