How Not to Interpret the Bible Part Five. Interpret Everything Allegorically
The Bible is not, overall, a piece of coded literature written in an elaborately allegorical manner with all sorts of hidden meanings, which needs to be decoded to be understood. Thank goodness. Just to be clear what allegory is– it is a story that has a surface meaning within the story, but in fact, those story elements refer primarily to things outside the story. Typical allegories are the Christian example Pilgrim’s Progress or the literary example Spencer’s The Fairy Queen. One has to be able to distinguish between a straight-up allegory where so very many of the elements in the story are symbolic and refer to something outside the story, or an allegorizing of a non-allegory, which is what we find in Philo in various of his books, or once in Paul in Galatians where he allegorizes the story of Sarah and Hagar, and finally, there can be a few allegorical elements in a non-allegory, for example in a parable. Perhaps the most classic example of the over-allegorizing of a non-alleg