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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.3
I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as “a story about the way things never were, but always are.” So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes.
To quote a Swedish proverb and then to modify it: “Theology is poetry plus, not science minus.”
The reason for their passion is that they have identified truth with factuality; thus, in their minds, if the stories aren’t factual, they aren’t true. And if these stories aren’t true, the Bible isn’t true. What is at stake is their view of the Bible.
When this debate breaks out in my classroom, I say to my students, “Believe whatever you want about whether it happened this way; now let’s talk about what the story means.”
Jesus is a figure of the present and not simply of the past. He
Not only does Jesus live, but “Jesus is Lord.” In the New Testament, this is the foundational affirmation about Jesus, and it is grounded in the Easter experience.
For me, the truth of the Easter stories is not at stake in these questions. For example, the story of the empty tomb may be a metaphor of the resurrection rather than a historical report. As metaphor, it means: you won’t find Jesus in the land of the dead. As the angel in the story puts it, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
At the conclusion of my response, I returned to his closing point and said, “I accept completely the truth of your statement that you walk with Jesus every day. Now, if I were to follow you around with a camera, would there be a time during the day when I could get a picture of the two of you?” I continued, “Of course, that’s silly. But my point is, I think your statement is really true, even though I don’t for a moment imagine that it’s literally true.”5
Indeed, I wonder if the emphasis of some Christians on the Bible being literally true is because they are concerned to say it’s really true.
In Christian history, the more-than-literal meaning of biblical texts has always been most important. Only in the last few centuries has their literal factuality been emphasized as crucial.
Their point was not that because Jesus had healing powers he must have been the Son of God, or that because Jesus was really raised physically and bodily from the dead, this proves that Christianity is true. Their point was that these words still speak to us today and speak powerfully to the circumstances of our lives.
One final comment about a metaphorical approach: metaphor means “to see as.” Metaphorical language is a way of seeing. To apply this to the Bible: the Bible not only includes metaphorical language and metaphorical narratives, but may itself be thought of as a “giant” 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.
A sacrament is a finite, physical, visible mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the sacred becomes present to us. A sacrament is a vehicle or vessel of the sacred.
Within this framework, being Christian is not primarily about believing, in the modern sense of believing certain propositions to be true. Instead, the emerging paradigm emphasizes the relational meanings of faith and leads to a relational and transformational vision of the Christian life.
Without a robust affirmation of the reality of God, Christianity makes no sense. And just as important, how we “see” God—how we think of God, God’s relationship to the world, and God’s character—matters greatly.
Central to understanding the question of God in the modern world is the notion of “worldview.” Our worldview is our image of reality— our image or picture or understanding of what is real and what is possible.
We all have a worldview, whether we’ve ever thought about it or not. We acquire one simply through the process of growing up.
Our worldview is not only our image of reality, but also a lens through which we see reality.
In a religious worldview, there is, to use William James’s term again, a “More.” In addition to the visible world of our ordinary experience and as disclosed by science, there is a “More,” a nonmaterial layer or level of reality, an extra dimension of reality.
Many Christians basically accept the modern worldview’s image of reality and then add God onto it. God is the one who created the space-time world of matter and energy as a self-contained system, set it in motion, and perhaps sometimes intervenes in it. God becomes a supernatural being “out there” who created a universe from which God is normally absent. This is, as we shall see, a serious distortion of the meaning of the word “God.”
Third, there are the provocative affirmations of postmodern science, especially postmodern physics. In his recent book Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith refers to two contemporary physicists who have said that the most fundamental processes of the universe occur outside of space and time.
Concepts of God concern what we think the word “God” refers to as well as how we think of the relationship between God and the world, the “God-world relationship.” Is God “out there”? Or “right here”? Or both?
In the history of Christianity, there are two primary ways of thinking about God and the God-world relationship. In common with many others, I call these two concepts of God “supernatural theism” and “panentheism.”5
Supernatural theism imagines God as a personlike being.
this concept imagines God as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is. The universe is not separate from God, but in God. Indeed, this is the meaning of the Greek roots of the word “panentheism”: pan means “everything,” en means “in,” and theism comes from the Greek word for “God,” theos.
