(May 27, 2016 at 8:57 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: It's a metaphor!
Yes it is. Here is what Aquinas says in the Summa:
"Holy Writ puts before us spiritual and divine things under the likeness of corporeal things."
and earlier...
"It is befitting Holy Writ to put forward divine and spiritual truths under the likeness of material things. For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in Holy Writ spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the metaphors of material things."
No problem.
