Popular thinking of many people today is colored by the idea that all truth is relative - that what is true for me may not be true for you. Thus, when someone prefers a doubtful interpretation of Scripture, he may justify himself by saying, "Everyone is entitled to his own interpretation," as if any interpretation is as good as another. The rule of authorial intent shows this thinking to be in error. The only correct interpretation is the one faithful to the author's intent. Churches tainted with neo-orthodox theology use Bible words and concepts to gain satisfying religious experience. This is existentialism along the lines of Kierkegard, Bart & Heidiger writ large. Upon reading a Bible text, they look for subjective meanings. They ask, "How is this text useful for reinforcing my own religious ideas and promoting a good religious feeling?" Because they set subjective meanings in place of intended meanings, they are violating the rule of authorial intent. This is the very essence of eisegesis as opossed to exegesis.
The basic sense of a passage is the single sense evident to any reader who allows the words their ordinary meanings and who expects the grammar and syntax to shape and combine these meanings in a normal fashion. (This rule should not be applied indiscriminately, without recognition that Biblical writers may sometimes propound a riddle or engage in word play. In either instance the words may bear more than one basic meaning.) That death is to be interpreted as spiritual death exclusively, when the broadest sense of the word is universally expressed throughout Scripture, can not be established from the context.
The context of a passage may supply clues to the correct interpretation. Such clues may even clarify a passage that otherwise would be obscure. The meaning of the word death is not obscure, its broadest sense is intimated throughout Scripture. The context of Genesis as a straightforward, in an obvious sense, authentic, literal, historical record of what actually happened (if the normal principles of biblical exegesis - ignoring pressure to make the text conform to the evolutionary prejudices of our age - are applied) does not support a restrictive interpretation of a spiritual death exclusively.
Just how much liberty do we have to discover allegories? Some church fathers and many commentators during the Middle Ages carried allegorizing to extremes, even so far as to neglect the plain meaning of Scripture. In reaction against allegorizing, most Bible-believing expositors since the Reformation decline to look for any allegories besides those Scripture itself identifies - with one major exception: The Song of Solomon has traditionally been read as an allegory of Christ's love for the church. Reading the meaning of death as being one exclusively a spiritual death only is not even allegory (where each element of a story represents something beyond itself), but an insistance of a restrictive interpretation of a word that is universally used in it broadest sense. And as I've already stated, that's not exegetical, that's pure eisegesis.
The Bible is to be taken literally unless it is using symbols or a figure of speech. Death in this case is not a metaphor: speaking of an equivalence when there is no more than a resemblance; it is not metonymy: a substitution of a related concept for the intended concept; it is not synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword); it is not ellipsis: an abbreviated expression that requires the reader to supply the missing words; it is not hyperbole: rhetorical overstatement.
How can it be objectively ascertained that the word in question isn't a figure of speech? Generally, an expression should be taken figuratively if it falls in one of three categories:
Scriptures are not to be interpreted in a metaphorical sense unless their literal sense is impossible, untrue, or trivial. It cannot be concluded that the account is symbolic unless there's meaning in the details. But virtually none of the details in the creation account have meaning if the account is not literally true. It is just a nice story with hardly any connections to fact. You have yet to conclusively adduce that death is exclusively spiritual, a restrictive interpretation of a word that is universally used with it broadest meaning intended.
Perhaps I and the others are not being clear enough. I'll try it again:
We don't have to read Scripture according to your "rules."
Also:
Your "rules" are not a guarantee that your understanding is straight from the Holy Spirit.
What hubris.
It cannot be concluded that the account is symbolic unless there's meaning in the details. But virtually none of the details in the creation account have meaning if the account is not literally true. It is just a nice story with hardly any connections to fact.
Thank you again for showing how those hellbent on seeing only the literal facts of an allegorical account can remain blind to the richness of the imagery. "Virtually none of the details in the creation account have meaning if the account is not literally true" you pronounce from on high. That's hilarious.
I guess the names of the trees in the Garden are meaningless, and you've probably never contemplated what it means to know Good an Evil and how this changes our responsibilities to act in a way that is different from the way animals react to their environment by instinct.
No, there's no meaning there. Just names of pretty trees.
SD
I also find this amusing:
The context of Genesis as a straightforward, in an obvious sense, authentic, literal, historical record of what actually happened
It's a nice example of what Reader Dave has pointed out to be the most common fundamentalist error: an attempt to impose post-enlightment rationalist standards of historical scholarship on a text written for a people who knew nothing of such things.
Actually the only really sound solution to Scriptural interpretation is to read Scripture in the context of the Church which has provided a consistent stream of interpretation from the time of the Holy Apostles onward. (We Orthodox and our separated Latin bretheren differ on where the Church is to be found since the 11th century, but we agree on the principle I have enunciated.)
Your proposed hermeutic would put you in good stead with the ancients in the Partiarchate which I am blessed to serve as a subdeacon: the exegetical school of Antioch very much tended toward literalism. While this restrained Antiochenes from falling into gnosticism, Origenism or Monophysitism, reliance on literal interpretation of Scripture did not prevent Nestorius or Theordore of Mopsuestia from falling into grevious heresies. Likewise, St. Cyril of Alexandria was soundly orthodox, despite the Alexandrian school of exegesis relying on metaphor and analogy in its approach to Scripture.
The problem--exacerbated by reading Scripture in translation--is that without well-formed tradition, 'literal' doesn't really signify much. Your own approach to the passage you cite from the Second Universal Epistle of Peter is a case in point: the Holy Apostle writes that 'prophecy' is not a matter of one's own interpretation (I checked the Greek), yet you apply it to all Scriptural texts. A 'literal' reading would lead to the limitation of the principle to prophetic texts. And, moreover, you then assume that multiple meanings are not intended by the Spirit. (A curious assumption, since human authors with far less wit and skill than Our Lord showed in his repartee with the Pharisees often intend multiple layers of meaning.)
Likewise, it is curious that you fix on 'death' being meant literally throughout Scripture. "In the day you eat of it you will die." Either 'day' is not literal in that Divine pronouncement, since the Scriptures record that Adam and Eve lived years and had children subsequent to the day they 'ate of it', or 'die' means spiritual death, separation from the Life of the All-Holy Trinity.
Of course if 'day' is metaphorical in that Divine command, one is left with the likelihood that it is metaphorical earlier in Genesis. It is the same word in both places--I checked the Greek Septuigent--as an Orthodox I regard the
Greek Old Testament prepared by Jewish scholars at the behest of the Ptolemaic Pharoah in the 3rd c. BC as authoritative--you are welcomed to check the Masorete to see whether the Hebrew 'day' in the command and 'day' in the creation account are different. I suspect not, since the best Jewish scholars of the 3rd c. BC rendered them the same in Greek.