Isn't calling only the uncomfortable verses metaphor a selective reading?

🔥The question: “Does believing the Bible mean taking ‘cut off your right hand’ literally too?”

🛡️The Church's answer: The literal sense of Scripture means finding what the author actually intended to express; it does not mean taking every expression at the surface of the words. Historical narrative, poetry, wisdom literature, parable, prophecy, and apocalyptic literature all work differently. The Church teaches us to attend together to the author's era and culture, the literary form, the unity of the whole of Scripture, the living Tradition, and the analogy of faith.

🎨An analogy — the different shelves in a library

If you read a library's poetry, news, law codes, letters, and fables by the same rules, you miss the meaning. You have to look at the literary form, just as you don't read the poem “my heart froze” like a medical report.

This analogy shows that the rules for reading change with the genre. Which shelf a text belongs on is not settled by the reader's taste; it has to be judged from the wording of the text, its historical background, and the author's intention.

🧐If they press further: “So you can call anything symbolic whenever you like?” — No. You have to examine genre, context, the original languages, and historical evidence, and you have to listen to the community's long-standing interpretation and the guidance of the Magisterium. Avoiding literalism and inventing whatever meaning you please are two different things.

✨In one sentence: “To respect what the Bible really means, don't read every sentence the same way — look at the author's intent, the genre, and the context.”