The Bible as a Secular Allegory

[Sam Jer]

How do you react to people who make the bible into a secular allegory?
It's common in highly educated segments of secular Israeli society, and closer at home for most of you Jordan Peterson does it too. Note for example how Jordan Peterson uses the Cain & Abel narrative in this video.

 

[WithinThePale]

I can't say I'm very good at it, but I try to state that I believe that the Bible records real events, and that I believe it to be the word of the true and living God. Then I try to show some of its internal consistencies, and the gloriousness of its one story of redemption. I once did a Bible study through part of Genesis with a Peterson enthusiast, and while I was glad to spend time showing him some of the story of redemption, ultimately he lost interest in my approach of taking it literally instead of from a Jungian perspective. I'd be really interested to learn what methods work well to get such people to consider a divine origin for scripture more seriously, rather than 'We've kept these stories because they speak to the human experience really well'.

 

[MW]

Paul says in 1 Cor. 10, these things happened. The Bible records historical events in geographical places that can be verified to a certain degree. Truth exists on that objective level by which we can speak propositionally and factually as we would of our every day experiences in the world. Person A went to Person B and said such and such. But the Bible also speaks across time. There are truths that speak to us at a deeper level than the propositional. When liberal theologians or psychologists can observe human interactions over time and find the Bible speaking to these kinds of things, it can be useful, as long as we do not start to distrust the objective, propositional message of the Bible, and especially its distinct and exclusive message of salvation in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

 

[Poimen]

How do you react to people who make the bible into a secular allegory?
It's common in highly educated segments of secular Israeli society, and closer at home for most of you Jordan Peterson does it too. Note for example how Jordan Peterson uses the Cain & Abel narrative in this video.

It seems to me that such persons misrepresent the genre of scripture due to pre-conceived notions of what truth is and how it is discovered. The Bible presents itself as historical narrative of God's redemptive dealings with his people and a desire to change that to reflect some kind of stream of collective consciousness demeans it and us.

For everywhere the message of the Bible is that it is written "for our learning, that we... might have hope" (Romans 15:4) because it is God guiding the story and its meaning in and through the living, suffering, dying, risen, and reigning Christ. Short of that we are left with the transcendent reduced to the best (or worst) of what humanity can achieve. But history shows us that is a self-refuting indeed, hopeless, endeavour.

Jordan Peterson, more than anyone else, should understand this since he militates against the idea of the state or a self-appointed group of experts imposing their vision on others. But is that not what he is doing to holy scripture?

 

[py3ak]

The existential reading of Scripture can be challenged on existential grounds. The issue is not, of course, with there being existential applications of Scripture, or believing that Scripture is profitable for personal growth in a variety of ways. But using Scripture as a resource allows people to avoid confronting its claims to authority and historicity. And that avoidance of a significant issue is inauthentic.

On existential principles, then, they should have the clarity to ask the questions: 1) Does Scripture state historical facts, and what do those facts imply, if so? 2) Given Scripture's claims to authority, does rejecting the authority while appropriating the wisdom, inevitably introduce hermeneutical distortion? In other words, by reading Scripture against its own grain, possibly what they are finding in Scripture is what they brought to it, rather than what it contains.

That should at least cause them to be honest in describing what they are doing: Scripture may be a catalyst for change, but on their premises it is one with limited corrective power (because it can't challenge their existentialist assumptions).