(Robert Farrar Capon from The Fingerprints of God: Tracking the Divine Suspect through a History of Images)
But the deepest difficulty with literalism is that it fails to see the principle device the Spirit uses to weave all those elements into a single story. All that wildly various wet-wash is hung on a paradoxical clothesline of imagery, not on a string of propositional truths. The Bible is held together by icons, by word-pictures like Light, Word, Water, Marriage, the Garden, the Tree, the blood of Abel, the Paschal Lamb, the Blood on the Doorposts, the Rock in the Wilderness, the Bread from heaven, and finally the City, both as historical Jerusalem in the Old Testament and as destiny of the world in the book of Revelation. It's these icons, these sacraments of the real presence of the Word himself, that make it a whole.
But the deepest difficulty with literalism is that it fails to see the principle device the Spirit uses to weave all those elements into a single story. All that wildly various wet-wash is hung on a paradoxical clothesline of imagery, not on a string of propositional truths. The Bible is held together by icons, by word-pictures like Light, Word, Water, Marriage, the Garden, the Tree, the blood of Abel, the Paschal Lamb, the Blood on the Doorposts, the Rock in the Wilderness, the Bread from heaven, and finally the City, both as historical Jerusalem in the Old Testament and as destiny of the world in the book of Revelation. It's these icons, these sacraments of the real presence of the Word himself, that make it a whole.
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