Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ...
by dragonwriter on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @02:20PM
(#10583345)
> > Creationism and biblical literalism are relatively recent "innovations" in some Christian traditions.
> This isn't really true. You're right that metaphorical interpretations are very old, but so are literal ones.
The existence of some literal interpretations is not literalism. Literalism is the doctrine which excludes any metaphorical interpretations, and it is, in fact, relatively new (and mostly isolated to a subset of Protestantism, not general to Christianity.)
Re:VLC contributor living in Aleppo writing about the Paris ...
by knodi123 on Tuesday November 17, 2015 @05:50PM
(#10584595)
I stand by my position that the existence of interpretations that said the bible is a history book and the events in it occurred as depicted, is not relatively new. If you use the term "literalism" in an academic sense that means something subtly different, then fine. The fact remains that creationism is definitely not even remotely new.
This isn't really true. You're right that metaphorical interpretations are very old, but so are literal ones. The catholic church, who pioneered some great non-literalist interpretations, also used to excommunicate you if you didn't believe all of humanity shared a single male ancestor named Adam.
Pick a random medieval christian peasant, and ask him whether the Ark was a real boat, and let's place wagers on what his answer will be.
The genesis stories were literal before they were metaphorical, and opinions about the relative percentages of fact to metaphor have shifted wildly based on century, region, and denomination.