Please remember the rules of the Religion Moderator as this topic is discussed.
Both.
The issue is to distinguish between the allegory and the fact.
Did the Good Samaritan REALLY exist, or was he a personality created to illustrate a point? In the long run, does it matter?
If you are a Christian, you believe Christ rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, Satan as a real entity, the fact that Christ was the Son of God, that he redeemed us by His death and suffering, plus the personalities and facts of the Old Testament.
But there is a lot of allegory in the Bible and a lot of material which needs to be taken in a figurative sense rather than a literal one.
Post the article on the Internet, and there isn't much of a "we" left. However one answers the question, somebody else will answer differently, and it's more common that people irritate others in to taking the opposite position than that someone brings others around to a point of view through reason and argument.
We should take the Bible seriously.
It is overly simplistic to ask whether we take the Bible literally or figuratively.
The Bible should be examined in the idiom under which it would have been intended and understood for its original audience. This requires an enormous amount of scholarship in ancient literature, history, philosophy, culture, and world religions. Each original audience would have had a very specific reaction to each specific writing.
Asking whether the Bible should be taken literally or figuratively is like asking whether one should load one’s toner cartidge with green toner or red toner. One needs a full range of color, and it needs to be adapted to the original intention of the photographer.
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No one in the world has ever, does now, or will ever, interpret the every single word of the Bible as being of the same sense as "the fire is hot." This is a straw man created to justify the rejection of things recorded in the Bible that are outside the purview of modern science and outside our own experiences (the six day creation, the age of the ancients, Noah's Flood, the Tower of Babel, etc.).
It's a good thing those liberal German Protestants discovered how primitive and exclusively allegorical the Bible is. What would Catholics have done without them?
Both.. as you do with any book with metaphors in it..
Taking it as one or the other misses the point of the whole book..
Knowing which is metaphor and which is literal is not always easy.. sometimes very easy..