Fictional stories entertain, real accounts inspire.
When Nathan wanted David to repent from his sin with Bathsheba, he told him a fictional story about a rich man and a poor man with one sheep. Did he do it to entertain David, or to inspire him?
Were Jesus’ parables all true accounts? No? Then they were for entertainment value only?
When people decide to not believe in OT accounts it does damage doctrine.
How? The teaching remains constant; the method of conveying that teaching varies.
If Job is to teach us to remain faithful to God in good times and bad, what good does a fictional story do?
So, if the story of Job – which takes the literary form of a pedagogical tale – isn’t historically accurate, how does the tale become less inspiring? It’s still something that an author of Scripture – who was inspired by God to write – used to convey the truth of God’s Salvation History!
How can a false story teach us to persevere?
So you’ve never seen a movie or read a book that inspired you, that wasn’t 100% historically accurate?
Perhaps Jesus was murdered in a dark alley or lonely road, but His disciples came up with an inspiring story of sacrifice to teach us the importance of loving and helping each other.
Straw man argument. I never suggested that the Gospels were fictional accounts.
I’ve often found people consider passages from the Bible as allegory when they don’t like what they read. It’s easier to say “God would never do that”, or “God would never demand that level of obedience.”
Again, please don’t attempt to put words in my mouth, or attempt to smear me with some account you’ve fabricated out of thin air.
… because, of course, then you’d be trying to tell the truth by using a fictional account, and that just can’t happen, now, can it?
us dummies who believe the entire Bible is true.
Now you’re just being silly – you see that, don’t you?
I believe that “the entire Bible is true”, too! “True” doesn’t imply “every word is literal historical fact”. From
The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, as found at the EWTN site:
It is not only legitimate, it is also absolutely necessary to seek to define the precise meaning of texts as produced by their authors—what is called the “literal” meaning. St. Thomas Aquinas had already affirmed the fundamental importance of this sense (S. Th. I, q. 1,a. 10, ad 1).
The literal sense is not to be confused with the “literalist” sense to which fundamentalists are attached. It is not sufficient to translate a text word for word in order to obtain its literal sense. One must understand the text according to the literary conventions of the time. When a text is metaphorical, its literal sense is not that which flows immediately from a word-to-word translation (e.g. “Let your loins be girt”: Lk. 12:35), but that which corresponds to the metaphorical use of these terms (“Be ready for action”). When it is a question of a story, the literal sense does not necessarily imply belief that the facts recounted actually took place, for a story need not belong to the genre of history but be instead a work of imaginative fiction.
