As I use the word, "metaphor" is a large umbrella category. It has both a negative and positive meaning. Negatively, it means nonliteral. Positively, it means the more-than-literal meaning of language. Thus metaphorical meaning is not inferior to literal meaning, but is more than literal meaning.
I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth as "a story about the way things never were, but always are." So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes.
A Catholic priest once said in a sermon, "The Bible is true, and some of it happened."
I say to my students, "Believe whatever you want about whether it happened this way; now let's talk about what the story means." The statement applies to the Genesis stories of creation, the gospel birth stories of the Bible generally: a preoccupation with factuality can obscure the metaphorical meanings and the truth of the stories as metaphor.
The Bible as metaphor is a way of seeing the whole: a way of seeing God, ourselves, the divine-human relationship, and the divine-world relationship. And the point is not to "believe" in a metaphor--but to "see" with it. Thus the point is not to believe in the Bible--but to see our lives with God through it.
Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pg. 49-54
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