What does the Old Testament mean?

When the Christian church took over the Old Testament, it did so on the understanding that some of it should be understood in non-literal ways. Origen and then Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine developed a doctrine which Augustine summarized as ‘Whatever there is in the Word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be refereed either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, you may set down as metaphorical.’ And he applied this so as to reinterpret not merely passages which, when interpreted literally, seemed inconsistent with Christian doctrine or moral teaching (such as that contained in the Sermon on the Mount), but also passages which seemed inconsistent with the supposed scientific truths established by contemporary Greek science. This tradition influenced much biblical interpretation until the Reformation; and should lead us to interpret it in the light of modern science. The meaning of any text depends on its context. The Bible is a patchwork of passages from different centuries. Only the whole Bible, and so any passage understood in that context can claim full truth and full divine inspiration. Individual passages in their original contexts can claim at most some limited degree of truth and inspiration