For a short time my family went to a church that belonged to the Missouri Synod branch of Lutheranism. They are literalists and somewhat fundamentalist, although they were also the ones who taught us not to take Revelation seriously for modern times.
We only went there because that congregation was founded by German immigrants and my German-born great aunt lived with us after her husband died. She had old friends at that church. After she went to a nursing home, my parents joined the "mainstream" Lutheran church that my cousins belonged to. It was theologically and socially liberal.
But, even the more literalist Missouri Synod church adhered to Luther's teachings about grace, faith, and forgiveness. As a child, I did not buy into the idea that non Christians were condemned. I was spiritually oriented even then. Maybe I was just born that way. I did not have the words or exposure to philosophy to put my views into words at such a young age, but literal heaven and hell were not real to me. I did not know the word "metaphor" then, but that was how I took those teachings. Kind of like fables with a spiritual message on how to live. So I Iooked at religions as various spiritual paths that people could take in life.
In grade school, a teacher read us the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each one feels a different part of the elephant and describes what an elephant is according to the limited part that he touches. I figured that's what religions were - limited understandings of spirituality. St. Paul said basically the same thing at the end of First Corinthians, chapter 13. "We know in part, and we prophesy in part."
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