Terrorizing the Bible: Allegory and Typology

Two Opposing Testaments

Although the Church from the very beginning accepted the Old Testament as “Holy Scripture”, meaning the word of God, and hence authoritative and canonical, this does not mean that the early Church Fathers were unaware of the problem of incongruity and strangeness inherent in the texts of the two Testaments. For, as Origen observes, if someone points out to us the stories of Lot’s daughters and their apparently unlawful intercourse with their father, or of Abraham’s two wives, or of two sisters who married Jacob, or the two maidservants who increased the number of his sons, what else can we answer than that these are certain mysteries and types of spiritual matters, but that we do not know of what sort they are?”

Celsus and Porphyry

Men like Roman philosophers Celsus, Porphyry, and others did point out the existence of immoralities, contradictions, inconsistencies as well as anthropomorphisms contained in the Old Testament, identifying several passages to indicate the immoral, human aspect of the Hebrew Bible.

The Church Fathers

The Church Fathers, on the other hand, could not declare the Old Testament to be manmade and corrupt for they believed that it had been divinely inspired and entrusted by God through His only Begotten Son Jesus Christ. They reasoned to themselves that it was the normative Scripture that Jesus had followed and thus urged others to look to this as the key to understanding his person. To discard the Old Testament was tantamount to discarding the person of Jesus Christ, an act that would have risked the entire faith. Ipso facto, the Church Fathers retained the normativeness of the Old Scriptures by appealing to “allegory” and “typology”. Allegory means “a story or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one” and typology means “the study and interpretation of types and symbols, originally especially in the Bible.”

The School of Alexandria

The school of Alexandria in the shape of two of its theologians and philosophers, Clement (155–215) and Origen (185–254), advocated this allegorical recourse which, later on, came to be adopted by other Fathers including, Ambrose and Augustine. Origen saw numerous difficulties with the literal textual sense of the Scriptures arguing that many people misunderstood the Old Testament because “they understand Scripture not according to their spiritual meaning but according to the sound of the letter.” According to R. E. Brown: “Many of the Church Fathers, e.g., Origen, thought that the literal sense was what the words said independently of the author’s intent. Thus, was Christ spoken of as “the lion of Judah,” the literal sense for these Fathers would be that he was an animal. That is why some of them rejected the literal sense of Scripture.”

Origen of Alexandria

Origen argued that “the law has twofold interpretation, one literal and the other spiritual... It is consistent with this when Paul [2 Corinthians 3:6] also says that ‘the letter kills,’ which is the equivalent of literal interpretation; whereas ‘the spirit gives life’ which means the same as the spiritual interpretation.”

Charles J. Scalise observes: “Though Origen takes Paul’s contrast between “the letter and the spirit” and Paul’s use of allegory as scriptural points of departure, his view of “the letter and the spirit” dramatically alters the Pauline perspective. For Paul, the “historical pattern” of the Old Testament story is explicitly preserved, even in the few places where an allegorical approach is explicitly used (e.g., the story of Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4:22–26). For Origen, however, though much of the Scripture is viewed as historical, the historicity of Scripture is itself unimportant; what matters is the spiritual meaning of Scripture developed by the method of allegory.” Hanson observes that to Origen “History... is meaningless unless a parable is derived from it, unless it is made into an allegory.”

Origen, following Neo-Platonist tendencies and using a word pattern from Paul (1 Thessalonians 5:23), introduced what came to be his famous threefold distinctive meanings of the Scripture corresponding to the supposed trichotomy of man’s nature: body, soul and spirit. First among these, he contended, was “the somatic” literal or philological meaning of the text which everybody can understand. Second was “the psychic” moral or tropological meaning, the existential application of the biblical text to one’s own situation, and the third “the pneumatic” spiritual or mystical meaning which could be grasped only by those who were mystically perfect. He argued that “all [Scripture] has a spiritual meaning but not all a bodily meaning.”50 He observed that certain passages do not make sense at all if not understood allegorically. “Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first, second, and third day, and evening and the morning existed without the sun, moon, and stars?” Therefore, Origen interpreted them thoroughly and allegorically. Bigg, Wolfson, and J. Danielou argue that Origen derived this method of interpretation from Philo. Bigg observes that “his rules of procedure, his playing with words and numbers and proper names, his boundless extravagance are learned, not from the New Testament, but through Philo from the puerile Rabbinical schools.” Grant, on the other hand, argues that it was not “Philonic, but derived from Origen’s studies of Greek grammar and rhetoric.”

