IV. METAPHOR IN MODERN
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT
The first serious break in Christian attitudes toward
the metaphorical interpretation of primary religious
discourse (one which was never equally duplicated
within Jewish thought) came with the Reformation in
the sixteenth century. Martin Luther was by no means
an absolute opponent of metaphor and allegory—he
used it himself from time to time, especially in inter-
preting such biblical sources as the Song of Solomon—
but his emphasis (and that of the weight of Protestant-
ism after him) was on the sharp reduction of the
boundaries, once again, of what could legitimately be
considered figurative in scripture. Just as the Protestant
movement broke away from the authority of the insti-
tutional church of Rome, so it rejected the authority
of much within church tradition and interpretation that
had over the centuries come to share the sanctity of
the Bible. If the Bible was to be the one basic authority
for faith, then the Bible, Luther argued, should be
permitted as far as possible to speak for itself as liter
ally as possible. Any other attitude, he saw, would be
to elevate human critical standards above the Word
of God.
This position, we should note, is not quite identical
with that of the Fundamentalism of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The latter movement grew in a
context of scientific biblical criticism and as a reaction
against it—a context which Luther and other early
Protestants never knew. In a sense, it can be argued
that the history of higher criticism, which parallels the
history of science itself, is just as much an opponent
of runaway metaphorical interpretation as was Luther,
though from different motives. It can also be argued
(though it is speculative to do so) that Luther might
have welcomed neutral scientific biblical scholarship
as providing the best means through which the original
biblical texts could be permitted to “speak for them-
selves.” It would have required considerable revision
of Luther's rather contemptuous attitudes toward the
powers and prerogatives of human reason for him to
have taken this attitude, of course, since scientific
biblical criticism is emphatically based on certain fun-
damental beliefs regarding what is literally the case—
they are the pervasive presumptions underlying the
scientific attitudes of the modern Western world—but
since Luther was a man of his time and not of ours
it is fruitless to examine this point further. The Funda-
mentalists, however, were in the historical position of
being required to make the choice, and their choice
was to hew to the literal language of scripture rather
than either to accept the allegorizing of the mainly
Catholic past, or to welcome the scientific discovery
of biblical history and literature by the Modernists.
In this literalism, of course, there were many de-
grees. Some metaphors were allowed by most Funda-
mentalists, although there was little consistent theory
to systematize where the literal line could appro-
priately be drawn. The Song of Solomon, for a prime
example, was seldom interpreted by Fundamentalists
at face value, which would make of it a rather erotic
collection of ancient wedding poetry. But while Philo's
warning against “impiety” was carefully followed, his
equal emphasis against “absurdity” was not. More
accurately, the Fundamentalists would not grant to
their opponents that there was anything absurd about
the sun standing still in the sky on command (Joshua
10:12), about an iron axe head floating on water (II
Kings 6:5), or, especially, about certain “fundamentals”
(hence the name) like the virgin birth of Jesus or his
bodily resurrection from the dead. All such accounts,
indeed, are only absurd relative to a set of beliefs about
what is and is not possible. If those beliefs are rejected,
then the choice between metaphorical treatment and
disbelief is not forced.
Rejection of the set of beliefs in question, however,
is inconceivable for most modern men. These are the
beliefs that underlie the common sense and the com-
mon life of contemporary civilization as well as the
intellectual possibility of science. There are today,
therefore, comparatively few outright Fundamentalists;
but there are still many Christians whose primary
religious discourse is full of much that is incompatible
with their basic beliefs about reality. This creates a
severe problem for contemporary non-Fundamentalist
theology, since the footloose freedoms of allegorical
interpretation have been blocked by the rise of modern
critical consciousness—for Catholics, today, as well as
Protestants—and the alternative of sheer disbelief, in
the manner of Plato against the Homeric poetry, is
unattractive to those who continue to venerate the
inherited religious tradition of their culture.
Several attempted solutions have recently been
under debate, all recognizing the nonliteral but some-
how valuable character of primary religious discourse.
One attempt has been made following the German
theologian Rudolf Bultmann, to “demythologize” the
biblical world-picture, interpreting scriptural stories
couched in primary religious discourse in terms of the
existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Another
effort to challenge the underlying philosophical
premisses on which Christian theology has traditionally
rested is based on the process philosophy of Alfred
North Whitehead: if the absolutes of the Platonic and
Aristotelian philosophies, especially in their bearing on
the nature of God, can be replaced with a new relativ-
istic and dynamic theoretical matrix, like Whitehead's,
capable of accommodating science and contemporary
consciousness as well as of giving a coherent meaning
to the traditional religious images, then, it is argued,
both religion and intellectual integrity can be saved.
Still other positions draw variously on the philosophical
views of Ludwig Wittgenstein, of John Dewey, of
Edmund Husserl, of Henri Bergson, or on still other
theoretical bases found either in philosophy or inherent
in the Christian tradition itself.
What is in common to all these efforts, the details
of which remain beyond the scope of this article, is
the insistence on retaining, so far as possible, primary
religious discourse while refusing to allow it to claim
literal truth. Its literal interpretation is to be found
in some further system of beliefs which, functioning
in a way similar to the way a theory articulates and
deploys a model in science, relates the vivid imagery
of primary religious discourse to what may be respon-
sibly believed relative to current knowledge. In the
extended sense of metaphor employed above, therefore,
we are witnessing in theology a return to metaphorical
interpretation of religious discourse; but it is a meta
phorical hermeneutic of a highly sophisticated form.
There are many, of course, who share the hostility of
Plato to this entire enterprise, however guarded the
method and refined the analysis. Still, as long as the
theories which interpret the inherited metaphors of
religious discourse are fashioned with integrity and
measured with rigor against the appropriate standards
of intellectual adequacy, the enterprise can do little
harm; and as long as there are many who find rich
values in preserving attachment to the primary
imagery of their religious tradition, the enterprise will
(despite Plato) be doubtless considered worth all the
“labor and ingenuity” required.
