Allegorically Speaking

Merriam-Webster defines the word allegorical as having hidden spiritual meaning that transcends the literal sense of the sacred text. The Bible is a collection of ancient writings reflecting the human desire and struggle to understand the sacred. Someone once said that if God were to read the bible, He would probably learn more about humanity than about himself, because the Bible is more an anthropology (study about humans) than it is a theology (study about God). Still, we trust that through the limited expression of humans, God’s Spirit does communicate His truth to us.

The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (1965), Vatican Council II said, “In determining the intention of the sacred writers, attention must be paid to the literary forms, for the fact is that truth is presented and expressed differently in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression. Hence the exegete must look for that meaning which the sacred writer, in a determined situation and given the circumstances of his time and culture, intended to express and did in fact express, through the medium of a contemporary literary form”. This is especially true for the writers of the Bible, because it was written by men with the help of God, and we need to understand their world view.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, says, “In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at the time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current …” (paragraph 110). In other words, it's important to understand the cultures, beliefs, and lives of the people who became for us the people of God, as well as the people of other nations that interacted with them. Obviously, what their social customs were like, how they lived, and what they believed must be considered relative to understanding them as a people.

We often hear the phrase "don't take the verse out of context", which I agree is extremely important to fully understand the continuous and consistent message of the Bible. Just as a verse should be studied as a whole in the chapter, chapters should be studied as a whole in the book, and the books should be studied as a whole in the Bible. It's equally important to understand that the depth of the meaning within the Bible goes beyond the literal and historical. The inspired word of God is full of allegory in the form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas such as charity, greed, or envy. Our task is to carefully search out the meanings of the stories within the Bible, which was written allegorically, with a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.