Origen went so far in his allegorization that all Scripture became, as Bigg observes, “transparent beneath his touch; the ‘crannies in the wall’ multiply and widen, till the wall itself disappears.” By this “exegetical suicide” as Hanson characterizes it, the Alexandrians, argues Bigg: “found symbols where there was no symbol; they treated symbols not as indications, as harbingers, but as proofs. Thus, they undertook to demonstrate Christian doctrine by passages which in the belief of the Jew were not Messianic at all, or, if Messianic, had not been fulfilled. They neglected the difference between before and after.”

In short they “found in the Old Testament what they already possessed, what they could not have found unless they had possessed it. But at any rate they found nothing more.” Through this “dangerous” and “delusive” method, as Bigg characterizes it, they abandoned too quickly the grammatical and historical sense of the text, such that the text, argues Scalise, lost “its capacity to exercise hermeneutical control over interpretation through its literal sense.”

The School of Antioch

The school of Antioch, represented by Theophilus of Antioch (115– 188), Diodorus of Tarsus (d. 393), Theodor of Mopsuestia (350–428) Chrysostom (354–407) and Theodoret (386–458), was soberer in its approach to the Scriptures than its rival the Alexandria School. These Antiochian interpreters, observes Mickelsen: “all emphasized historical interpretation; yet this stress was no wooden literalism, for they made full use of typology. The school of Alexandria felt that the literal meaning of the text did not include its metaphorical meaning, but the school of Antioch insisted that the literal meaning cannot exclude metaphor.”

These early fathers tried to solve problems raised by Marcion and others by typology and allegory. D. B. Stevick observes: “Insofar as the Fathers recognized problems and discrepancies in the text of Holy Scripture (as many of them did), they seem able to accept some ingenious reconciling explanation or to shift to allegorical exegesis. That is, they would observe the problem passage and then say that the apparent difficulty concealed a mystery: This number stood for one thing; this river was a symbol of something else; and this person was a type of still another thing. Put them together as an allegory, and the problem passage becomes a revelation of great truth.”

St. Jerome and St. Augustine

Other Fathers like St. Jerome (347–419) and St. Augustine (354–430) followed Origen in allegorism. Though Jerome in his later life tried to get away from allegory, he did not fully succeed. Farrar observes that “He flatters himself that he succeeded himself in steering safely between the Scylla of allegory and the Charybdis of literalism, whereas in reality his ‘multiple sense’ and ‘whole forests of spiritual meanings’ are not worth one verse of the original.” Augustine, in the name of having sound principles for interpretation, himself allegorized extensively.

From 600 to 1200 AD, allegory, observes Mickelsen, “had a real hold upon the minds of medieval theologians.” Brunner observes that “the rank growth of the allegorical method of Biblical exposition made it impossible to maintain the Bible text as normative, as compared with the ecclesiastical development of doctrine.” Using allegorical exposition the Scholastics, says Brunner, “prove”, with the help of Scripture, all that they wish to prove.” The outcome was, as John Bright puts it: “a wholesale and uncontrolled allegorizing of Scripture, specifically the Old Testament. This did not confine itself to difficult or morally offensive passages, or to passages that tell of something that seems unnatural or improbable, or to places where Scripture contradicts, or seems to contradict, other Scripture; it extended itself almost everywhere. Scarcely a text but yielded hidden and unsuspected riches to the interpreter’s ingenuity.”

