Sorry, but I don’t see the literal versus metaphorical language issue as a red herring or an aside (I just noticed that this thread has been separated out of the thread-in-chief by the editor.) At base in the entire thread is the nagging question of how can we square a God which countenances the wholesale annihilation of races of human beings with a caring, loving, merciful, compassionate, empathetic God. I suggest metaphor is one way to do just that. Like Philo, for example, who relied on allegory, the words are not read as a string of definitions with punctuation marks, or significations of the corporeal, but as allegory, metaphor or symbols. Jonah was not really swallowed by a whale. Or, maybe, whether he was or wasn’t is really irrelevant?
Further, in my faith tradition we have a fairly clear (Aquinas) understanding of the difference between the literal and spiritual meaning of scripture, and while it is always the literal meaning that is the ground, it is the spiritual meaning that we preach, it is what we rely on when we engage in discourse "in front of the text" or on a "reader centered" basis, which is where, by the way, the emerging church is, in my view.
As for the consistent application of rules for picking conceptualizations, I have commented on consistency and the advisability thereof elsewhere on this site.
I hold that meaning in the now and "for our future" in scripture comes with and through literary device. Leaving the apophatic unconsidered, theology is all about language and meaning is in the metaphor.