As those who read with modern eyes, we struggle to understand how anything but that which is absolutely literal could be appropriate. We expect the Bible to read like an automotive textbook. Yet the metaphorical communicates truth just as much as the literal, sometimes more so. The point is, we “ascribe to God in an absolute sense all the perfections we observe in creatures.”32 As we do so, however, we must keep in mind that there can be no perfection in the creature in the exact same way that it is in God.33 It is “palpably absurd of you,” says the church father Tertullian, “to be placing
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