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Baha'u'llah emphasizes that because people in former ages interpreted prophecies literally, they failed to understand their spiritual meaning. This failure to understand the prophecies is also one of the reasons why people have opposed the Prophets of God. Today there are many conservative Protestant Christians who emphatically reject the explanations of other Christians who interpret some prophecies of the Bible symbolically or allegorically. As one Christian points out, 'Because of the excesses which allegorization has produced in church history, most conservative interpreters today have rejected it.' (23:1) As the end of the nineteenth century drew near, conservative Christians began increasingly to emphasize literal interpretation in connection with prophecy. This was partly an effort to battle 'modernism' and secular culture. The advent of modern science and Darwinism had shaken people's beliefs in the Bible, especially the traditional, literal interpretation of Scripture. Some Christians accommodated these developments by returning to a more allegorical method of understanding the text. Conservatives resisted this by attempting to refute modern theories and articulating theological arguments that Scripture had to be literal in order to be true. By rejecting symbolic interpretation, they sought to preserve traditional views but, in so doing, they also imposed their own restraints on what God could intend in the Scripture, narrowed their options for understanding its message, and left themselves unprepared in the event they were wrong. (23:2) This rejection of allegorical or symbolic interpretation is surprising since Paul himself provides interpretations of the Old Testament which directly support some of the main assumptions of the allegorical method.
(23:3)
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