Is there any Christian theological model for a non-literal ark? The most common debate about Noah's flood is whether the flood was global or local. I want to put this particular debate aside for a moment, and ask a different question:  Did the flood happen at all?

Reading the views of many (often atheists, sometimes local-flood proponents), there seems to be a pretty strong scientific case against a global flood.  However, as I read about this view, I have to wonder: Wouldn't (at least according to the skeptics) a flood of sufficient scope to threaten the existence of any given animal species also suffer from most of the scientific problems associated with a global flood?

And if there were a flood of limited enough scope that some species' existence were not threatened, why not just send Noah and his family across some mountain to escape the local flood?

So this makes me wonder if there is a Christian theological model in which the flood, or at least the ark, is non-literal.

I realize there might me more than one competing model, so I'm just asking for one.  Does such a model exist?  If so, please point me to whomever has proposed it.

I imagine that such a model would include either or both of the following tenets, but please don't limit answers to these if there is some other approach to the theory that I have not considered:


Noah and his family escaped the flood by some means less drastic or miraculous than a boat, and the boat and animal rescue was added by later generations or authors as an embellishment to the story.
Noah and his family never existed, the world was never flooded as God's judgement, and the story is a non-real myth, meant to make a point about something other than history.
I don't know of a detailed exposition that focuses specifically on the story of the ark, but in the Medieval ages it was common to say that each piece of scripture possessed the following levels of meaning:


Literal sense
Spiritual sense
Fuller sense


From the link above regarding the "literal sense":


  The literal sense is not to be confused with the "literalist" sense to which fundamentalists are attached. It is not sufficient to translate a text word for word in order to obtain its literal sense. One must understand the text according to the literary conventions of the time. When a text is metaphorical, its literal sense is not that which flows immediately from a word-to-word translation (e.g. "Let your loins be girt": Lk. 12:35), but that which corresponds to the metaphorical use of these terms ("Be ready for action"). When it is a question of a story, the literal sense does not necessarily imply belief that the facts recounted actually took place, for a story need not belong to the genre of history but be instead a work of imaginative fiction.


When one looks at the genre of the flood story, it (arguably, anyway) does not follow many patterns for a historical story - for example, it does not make clear when the event happened in relation to other well-known events as many history-genre stories do, ("In the Year X of the reign of Y", often referring to multiple rulers to make it clear), and it does not cite witnesses that can be cross-referenced (as, eg, the Gospels do).

The above link goes on to say 


  One of the possible aspects of the spiritual sense is the typological. This is usually said to belong not to Scripture itself but to the realities expressed by Scripture: Adam as the figure of Christ (cf Rom. 5: 14), the flood as the figure of baptism (1 Pt. 3:20-21), etc.


So, in this way of interpreting the Bible, the flood story is one example of something that prefigures baptism, and one example of something from the Hebrew Scripture pre-figuring something in the new. 

It is an interesting example in terms of apologetics because this way of interpreting the Bible was formalized in the Medieval period (and can be seen as early as Origin of Alexandria), and shows then that non-literal ways of reading the Bible predate the emergence of modern science and the scientific method at least by centuries, and therefore refutes many naive ideas non-Christians have about Christianity.