What Was the Intention of Biblical Writers, Then?

(Image credit)

Normally, in the St. Louis area, temperatures rarely fall below 20 degrees, and and snowfall doesn't get over 4 inches at most (our biggest problem most years is sleet or sleet/snow mix, actually). Typical pattern is temps in the 20's or 30's (Fahrenheit of course, I'm in 'murica), occasional snow, then it flips back to 40's or even 50's with rain,  and it keeps going back and forth between those two patterns.

This week, that pattern was shattered. 12-15 inches of snow fell over the area, and temperatures feel to lows not seen in over 25 years. Yesterday morning, we had a low of -6. I had pipes freeze in my basement, despite a heater being down there.

What is the relevance of all this snow discussion, you might ask? Well, because of the snow, I couldn't get out the the Unitarian church I've become a part of recently (they canceled services) and the had an experiment with having a form of "e-church" on their Facebook page. I signed up for Facebook, and joined in on my phone. Links were posted to videos of music, and the minister gave a short sermon in a post on their page.

Gutenburg Bible. Credit: Wikipedia

His sermon really got me thinking about how I view the Bible. Of course as a former "fundigelical", I thought of most everything in the Bible as being literal truth, unless it's painfully obvious, even to a child, that it's a metaphor. It's interesting to think that a primarily literal interpretation of the Bible didn't even come about until around 110 years ago.

As writer Jonny Scaramanga points out in his great post Was Jesus a Creationist? early theologians, Christian and Jewish alike, considered much of the Old Testament to be figurative. It wasn't until the birth of the modern American fundamentalist movement that people started taking stories like Adam and Eve seriously as literal truth.

Now, I don't know what to think about the intentions of Biblical writers. Did many of them mean for the Bible to be taken so seriously, or did they play around a lot with metaphors and allegories to get a point across? It's especially possible that the second case could be true, seeing as how common allegorical stories were in the ancient Middle Eastern cultures that the writers came from.