chuckd
Puritan Board Junior
Oxford English Dictionary on "literal":
What if the author intended a certain passage to be an allegory, such as Song of Songs or Pilgrim's Progress? Taking them literally would also be taking them allegorically, correct?
II. Free from metaphor, allegory, etc.
a. orig. Theol. Originally in the context of a traditional distinction between the literal sense and various spiritual senses of a sacred text: designating or relating to the sense intended by the author of a text, normally discovered by taking the words in their natural or customary meaning, in the context of the text as a whole, without regard to any ulterior spiritual or symbolic meaning. Opposed to allegorical adj., anagogical adj. 1, moral adj. 2d, mystical adj. 1b, tropological adj. 1.
What if the author intended a certain passage to be an allegory, such as Song of Songs or Pilgrim's Progress? Taking them literally would also be taking them allegorically, correct?