The Truth of Metaphor

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

The problem is that facts never speak for themselves.  Chronicles and testimonies and stories mean different things to different people.

-Leonard J. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian (pg. 64)

There is danger in being open-minded to error; there is also a danger in being so zealous in protecting the Saints from new views that free inquiry is stifled.

-Leonard J. Arrington, Adventures of a Church Historian (pg. 64)

"I seen they was some things that folks couldnt lie about. The facts was too plain. And what a man was worth at his work was one of them things. It was just knowed to everbody from the lowest to the highest and they wasnt no several opinions about it."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 49)