Thanks for your comments and for reading. Glad you enjoyed it.

To address some of your points, language is figurative in and of itself, yes, but only at its most basic level, in that words, or letters strewn together in some pattern, represent other things. The letters “D-O-O-R” represent the thing we walk through when we enter buildings, for instance. This is Jacques Derrida’s famous “sign and signifier” construct.

But all sentences or paragraphs aren’t meant to be taken figuratively, nor is all language figurative. It’s the reader’s choice whether she will take something figurative from “Step out the door like a ghost into the fog (A Counting Crows line),” but that says nothing about the writer’s intention to make it a literal statement or not.

So, while it might be interesting to survey some people or make them write essays on how the line you quote from Shakespeare might be figurative (There’s a very good chance that he meant it to be figurative, obviously), but my point is that the reader of any text can’t say for certain whether a passage was meant to be literal or figurative today, much less hundreds or thousands of years after it was written. There’s probably a 99 percent chance Shakespeare was speaking in figurative terms in that passage and many others, but we can’t know for 100 percent certainty because we aren’t Shakespeare.

But in Shakespeare’s case, it’s OK for us to wonder whether he was using literary tools in certain passages or not. But, and here’s the hang of it, no one is claiming that Shakespeare was handing down a word from God. He’s just writing plays and poems. The Bible claims to be an authoritative word from God (as does the Hebrew Bible and the Koran) flaws and all as they are.

The Christian Bible, the Hebrew Bible and the Koran all make this claim, and all contain passages that could go either way. The sheik in my post already said certain passages were misinterpreted and were meant to be taken figuratively in the Koran. On what authority does he have such information is beyond my reach. The Bible contains parts that are clearly poetic. Song of Songs, for instance. But poetry doesn’t always equal figurative. I can write a perfectly literal poem about the beauty of a flower without using any figurative language. Christians, as you know, take the Song of Songs to be a metaphorical representation of the bride and his church. But on what authority do we know this? Maybe it’s just a seedy, Bronze Age, poetic account of two people madly in love and nothing more? The only way to make it fit into the canon is to transfuse some spiritual connotation into it.

My greater point was simply that bits of spiritual text are taken literally and bits are taken allegorically. Without a new word from God, it will be hard in some instances to tell which is which.

If the Bible is written just the way God intended, with differing accounts of the same stories, errors leaping straight into the headlights of established science, and just bizarre tales (A bear killing 40-something children comes to mind) with the same omniscient mind, you, my friend, could have produced a much more believable canon.

And the canon that folks hold so dear is made of only the certain books certain religious people thought should be included in the official Christian Bible at the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century. I’m sure you know this, but so many believers seem to just think it up appeared out of blue sometime shortly after 33 A.D.!

You know that I love reading your blog and I enjoyed reading this piece. I’m glad you are thinking deeply and critically about these matters. You have done a great job here of making an argument that neither modernists philosophies and postmodern philosophies give us an adequate framework for evaluating truth. On the one hand, the modernists say text must be read without any figurative allowance which leads to absurdity because language itself is figurative. All three texts mentioned contain poetic literature and narrative. These genres are figurative by nature even though the message is literal.

On the other hand, the postmoderns would say that since language is how we understand truth and since language is so very figurative by nature, then we cannot know what is true and what is not. An equally sad and lonely place to find ourselves.

Perhaps we can think about truth in a different way from both of these radical philosophies. Jeremy, tell me — how can we understand what truth is? If you understand that, you can move forward.

If the Bible is God’s revelation to us (as I believe it is) it must be reliable because God cannot be deceitful. However, it is creative because that is how we understand things. God spoke to us in our own language. Wouldn’t it be boring if it were written like a scientific treatise? It speaks to our minds but also to our emotions throught story.

A poem should be read as a poem. Nobody reads this line by Shakespeare and pretends it is not figurative:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players

If so, people would either be looking for the stage lights or calling Shakespeare a liar. It is figurative but it still conveys great truth. Should we stop reading Shakespeare because he did not label for us which parts should be taken figuratively and which should not? No!

The Bible is written just the way God intended. If we can’t be reasonable when interpreting it, we are doomed to a sad life.