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The bible is often metaphor, and no one denies this, other than my perhaps wrong understanding that bible alone Christians take all of scripture literally, except John 6.

That's an important and helpful insight. "Bible alone Christians" are very often not well understood by their opponents. This is not something in which I am trying to fix blame, but it is a real problem with some of these FR conversations. For one thing, "Bible alone" is a misnomer if it is taken in an absolute sense. It's really more like "Bible first," or "Bible supreme" concept. "Bible alone" is a straw man. We who take the Bible as our supreme authority in matters of faith and doctrine are happy to be enlightened by sources of knowledge outside the Bible, linguistic, patristic, scientific, archaeological, etc. Very often those sources will help us better understand the Scriptures. But at the end of the day, when all fonts of wisdom have been considered, and an actual decision of faith, morals, or doctrine must be made, for us the Scriptures will trump every other claim to authority.

Furthermore, this means we are not predisposed to either a rigid literalism or a flamboyant anti-literalism. We just want to get at original intent, wherever that takes us, similar to the conservative approach to the Constitution. What is the author saying? Sometimes that can be solved most naturally with literal understanding, and sometimes best with figurative, and most often with a mixture of both.

For example, we no doubt both accept that Jesus bodily rose from the dead. Some would turn even that into a symbol with no corporeal reality, but we would reject that, because it is clear from the text that the resurrection of Jesus was both a spiritual and corporeal event, and that's how the disciples experienced it. So we accept that, because that is clearly what the author intended to convey.

certain instructions are NOT metaphor or symbol; the ten commandments and the beatitudes are clear instruction; as well as John 6.

Direct commandments and other such instruction often do have a more literal flavor to them, but even here there can be a mix of metaphor and literalness. God sent real manna from Heaven to sustain Israel. They were under specific instructions on how to gather and prepare it. But we also know it was a metaphor for the Heavenly bread, Jesus Christ, as taught in John 6.

And Israel was under instructions to remember the very real events of the Exodus from Egypt, including that amazing walling up of the waters of the Red Sea, the terrifying night of the angel of death, the real sacrifice offered for the firstborn of Israel, and the making of the first passover meal. All vividly real, but all pointing forward by prophetic metaphor to Christ, with the Red Sea a picture of our baptism and escape from sin, the passover lamb an image of Christ, by which we too escape death, the unleavened matzo of the passover meal representing both Israel's hasty escape from Egypt, and the body of our Savior broken for our escape from a slavery far worse than Egypt's.

I didn't realize how late it was. perhaps we can pick up on John 6 later. Suffice it to say for now that it is already entering metaphoric space when Jesus speaks of Himself as the Bread of Heaven, because He is using the literal manna to represent Himself, and that is metaphor.

Anyway, I must go to bed.

Peace,

SR