Shrugging, he allowed himself to wallow in it, at least a little. “Bertrand Russell claimed, ‘So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.’” The Gospels don’t spell out everything, I counterargued in my head. Rather, they are enacted in deeds, principles, or parables. In symbols or syllogisms. Any student of literature knows that metaphor is far more precise than the literal, although there were plenty of both in Scripture. Surely a literary theorist could see it much more clearly than the rest of us. For example I thought of how objectively
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