Is Allegorical Religion better than Fundamentalism?

[Belacqua]

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.

Allegory can work like that. Often it does. 

Remember that when we read about a historical event, we are not experiencing the event directly. We are reading an account of the event that has been selected, interpreted, described from a particular point of view, and carefully placed within a larger narrative. A real event can easily function allegorically in this way. 

A more modern example is Arthur Miller's play A Crucible, which is a description of (more or less) real events, and functions as an allegory of the McCarthy trials. 

In spiritual literature, in particular, events are portrayed so as to provide larger lessons. Jesus fed people, and we would be very simplistic NOT to interpret this as teaching a message about how we should behave. If you were there and saw it, you might say it was a good example or an inspiration. When it's in the book, and interpreted to mean much more than simply giving people food, then a real event becomes allegory. (And I'm aware that any one of the events in the NT may be fiction, but even the ones that are true serve as allegory.) 

Remember that traditionally, each sentence in the Bible is interpreted at four levels, with the literal being the easiest and (usually) least important. Here is the Jewish version of this hermeneutic system:

Peshat (פְּשָׁט‎) – "surface" ("straight") or the literal (direct) meaning.

Remez (רֶמֶז‎) – "hints" or the deep (allegoric: hidden or symbolic) meaning beyond just the literal sense.

Derash (דְּרַשׁ‎) – from Hebrew darash: "inquire" ("seek") – the comparative (midrashic) meaning, as given through similar occurrences.

Sod (סוֹד‎) (pronounced with a long O as in 'lore') – "secret" ("mystery") or the esoteric/mystical meaning, as given through inspiration or revelation.

Christians adapted this system for their own use, since at least the time of Augustine. 

Finally, it is a commonplace of Christian belief that when God unfolds the events of history, he does so in the way that a human author writes a novel. The author may describe an event which is clearly understood by the reader to have more than literal significance. Christians say that God does the same, so that the defeat of the Moabites, for example, is a literal event which has an allegorical meaning inherent in it from the beginning. (I understand that non-religious people will not accept the origin of these meanings, but it shows how allegory functions for believers.)