Truth of Scripture, Factual and Figurative Language

Following up this post, and deeply conscious that I'm violating a rule that good blog-writing should be short and to the point:

From the Mailbag:

I just want to know how a person who believes that the events in the Bible are as fictional as Aesop's Fables can also believes that the Bible is divinely inspired, set apart from other books.

I would put the question the other way around:

Why would you say that it wouldn't be inspired just because it's fictional?

If we encounter in Aesop's fables a moral that we say is "true" (and we do, all the time), we don't say, "But of course it's less true than scripture" unless we're very confused about what truth is. Either it's true, or it's not, or it's true with qualifications, but it's not "less" true than truth.

And it's only a sort of misguided piety that makes us think that something is "more true" than another truth just because it appears in scripture.

I'll take it a step farther. Not only is the "moral" true, but so is the tale itself. "Waitaminnit," someone might say, "that rabbit did not talk!" No, but the rabbit is a sort of metaphor for a kind of person, treated a certain way by a skilled story-teller, to emphasize certain characteristics in the human heart. It is true.  It is the truth of a certain kind of person (probably traits of whom we all carry in our personality).

If we must be tiresome I'll admit the rabbit never talked, that there are no such things as hobbits, and that there is no Santa Claus who is the personification of the meaning of Christmas. But raising the question is the very worst of what passes for the adult "mind."  

And maybe the worst of modern thinking that thinks it is superior to figurative language simply because it knows how to do without it.

So back to scripture: if you have a "fiction" that tells a profound truth, why would you need to raise the question of "inspiration"? It tells the truth, doesn't it? The Holy Spirit can work through it, can't she? What's the trouble? Why would one need to ask whether inspiration is compromised by the fact that the event never took place, unless one is committed to the assumption (which isn't scriptural) that for any truth to be "fully" true it must also be historical?

But once we have said that, we must say of Aesop, "It is not true," since we have agreed that only historical facts are really true.

And that's just narrow and unimaginative, as well as bad thinking.

If we want to, we can say the ways in which Aesop is true, but this is (as I said before) a little tiresome: it would be cruel and (worse) boring to sit a child down, tell him a tale and then explain laboriously which parts were true, in which ways, and which ones were not and why. That's because the way story functions is to penetrate our imaginations, and we ought not to pay too much attention to the mechanics of the thing if we can help it. At least not as Christians: your business is to tell the stories, not to parse them. Once they have been told they become the raw materials for all sorts of ways of talking about God.

Last point: if God, having children, determined to tell them a fairy-tale, what would it look like? How would it go? What would the moral be? Would Godhave to ensure that it was historically true to be God and not to be a liar? Not at all. God would merely have to tell a story that was true (and as we saw in Aesop, that might not mean historical truth). 

Obviously, an inspired fairy tale does not cease to be inspired because it's a fairy tale, but neither does it cease to be a fairy tale because it's inspired.