The application of symbolism to critical biblical passages remains an interesting thing to contemplate.
Going on from my earlier post,
There is a major problem in attempts to cast the early chapters of Genesis as other than having the meaning of their face reading; particularly noting that the face reading is set in terms of of the causality of the world of our being and experience (coordination points are in the chronological alignment, the pattern of causality that is identical our experience, the continuity of space-time between the Genesis 1-3 depiction of the world and ours, and the uniformity of relationships between that depiction and ours, for example).
The problem is that unfooting Genesis 1 unfoots the understanding of our origin, relationships and sin (particularly the relationship with God) that only can come from Genesis 1.
The claim that G1 is mythic, or symbolic (which amounts to the same thing) immediately removes the information-content that it would otherwise convey. This means that the origin of all things, of our relationship with God (both made, in Genesis 1:27? and broken in Genesis 3:n, and fore-redeemed (Genesis 3:n), and our self-identity are not known, if they are not factual in the only account we have.
Then to explain sin, for example (but also to explain anything else in these chapters), becomes problematic. To understand the claims of scripture people must know the real connections that did, do and will affect them; they mythic connections will not do this, as people's lives are lived, challenged, enjoyed and frustrated in the real world, not the uninformative mythic one from whence comes at best metaphors of the real world. So is we can't show a 'real-world' engagement that explains our situation and all its dimensions, then it does not provide for us to understand our position.
This has a pastoral aspect.
If a person grappling to understand sin and God's redemptive response is told that sin is only explained in the Bible in symbolic terms, then the person can ask "then where did it really come from?" And how would we know? If G1 doesn't tells us what really happened, then what did really happen, and how would we know? Are we therefore really linked to God as G1 says, and do we really bear God's image, or is that just an ex-post facto hope for significance and meaning? The person could well ask, what is 'really real' and the 'real' point of reference for our existential position. If G1 is relegated to the symbolic, then the person would well look to materialism as the final reference point: materialism which eliminates God and the existential position would be the tissue of nonsense that Camus, Satre et al would leave us.
The unwitting, or perhaps just unacknowledged reference made when G1 is regarded as symbolic is that the world as we know it becomes 'a given' not created, and the result of itself, not of will. Alternatively it defaults to an implicit materialism which provides that true knowledge about the world in its totality (our world as experienced) leaves God out, as a not quite real figure; linking only through the tendrils of symbol, not the stout columns of what is real. So he's not really part of our world, but is set more in pagan terms, being an element of a prior world: the world as given, as Enuma Elish, for instance, assumes.