Using this wholesale allegorizing, the Church was able to save the Old Testament as the Sacred Scripture which, according to them, propounded Christian meanings in each of its texts. The Roman Catholic Church, the heir of this tendency, has traditionally been and still is more inclined and hospitable to the allegorical “mystical” meanings of the text than most Protestant churches.

Protestant Approach

Many Protestants, following the pattern of Reformers like Luther and Calvin, reject allegory in principle. Luther scolded those who used the allegorical method of interpretation and rejected it altogether. In his “Preface to the Old Testament,” he writes: “There are some who have little regard for the Old Testament... They think they have enough in the New Testament and assert that only a spiritual sense is to be sought in the Old Testament. Origen, Jerome, and many other distinguished people have held this view. But Christ says in John (5:39), “search the Scriptures, for it is they that bear witness to me.”

He further argues: “The Holy Spirit is the simplest writer and advisor in heaven and on earth. That is why his words could have no more than the one simplest meaning which we call written one, or the literal meaning of the tongue... But one should not therefore say that Scripture or God’s Word has more than one meaning.”

John Calvin called allegorical interpretations an invention of the Devil, something “puerile” and “farfetched” meant to undermine the authority of Scripture. By emphasizing the plain historical and philological sense of the text, both Luther and Calvin emphasized the authority of the Scripture and dispensed with “Tradition” with its accepted mystical meanings, “the exotic jungle of fanciful interpretation.”

Luther gave profoundly Christological interpretations to the Hebrew Bible and urged Christians to search for Christ and the gospel in the Old Testament.

Since the Reformation period, the trend to find Christological as well as typological meanings in the Old Testament has been quite pervasive in influential Protestant circles and is still popular among a number of scholars especially in Europe and the UK. Karl Barth, Wilhelm Vischer, O. Procksch, A. B. Davidson, and R. V. G. Tasker are examples. Vischer, for instance, argues that, “the Bible is the Holy Scripture only insofar as it speaks of Christ Jesus.”

It is the only “dogma which for the Christian binds the testament together; the Old Testament telling us what the Christ is and the New Testament telling us who He is.” Procksch contends that “the figure of Jesus Christ has the Old Testament as its background. He is the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies: without him the Old Testament is a torso.” Bright remarks that: “The normative element in the Old Testament, and its abiding authority as the Word of God, rests not in its laws and customs, its institutions and ancient patterns of thinking..., but in that structure of theology which undergirds each of its texts and which is caught up in the New Testament and announced as fulfilled in Jesus Christ.”

This approach, though rejecting the allegorical sense and advocating a plain literal or grammatical-historical meaning of the text, seems to do a similar injustice. All these methods supply the Old Testament with meanings and results in advance. The result is that writers merely quote the Old Testament to prove what they think should be proven by it. Somewhat like their Catholic friends, Protestants, in the name of finding Christological meanings, approach the Old Testament with preconceived, set ideas, as well as hard and fast assumptions, superimposing these assumptions onto the text of the Old Testament itself and in the process perhaps consciously disregarding its plain meanings.  The practical outcome not surprisingly is the same, a disguised sort of allegory. Worth mentioning here is the fact that the Protestant approach to the Scriptures has probably caused more confusion and diversity of interpretation than that of the Roman Catholics. For Catholicism, the Church is the final authority determining the validity of interpretation. No interpretation can be given to, and no meaning interpolated from the Scriptures, which contravenes the Church’s dogmas and teachings. Protestantism, on the other hand, exercises individualism. Protestants shrink from official church-dictated meanings of biblical text and give every individual Bible reader the right to find meanings for him/herself.

Predictably, this has resulted in such a diversity of biblical interpretation that often it seems we are left with nothing but a heap of confusion, with biblical text meaning simply what each interpreter takes it to mean.

See details in my book "Concept of God in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic Traditions", chapter 2