Allegory as Common Language

Pearl, Miniature from Cotton Nero A.x.

For ten years, as a literature professor at a secular college, I’ve discussed the Bible--Hebrew and Christian Scriptures--with atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, and modern-pagan readers. My students regularly accomplish an astounding feat that the larger culture finds almost impossible: despite radically divergent worldviews, my students can discuss God and the Bible without arguing, without having to be right, and without rehashing go-nowhere binary debates about creation vs. evolution or whether God does or doesn’t exist. I’ve listened to a pentecostal minister, a catechism teacher, an ex-Catholic atheist, and a Torah-reciting orthodox Jewish man puzzle over Exodus 4:24 where, suddenly, strangely, God seeks “to kill” Moses. Zipporah, the Hebrew leader’s wife, reacts quickly and saves her husband’s life. During another class, the president of the local Campus Crusade for Christ (CRU) chapter listened to a gay devout Christian share his pain over 1 Corinthians 6:9, where the writer Paul includes gay men in a list of people who won’t “inherit the kingdom of God.” The twenty-somethings who fill my classrooms inspire me with their curiosity, their willingness to listen, their lack of appetite for one-upping. What makes such rich interfaith--and theist/atheist--dialogue possible? When conversation about God and the Bible occurs in an ideologically diverse community, the ability to bridge difference and minimize conflict rests on an ancient literary mode and reading practice: allegory.

Allegory is extended metaphor--a literary form that uses story, character, and images to explore philosophical, psychological, and spiritual ideas. As the Oxford Dictionary of Christianity puts it, allegory speaks about one thing to illustrate something else. Anyone who’s read Aesop’s Fables knows what allegory is: think tortoise and the hare. The story surface features a critter race, but underneath the surface, the tale explores human psychology, offering practical wisdom for fostering success. Allegory is ​thought ​in visual and narrative form. To practice allegorical interpretation, you ask what the story is thinking about, rather than whether it’s “true” or “factual.” Having encountered stories like this since childhood, we can usually understand allegory intuitively, if we remind ourselves to read that way.

Allegory helps all readers engage the Bible, but readers taught to focus on the Bible’s story surfaces may not automatically practice allegorical reading. This reading practice, however, allows un-likeminded reading companions to circumvent logjams in discussion over whether particular events “really happened” or whether every detail is “accurate.” To some readers, it’s important whether the Bible is true and factual. For other readers, the Bible’s value does not derive from factuality or historical accuracy. Instead, its value derives from its ingenious—even preternatural—deployment of literary tools for exploring and picturing emotional, social and spiritual experiences. Whether you believe the Bible is the “inerrant Word of God” or a collection of incomparably influential literary classics, you can read Bible stories allegorically. Like all literary classics, Bible stories contain life-changing insights into love, sex, work, family, power, trauma, leadership, maturity, ethnicity, marriage, embodiment, nature, suffering, healing, knowledge, community, and everything else that makes up our messy, baffling, occasionally glorious lives. Many privileged Westerners cruise ancient texts like The Tao Te Ching, the I Ching, and The Mahabharata, looking for pointers about common existential conundrums. Read allegorically, Bible stories offer the same potential for depth of understanding.

Allegorical reading is not new. It’s the oldest way of reading the Bible. The earliest known Jewish and Christian Bible commentators practiced it. Philo of Alexandria, a second-century ce Jewish writer, practiced allegorical interpretation to uncover what he saw as the universal significance of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament, for Christians). Origen, a Christian martyr who taught at the Catechetical School in Alexandria from 202-231 ce, prepared students for baptism by teaching them to read allegorically. Origen did not teach allegorical reading as an academic exercise: for him, allegory opened a path to the Bible’s deepest meanings. Only by burrowing beneath the literal surfaces of the stories, Origen taught, could readers mine the Bible’s spiritual gold. The beauty and value of allegorical reading in our own time is that it allows readers with divergent worldviews to encounter biblical literature together. Focusing on the Bible’s bedrock-level ideas helps bridge the gulf between atheist/theist, Jewish/Christian, and JudeoChristian/Muslim frameworks for reading biblical literature.