Significantly, this concept of God does not reduce God to the universe or identify God with the universe. As the encompassing Spirit, God is more than everything, even as everything is in God. Thus, God is not only “right here,” but also “more than right here.”
The traditional terms for these two dimensions of God are transcendence and immanence: the “moreness” and the “presence” of God.
So common is supernatural theism in our time that many people think its concept of God is the only meaning the word “God” can have. For them, believing in God means believing in a personlike being “out there.” Not believing this means not believing in God.
“This is all very interesting, but I have a problem every time you use the word ‘God,’ because, you see”—here there’s usually a pause and a deep breath—“I really don’t believe in God.” I always respond the same way: “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” Invariably, it is the God of supernatural theism. I then tell them that I don’t believe in that God either. They are surprised, for they know that I believe in God. They’re simply not aware that there is an option other than supernatural theism.
Indeed, in an important respect, it is more biblical and more orthodox than supernatural theism, for it emphasizes both the transcendence and presence of God, whereas supernatural theism in its modern form emphasizes only the transcendence of God.
To echo a comment made a half century ago by Paul Tillich, one of the twentieth century’s two most important Protestant theologians: if, when you think of the word “God,” you are thinking of a reality that may or may not exist, you are not thinking of God. Tillich’s point is that the word “God” does not refer to a particular existing being (that’s the God of supernatural theism). Rather, the word “God” is the most common Western name for “what is,” for “ultimate reality,” for “the ground of being,” for “Being itself,” for “isness.”
The religions of the world often emphasize that God or the sacred is beyond all words, beyond all language.
The “wholesale God” is what we talk about when we talk about what the word “God” means, what it points to.
Whatever God is ultimately like, our relationship to God is personal. This relationship engages us as persons at our deepest and most passionate level.
Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you because it is through what happens to you that God speaks. . . . It’s in language that’s not always easy to decipher, but it’s there powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.14
By the character of God, I mean what is sometimes spoken of as the nature of God or even as the will of God, but I see character as deeper than will.
The point: it makes a difference how we see the character of God, for how we see the character of God shapes our sense of what faithfulness to God means and thus what the Christian life is about.
In the first way of imaging God’s character, God is a God of requirements and rewards.
When God’s character is thought of this way, then the Christian life is about meeting God’s requirements, be they many or few.
The second way of imaging God’s character sees God as a God of love and justice.
The God of love is also the God of justice. The two are related, for in the Bible justice is the social form of love.
To take the God of love and justice seriously means to take justice seriously and to be aware that prolonged injustice has consequences.
The Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms us into more compassionate beings. The God of love and justice is the God of relationship and transformation.
God as the lawgiver and judge is the God of “works” that Paul and Luther and the Protestant Reformation in general rejected. Instead, they affirmed radical grace: God’s acceptance of us is unconditional, not dependent upon something we believe or do. But radical grace has most often been too radical for most Christians. We most often put conditions on God’s grace: God accepts you if . . . And whenever an “if” clause is added, grace becomes conditional and ceases to be grace.
The Christian life is not about believing or doing what we need to believe or do so that we can be saved. Rather, it’s about seeing what is already true—that God loves us already—and then beginning to live in this relationship. It is about becoming conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God.
Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of Christianity is that we find the revelation of God primarily in a person, an affirmation unique among the major religions of the world.
And because Christians find the ultimate disclosure of God in a person and not in a book, Jesus is more central than the Bible. Jesus trumps the Bible; when they disagree, Jesus wins.
To define the second phrase most concisely, the post-Easter Jesus is what Jesus became after his death. More fully, the post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian experience and tradition.
By the post-Easter Jesus of Christian tradition, I mean the Jesus we encounter in the developing traditions of the early Christian movement—in the gospels and the New Testament as a whole, as well as in the creeds.
