ALLEGORY AND TRUTH--1
An ordained minister said to me, "the Bible is all allegory.  The stories may not be historically true but they have truth in them."

  I've been thinking about this.  If something isn't historically true it won't have any spirituality.  If I say I'm a Hollywood agent and I'll make you famous, you aren't going to believe anything I say about God.  If I say it's raining outside--and it is--then you might listen to me because I told the truth.

  The issue all ancient peoples had to face was, the world is a terrible place in which to live.  Life was frightening to the Greeks, the Romans, the Hebrews and others.  If God did not reveal Himself to them, they only had death in their future.  Men died in war, women died in childbirth.  Men had the psychological horror of war, women had social destitution.  They all knew the abyss is a swallowing throat.

  So we created insular psychological structures in which to hide from our own existence.  We have built governments, works of literature and religion, science and knowledge to protect us from our own awareness.  This is religion but not faith, medieval fables but not history.  The quality faith and history have is they are based on the understanding that something must be historically true for it to be spiritually meaningful.

  Some religions and philosophies have no reality to them.  They are not really believed to the point of the risk of a life.  The great writers know that for drama to exist, something has to be lost.  The tragedies--Greek, Shakespeare, and others--all are bult on the understanding that something must be lost in order for something better to be gained.  But in allegory nothing is lost, so there is no drama.

  Jesus says you must lose your life in order to gain it.

  The movies of today, with their computerized images, have no drama because nothing is being risked.  It is all appearance, not drama.  It is the Bible's historical truth that makes it so compelling men and women have died for it. God does not write allegory with some psychological point to it--God writes truth with great spiritual presence through it.

  But some people say myth is true.  This is like the fellow who said he talks to the clouds.  He might do so but I don't believe in anything the clouds are saying.  If the ancient Greeks concocted that someone named Sky impregnated Earth, producing drops of blood which became man, none of this has anything to do with God.  It doesn't explain anything about us as men and women and it certainly doesn't deal with death.  It might have made the ancients feel less horrified by their own existence but it doesn't alleviate that horror.

  Still, allegory is symptomatic of our age.  We have become multicultural, so we don't want to offend anyone.  As long as Jesus was not a real person, we believe no one is offended and everyone can agree with everyone else.  But if Jesus really did live, and do miracles, and be resurrected from the dead, then we are compelled to believe that He is God and no other.  That will separate us from everyone else, that will expose the emptiness of every other religion.

  Ultimately it goes back to whether Jesus is God or just a man.  In some centuries He was believed as being no more than a man.  In some other centuries He was believed as God, but not a man.  The church went to a great deal of trouble in church councils to establish how Jesus was both God and man.  But today, in our time we don't believe that.

  So each generation must cut their own path back to Biblical times, to see Jesus as truly God and truly man.  If we are tempted to allegorize Jesus, we are no more than speaking to ourselves, not listening to God.  All religions look to a horizon, an ultimate place from which our own life is to be understood.  Allegory does not look to God, it merely refers to the imagination of ourselves, by ourselves.  And that is no more convincing to anyone today than the gods were to anyone in the past.