The New and the Old in Typology

The Fathers of the Church often made use of typology in their efforts to interpret the Old Testament in the light of Jesus Christ. They found in the Hebrew Scriptures “types,” or prophetic images, that point forward to and are fulfilled by persons and events of the New Testament (to recall examples given earlier: Moses and Melchizedek are types of Christ, the true Lawgiver and High Priest; the manna in the wilderness is a type of the Eucharist, and so forth). Typology as an exegetical method, however, is very much out of fashion today. Most scholars consider it to be a forced and arbitrary imposition of Christian beliefs on the Old Testament that does violence to both the Old Testament and the New.

Properly understood, however, typology is a valuable, even indispensable method for uncovering both the unity between the Testaments and their ultimate “spiritual” meaning, a meaning conveyed by the person and work of Jesus Christ.

The unity between the Old and the New Testaments is grounded in the Church’s perception of both the historical and the symbolic links that exist between them. A distinction is usually made between two methods of deciphering those links: “allegory” and “typology.” It is usually assumed that typology stresses the connections between actual persons, events, places and institutions of the Old Testament, and parallel realities in the New Testament that complete or fulfill them. These are related as (proto) type to antitype or Promise to Fulfillment. “Allegory,” on the other hand, is usually defined as a quest for the “hidden” or symbolic meaning of a given Old Testament narrative, a meaning considered to be higher, fuller, or more spiritual than the meaning discerned by typology. The focus of allegorical exegesis is not on historical events as such, but on the underlying spiritual meaning concealed in the words that speak of that event. Like narrative criticism, it is primarily concerned with the message conveyed by the text itself, whether or not the biblical author grasped that message and intended to convey it.

Recent studies have nevertheless modified the traditional picture of typology and allegory in significant ways. They have demonstrated that typology is not primarily dependent on an historical extension through time, from past to future. Rather, the type contains a “representational” or “self-actualizing” quality that comes to expression through the biblical narrative, such that the antitype is already reflected by or “contained in” the type. (An excellent example of this is provided in St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians [10:4]. There he alludes to the Israelites’ desert wandering following the Exodus from Egypt. Tb slake their thirst, God provided water from a rock [Ex 17; Num 20]; and this Rock, Paul declares to be Christ!) By anticipation, the Promise contains its own Fulfillment, since the type already contains and reflects the eternal truth to which it points.

This is not a new concept. In fact it goes back at least to Diodore of Tarsus, one of the greatest exegetes of the fourth-century catechetical school at Antioch. Ultimately, this perspective is rooted in St Paul’s conviction that Christ is present and active in the Old Covenant, among the people Israel (1 Cor 10:4: 2 Cor 3:14). It perceives that the type possesses a symbolic, revelatory quality that comes to expression less through the historical event itself than through the narrative or story that recounts that event; that is, through the text of Scripture. Therefore it can be argued that typology, like allegory, finds ultimate meaning less in historical events as such than in the biblical witness to those events.

Nevertheless, it is essential that we not sever the historical roots of typology. Revelation necessarily occurs within the domain of what we call “history,” and it does so through the medium of historical realities (events, persons, institutions, rituals). Those realities may not be objectively verifiable. They may even be essentially symbolic or parabolic (e.g., the etiological myths of Genesis 1-11 or the story of Jonah). They are not for that reason any less “real” than events of our immediate experience. Insofar as they exist in the divinely inspired religious consciousness of the people of God, they convey revealed truth and serve God’s purposes for their salvation, even if the stories that convey them can properly be labeled myth, legend, or even metaphor.

The point is that behind the biblical narratives there is ultimate reality, ultimate truth, that at one point in time (“history”) was revealed within the framework of objectively determinable human experience.

The Exodus, for example, as historical “event” and as symbolic “type,” finds fulfillment in its antitype, the historical events of Christ’s passion and His victory over death. Both must be rooted in history, that is, in experiential reality. Yet both find their ultimate meaning in and beyond history: the Exodus, in God’s saving activity among His people and in their hope of the messianic kingdom; and the Resurrection, in Christ’s victory over death and in the eternal life He offers to all believers. Although rooted in history (the domain of fallen human existence), the type transcends history, insofar as it contains and reveals its own eschatological Fulfillment.

The type, then, is “double.” Necessarily grounded in historical reality—because that is where salvation must be worked out if it is to concern us as historical beings—the type bears and reveals eternal truth. Its uniqueness and significance lie in the fact that it serves as the intersection between life in this world and the reality of the kingdom beyond. This is why Diodore had to insist that the type contains a double sense, at once historical and transcendent, literal and spiritual.

The ritual gestures of the Church known as sacraments have been defined as visible (i.e., historical) realities that convey invisible (transcendent) grace. They, like Scripture, possess a “double sense,” in that the physical reality (water, oil, bread, wine) contains and conveys spiritual power and meaning.

Typology reveals what we may call the sacramental value of Scripture. Its diachronic aspect (development through time) unites past to present and earth to heaven. Yet the type simultaneously (synchronically) reveals the future Fulfillment in and through the historical event itself. Transcendent reality becomes, as it were, “incarnate” within the type, whether that type is an Old Testament event fulfilled by a corresponding reality that takes place within the time of the New Covenant, or a New Testament reality that manifests and renders present in our life and experience some transcendent value and meaning that was revealed in Christ’s person and work. It is by virtue of its revelatory yet sacramental character that Scripture unites us with the multitudes whom Jesus healed, grants us to share the disciples’ communion with Him in the Upper Room, bestows upon us the blessing He pronounced on His followers just before His Ascension, and renews us through His perduring presence with us in the Person of the Holy Spirit.

It is through typology, in other words, that we can best grasp the sense of Jesus’ assertion that the Kingdom of God is present in our midst, even within us (Lk 17:21). It is the dynamic of typology, by which God’s Promise already contains and manifests its future eschatological Fulfillment, that reveals to us, in all its power and glory, the presence of the Kingdom which is to come.