If it is taken symbolically, it is a profound expression, the ultimate Christian expression, of the relationship between God and man in the Christian experience. But to distinguish these two kinds of speech, the non-symbolic and the symbolic, in such a point is so important that if we are not able to make understandable to our contemporaries that we speak symbolically when we use such language, they will rightly turn away from us, as from people who still live in absurdities and superstitions. If Tillich's words ring true for the intellectual, faith for many people is not an intellectual activity or defined as a way of acting based on one's way of seeing the world. To have faith in such a context requires an act of will to belief in an event for which there is no proof. In the simplest of terms, a symbol is something that stands in the place of some other thing.
All words are symbols for ideas.
In religious language, the symbols we call words stand in the place of other symbols, symbols which point beyond the literal, concrete object symbolized to tell more about the speaker's experience. The character of religious language , the words with which people communicate religious experience and interpret that experience is closer to poetry than prose. is both mythic , heroic , and imaginal . Psychology of Religion's attempts to understand religious experience and behavior can be defined by whether a literal or symbolic experience was being addressed. Literal Interpretations People use the same religious language to mean events that they consider factually, if unverifiably, true and for events that are archetypally true in human experience but not factually true. Many believers, perhaps the majority, hold that the scriptures of their tradition are literally true.