I came across this article after being inspired to search further by Crazyheart's biblical symbols thread. The author touches on a number of issues - myth in a literary context, symbolic language in an historical context and the loss of the richness of both in our modern context.

Note that the article was written in 1982; yet I am of the opinion that not only does the situation remain but that the reductionist view has become more entrenched over the years since it was printed. It is this narrowing world view that I hold responsible for the persistent and destructive schisms among the isms of our present day society – an opinion that perhaps reveals my own reductive tendencies ;-)

Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance

- by Conrad Hyers

. ... August 4-11, 1982 issue of The Christian Century, pp. 823-27.

Woe to him who strives with his Maker,
an earthen vessel with the potter!
Does the clay say to him who fashions it,
`What are you making?'
or `Your work has no handles'? [Isa. 45:9].

With all the decades of scientific research and biblical scholarship that have intervened since the Scopes "monkey trial" in 1925, one might have thought that the issues were by now passe. Yet the recent wave of school-board hearings, legislative bills and court cases suggests that literalism is a persistent phenomenon. Indeed, we may be seeing only the top of the turnip.

The literalist mentality does not manifest itself only in conservative churches, private-school enclaves, television programs of the evangelical right, and a considerable amount of Christian bookstore material; one often finds a literalist understanding of Bible and faith being assumed by those who have no religious inclinations, or who are avowedly antireligious in sentiment. Even in educated circles the possibility of more sophisticated theologies of creation is easily obscured by burning straw effigies of biblical literalism.

But the problem is even more deep-rooted. A literalist imagination--or lack of imagination--pervades contemporary culture. One of the more dubious successes of modern science--and of its attendant spirits technology, historiography and mathematics--is the suffusion of intellectual life with a prosaic and pedantic mindset. One may observe this feature in almost any college classroom, not only in religious studies, but within the humanities in general. Students have difficulty in thinking, feeling and expressing themselves symbolically.

The problem is, no doubt, further amplified by the obviousness and banality of most of the television programming on which the present generation has been weaned and reared. Not only is imagination a strain; even to imagine what a symbolic world is like is difficult. Poetry is turned into prose, truth into statistics, understanding into facts, education into note-taking, art into criticism, symbols into signs, faith into beliefs. That which cannot be listed, outlined, dated, keypunched, reduced to a formula, fed into a computer, or sold through commercials cannot be thought or experienced.

Our situation calls to mind a backstage interview with Anno Pavlova, the dancer. Following an illustrious and moving performance, she was asked the meaning of the dance. She replied, "If I could say it, do you think I should have danced it?" To give dance a literal meaning would be to reduce dancing to something else. It would lose its capacity to involve the whole person. And one would miss all the subtle nuances and delicate shadings and rich polyvalences of the dance itself.

The remark has its parallel in religion. The early ethnologist R. R. Marett is noted for his dictum that "religion is not so much thought out as danced out." But even when thought out, religion is focused in the verbal equivalent of the dance: myth, symbol and metaphor. To insist on assigning to it a literal, one-dimensional meaning is to shrink and stifle and distort the significance. In the words of E. H. W. Meyerstein, "Myth is my tongue, which means not that I cheat, but stagger in a light too great to bear." Religious expression trembles with a sense of inexpressible mystery, a mystery which nevertheless addresses us in the totality of our being.

The literal imagination is univocal. Words mean one thing, and one thing only. They don't bristle with meanings and possibilities; they are bald, clean-shaven. Literal clarity and simplicity, to be sure, offer a kind of security in a world (or Bible) where otherwise issues seem incorrigibly complex, ambiguous and muddy. But it is a false security, a temporary bastion, maintained by dogmatism and misguided loyalty. Literalism pays a high price for the hope of having firm and unbreakable handles attached to reality. The result is to move in the opposite direction from religious symbolism, emptying symbols of their amplitude of meaning and power, reducing the cosmic dance to a calibrated discussion.

One of the ironies of biblical literalism is that it shares so largely in the reductionist and literalist spirit of the age. It is not nearly as conservative as it supposes. It is modernistic, and it sells its symbolic birthright for a mess of tangible pottage. Biblical materials and affirmations--in this case the symbolism of Creator and creation--are treated as though of the same order and the same literary genre as scientific and historical writing. "I believe in God the Father Almighty" becomes a chronological issue, and "Maker of heaven and earth" a technological problem. 
 

The rest of the article delves into the numerological symbolic meanings of Genesis as it relates to the ancient Israelites - an interesting read on all its own, IMHO.

click link for more Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance 

I will end with this one thought from the article - the summation, I believe, of the dangers of literalism....

If one were to speak of a hermeneutical fall, it would have to be the fall into literalism. Literalism diverts attention from, as well as flattening out, the symbolic depth and multidimensionality of the biblical texts. The literalist, instead of opening up the treasurehouse of symbolic imagination, digresses into more and more ingenious and fantastic attempts at defending literalism itself. Again and again the real issue turns out to be not belief in divine creativity but belief in a particular theory of Scripture, not faith but security. The divine word and work ought to have better handles!