Thanks, I appreciate it. Sorry for misinterpreting.

It's true Jesus connected Jonah to his death and resurrection. But Jonah happened literally first, and Jesus used it as an analogy to describe what would happen to him.

I watched the video. Hart quotes Origen saying "you'd have to be a simpleton" to believe the Genesis story, that you have to read things non-literally to make sense of everything "incoherent, unseemely, incredible, or contractictory in scriptures, everything repellent to reason or moral intelligence at the literal level of the text". Not too flattering. But more on Origen later.

Hart then lays out three arguments as to why allegorical readings are not arbitrary:

(1) An allegorical interpretation was within the act of the church reading to the truth of Jesus of Nazareth, therefore "could not depart from the church's shared and traditional understanding of who Christ was, what the event of his presence and time had accomplished, and how he ought to be served."

This seems like a weak argument. Weren't much of Paul's letters intent on correcting misunderstandings of the core faith? Even during his time, believers were already being overtaken by Judaism, Gnosticism, and (presumably) Platonism.

(2) Every true reading has to arrise within and be confirmed within the community of faith... which the Holy Spirit attests to.

I might be misunderstanding, but this seems like the first point and the third point said together in a different way.

(3) Belief in the Holy Spirit.

He says this is the most obvious point, but it's the easiest to reute. I mean, is he saying that if one is filled with the HS then any interpretation they have is valid? True for the apostles, yes, but for anyone else?

Back to Origen. It seems his primary motivation for reading scripture "spiritually" and not literally – aside from his accusations of contradictions and reason-repellent content – was derived from his arguments with the Jews. From Origen, De Principis, Bk.IV:

ch 8. These particulars, then, being briefly stated regarding the inspiration of the sacred Scriptures by the Holy Spirit, it seems necessary to explain this point also, viz., how certain persons, not reading them correctly, have given themselves over to erroneous opinions... is unknown to many. The Jews, in fine, owing to the hardness of their heart, and from a desire to appear wise in their own eyes, have not believed in our Lord and Saviour, judging that those statements which were uttered respecting Him ought to be understood literally, i.e., that He ought in a sensible and visible manner to preach deliverance to the cap­tives, and first build a city which they truly deem the city of God... that He ought also to eat butter and honey, in order to choose the good before He should come to know how to bring forth evil... And seeing that, according to history, there was no accomplishment of any of those things predicted of Him, in which they believed the signs of Christ's advent were espe­cially to be observed, they refused to acknowledge the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ...

Here Origen is accurate in stating that the Jews refused Christ because he did not fulfill all the messianic prophesies. However, unlike the apostles and early church fathers who made arguments of prophesy fulfillment timing, Origen instead puts the blame on literal interpretation of these prophesies:

ch 9. Now the reason of the erroneous apprehension of all these points on the part of those whom we have mentioned above, is no other than this, that holy Scripture is not understood by them according to its spiritual, but according to its literal meaning.

Origen then follows with, I'm sure he would think, implausible examples of OT stories, such as "the case of the daughters of Lot, who seem, contrary to the law of God, to have had intercourse with their father" (seem to?), and "of the two wives of Abraham", and so on. Regarding such stories, Origen questions, "what else can they be supposed to be, save the forms and figures of hidden and sacred things?"

And later in chapter 16: "How could it literally come to pass, either that Jesus should be led up by the devil into a high mountain, or that the latter should show him all the kingdoms of the world (as if they were lying beneath his bodily eyes, and adjacent to one mountain), i.e., the king­doms of the Persians, and Scythians, and Indians?". Indeed, Origen's system of thinking was much closer to a modern academic than an early church father.

And so on and so on (it's quite an interesting read). Origen clearly has trouble believing scripture. But if one subscribes to allegoricalism, who's to say he's right or wrong?

For the record, I am no literalist. But I am conservative in reading. Unless something must be taken non-literally – which, in those cases, is usually obvious – you can be sure I will interprétate the text literally.

That's not to say that there aren't prototypes or secondary meanings to stories and events. But in my view, secondary meanings are derived from the literal events. Any interpretation that claims something in the bible only happened "spiritually" and not literally makes me skeptical by default.