“All of the Bible is true and some of it happened.”
Rev Bosco Peters reviews “Religion as Metaphor”, by David Tracey

Religion as Metaphor: Beyond Literal Belief by David Tacey

I hope David Tacey’s book is another doorway into the realisation of the importance of metaphor. It rightly argues that the new atheism and fundamentalism are both misunderstanding the stories literalistically.

I regularly encounter a fear that if someone questions the historicity (or validity) of a detail in the Bible, then the whole fabric of the Bible might unravel. “You cannot believe half of it, so why believe any of it?”

Many stories in the Bible, however, are not about something that happened somewhere else at another time, they are stories about what is always happening (including here and now) – and that’s what gives them their power. The right question to ask of such stories is not: what actually happened? But: what does it mean?

More at:  Liturgy.co.nz