Well, I think one of those "ways" just seems retarded. How are we to decide what scriptures are and aren't "purely symbolic", if pure symbolism is all that some of them apparently are? What doofus thought of this? Are we to simply rely on imperfect human reason, on the natural notions of the inferior mind, to determine all of this? "Durr, I don't like what this really means, I'm just going to say it's a symbol now!" Absolute imbeciles.
>Ah, no, Jesus didn't actually feed a crowd of five thousand, that story was just symbolic.
>Nuh-uh, Saint Paul never actually said that there is one church, one faith, one baptism, and so on, he was just speaking in symbols.
>He didn't really say that women should keep their heads covered in the church, either, that was just some complex symbolism.
>No, God didn't literally create the Earth in seven days, it's just symbolism for some damn reason!
Do you see where we're arriving at with this attitude towards the scriptures? It's just Horseshit-Central, that's where this shoddily-made wagon-of-thought tumbles into. It's bogus, and it's a complete distortion of the truths given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ for the sake of the feeble human mind's appeasement so that we may find slothful, ignorant comfort in lies.