Allegory can also bridge the gulf between literalist and non-literalist readers. The most bitter debates about what the Bible is--history/fact or metaphor/poetry--flare ​within​, rather than ​between​ faith traditions. The gulf between mainline liberal Protestants and, say, fundamentalist Baptists, looks wider to me than the one between atheists and God-lovers. Arguments about the Bible between what scholar Marcus Borg terms “literal-factual” and “historical-metaphorical” readers often lack neighborly good-will. Reading the Bible literally requires a decision to suspend disbelief and accept what sounds improbable by twenty-first century standards. Readers unable to dismiss the fossil record, carbon dating, or other scientific methods for ascertaining geological age make the decision to understand the Bible in terms that jibe with earth science. Mutual tolerance is the best course of action. Perhaps it isn’t necessary to categorize reading tendencies in binary terms and then choose sides. I have certainly heard literalists read historically and metaphorically; and non-literalists can certainly find “facts” in the Bible that sources outside the Bible corroborate: the Jewish Temple definitely got destroyed twice, once in 586 bce, then again in 70 ce. Allegorical interpretation shifts the conversation away from intractable disagreements and refocuses attention on the spiritual, philosophical, and psychological themes that interest everyone. Allegory thereby provides common ground on which readers can operate.

Countless Bible scholars have pointed out that it remains important, while considering how a literary work might illumine lived experience, to consider how a story’s original makers and consumers would differ in perspective from any twenty-first century reader. Twenty-first century readers draw hard lines between fact and fiction, poetry and nonfiction, metaphor and reportage. Lines like these vary from culture to culture. As Philo of Alexandra, Origen and other ancients recognized, Hebrew Bible storytellers employed metaphorical language freely. They had no interest in writing for the New York Times. They were not trying to practice geology or physics as we know those disciplines. It doesn’t really make sense for the not-so-new atheists or anyone else to complain that epic storytellers have not described the world as a contemporary geologist or physicist would. Anyone acquainted with intellectual history should know the difference between pre- and post-Enlightenment epistemology, premodern and postmodern thinking. (If you wish, you can see my article ​Pre- and Post-Enlightenment Epistemology, on this site, for definitions of epistemology, Enlightenment, mythopoesis, and other terms.​) Some critics of biblical literature seem to imagine that pre-scientific thinkers got everything “wrong” because they were so “primitive.” Actually, the mythopoetic thinkers of the ancient world would not have aimed for “factual accuracy” because it did not exist yet as the dominant epistemological standard toward which to strive; mythopoetic thinking utilizes metaphor as a form of thought. Early Christian Bible interpreters, like their Jewish counterparts, understood metaphor, and did not mistake it for earth science. In the third century ce, Origen wrote “No one, I think, can doubt that the statement that God walked in the afternoon in paradise, and that Adam lay hid under a tree, is related figuratively in Scripture, that some mystical meaning may be indicated by it.”  

Some twenty-first century intellectuals fight about creation because the Enlightenment triggered a cultural battle for authority between science and religion. Science has never forgiven the Church for excommunicating Galileo, among other offenses against reason and truth. Religion has never forgiven science for usurping much of the cultural authority religion once monopolized. We can de-escalate this cultural battle, disassemble this binary thinking, if we adopt the assumption that science and religion serve different human endeavors. We don’t have to attack one to perform our allegiance to the other. Reading allegorically allows anyone to appreciate an indispensable literary treasure without sacrificing scientific approaches to truth.

Sources Used: 

Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity

Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time

Angus Fletcher, Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode

Origen, On First Principles

Hindy Najman, “Early Nonrabbinic Interpretation,” in The Jewish Study Bible

Karin Hedner Zetterholm, Jewish Interpretation of the Bible: Ancient and Contemporary

Frankfoort, Henri. Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man.

**Websites are not the place for detailed bibliographic information. Thorough citation information will be available upon release of my current work-in-progress, The Bible for Atheists and other Spiritual-but-not-Religious People.