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 first superscripted word in each of the four Gospels is the Greek proposition kata.  The basic sense of this preposition is "according to..." The gospel according to Matthew, the gospel according to Mark, the gospel according to Luke, and the gospel according to John.  That this little preposition should so prominently headline each of the gospels is significant.  It indicates that what follows, in all of its personal particularity, is not an abstract or objective recitation of facts but a profoundly personal and subjective declaration of Jesus's atoning grace.

It is sometimes tempting to view the incongruous particularities of each of the gospel narratives as a kind of deficiency that needs to be corrected by correlation--but it is not.  Rather, the fact that each gospel narrative necessarily comes to us filtered through the beating heart of a particular, individual experience of God's love marks the exact point at which truth without truthfulness would show itself to be utterly inadequate to the gift Jesus wishes to give.  When it comes to the announcement of the good news, bare truth is no virtue.  The very aim of the gospel in confronting us with certain truths is to induce in us a reorientation of our subjective relation to the truth.  In order for the gift of grace to be received, we must take up the truth as our own, as something spoken truthfully with our own mouths about our own selves.  The kata that opens each of the Gospels indicates that what they give to us is not simply the truth, but their own personal experience of its truthfulness.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 117