re: Don't take the Bible literally says scholar who brought earliest Latin analysis of Gospels

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Who gets to choose what is meant literally or figuratively?

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I don't know about choose, but the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines what literal and spiritual means in terms of Biblical texts:

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The senses of Scripture

115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal."83

117 The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God's plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.

1. The allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ's victory and also of Christian Baptism.84

2. The moral sense. The events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written "for our instruction".85

3. The anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, "leading"). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.86

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The literal sense is not necessarily the words, but the meaning of the words.

If 200 years from now, someone reads a news story from today that says it was "raining cats and dogs", does it literally mean it was raining cats and dogs? No. "Raining cats and dogs" is an allegorical statement. But without understanding the culture of the day, someone in 2200 might take that to mean it was actually raining cats and dogs.