He is misunderstanding “figuratively” here. “Figurative” has to do with such things as “eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge”, the “fruit” and “tree” may be figurative; now, if the Bible said, “And then Eve ate an apple from the apple tree of knowledge of good and evil”, one would be required to take it literally if one believes the Bible is inerrant, e.g. the Catholic Church (although there are dissenting interpretations of Dei Verbum). As it is currently phrased, context allows the “fruit” to be generalized, and only the “sin” concretized.
But, in this, the genealogies, the Bible states categorically a plain, mathematical fact: there are two choices: 1) the Bible is wrong, and the author lied or fictionalized, or 2) the fact is correct.
I also take exception to the Church “moving in this direction”. The Church does not move; its doctrines are eternal and immutable. If this is the case, St Thomas Aquinas reading Genesis in the 1200s, or St Paul reading it in the first century, could not have had a correct understanding of it. Modern naturalistic science has come and said “thus it is”, and religion has bowed, and said, “we reinterpret the Bible, we read your discoveries in to it”. So has it ever been: when has there ever been a time where religion has said, “Thus it is so”, and the naturalistic scientists said, “Yea, it is: therefore although our facts are right, our philosophical framework is not, and our interpretations are incorrect: we must take the facts and re-interpret them in to a non-atheistic framework”?
Long age interpretations were never thought of before “deep time” uniformitarianism because popular in the mid-19th century. No one, before Lyell and Darwin, reading the Bible, came to any conclusions like those reading after, and influenced, by such men, would. This is called eisegesis, or poor exegesis, and involves reading external material and pre-conceived notions in to the Biblical text, instead of letting the text speak for itself. Note that this does not discount a sensus plenior. We’ll speak more on this below.
A mark of eisegesis is the extensive use of verbal gymnastics, redefinition, and rhetorical legerdemain, setting one verse against another and reading outside of context: thus, the word “yom” in Genesis 1 can technically mean “indefinite period of time”, but in the context it is given, with both “evening and morning” and a cardinal or ordinal number, it must mean a 24-hour day; whenever “yom” is used with these modifiers, it indicates either 1) the daylight period, 2) a 24-hour period of day and night. Now, in Genesis 2, “yom” is appended with the preposition “b” (making “be’yom”), which is a figurative usage: “In the day when the LORD created the heaven and earth”, analogous to our English usage, “in the day of the Apostles”.
Now, Scripture has multiple senses. All of these senses are based on the literal, or, more correctly, the historico-grammatical. It is quite possible that great and decreasing longevity was a sign of spiritual decay; but if no men actually had great longevity, the allegorical interpretation falls apart, as the Biblical author is at best using a lie to illustrate a spiritual truth - and what kind of truth is it, that is illustrated with a lie? If the sole meaning was of spiritual decay, the inspired author could have said so easily in far fewer words, or appended, “and their ages decreased due to sin”. The Bible, in fact, does state so, although not quite as plainly: but such an interpretation presupposes individuals with the stated ages in order to be coherent!
Take the Ark of Noah to be another example; it has been interpreted as a type of the Church. This is because those who were in the ark were saved, and required the ark to be saved, and those who were without, perished. Now, if no one in the historical ark was actually saved, and those who were outside of it didn’t perish - that is, if there was not a global flood - the typology is meaningless. If there was no ark and no flood, it becomes obvious that it is fruitless, and, indeed, insane to interpret it as a type of the Church. For if the ark did not exist, the typology does not exist; if men were not saved in it, and did not perish outside of it, it no longer has any analogy with the Church. A type that did not exist has been interpreted as having an antitype in the Church. If one persists with this line of reasoning, the Church does not exist! One must both abandon the typology, and confess that the Biblical author was not only incorrect, but that he invented an absolute myth, which myth was then interpreted as foreshadowing the Church.
(Continued below)
You’re saying that we don’t have to take these ages literally, right?