re-reading Amazing Grace lately...

[jenk]

From the chapter The Bible: Illiteracies and Ironies:

A Methodist pastor told me that she was recently approached by a young parishioner who told her that he could no longer read the Bible, as he had discovered that it included stories of animal sacrifice. The young man was thoroughly nonplussed when she informed him that there were ancient tales of human sacrifice as well. Welcome to human history, and the history of religion. Even those who would approach the Bible with a more open mind are sometimes handicapped by what Huston Smith has chracterized as "fact fundamentalism." As the theologian Marcus Borg stated in a recent essay in The Christian Century, while "conservatives insist that everything in the Bible must be factual in order to be true," their more liberal scholarly counterparts "seek to rescue a few facts from the fire. Both camps seem largely unaware," he adds, "that we live in the only culture in human history that has equated truth with factuality." Borg finds that "this has had a pernicious effect on our ability to appreciate the Bible, with its interweaving of history and metaphor and symbolic narrative." [Emphasis added]