The four categories are helpful, and I share your concern/observation about allegory. It often says more about the interpreter and reader. The use of allegory is rampant today, even in the pulpit and with many of our church leaders. I have heard too many sermons about how we (as the church) are following a pillar of fire by night into the promised land, etc. It gets old because it is sloppy.
I suggest a new word for allegorical. Typological.
However, Gordon Fee said, "The text (bible) cannot mean what it never meant." That has been my mindset when I have prepared for teaching or preaching. But the four categories really don't agree with Fee's statement.
Thanks, David. I tend to disagree with Fee because the New Testament writers - and Jesus himself - seemed to find more in the OT than the OT authors could have intended. When Jesus says, for instance, "this is my body" and "this is my blood," he was saying something about the passover that Moses could not have meant. But, if Jesus is the eternal Word and the whole canon is the Word written, then we would expect him to know the Word, written in the words of Jeremiah, Moses, David or Isaiah better than they knew even their own writings. This is really the way typology works, as you indicate. So... Jesus' read the passover narrative as a "type" of his own passion, but the original writers would not have seen clearly what was signified in the things they were writing about.
Thanks for this essay, Bryan. Enlightening.
The four categories are helpful, and I share your concern/observation about allegory. It often says more about the interpreter and reader. The use of allegory is rampant today, even in the pulpit and with many of our church leaders. I have heard too many sermons about how we (as the church) are following a pillar of fire by night into the promised land, etc. It gets old because it is sloppy.
I suggest a new word for allegorical. Typological.
However, Gordon Fee said, "The text (bible) cannot mean what it never meant." That has been my mindset when I have prepared for teaching or preaching. But the four categories really don't agree with Fee's statement.
I'm left to ponder...
Thanks, David. I tend to disagree with Fee because the New Testament writers - and Jesus himself - seemed to find more in the OT than the OT authors could have intended. When Jesus says, for instance, "this is my body" and "this is my blood," he was saying something about the passover that Moses could not have meant. But, if Jesus is the eternal Word and the whole canon is the Word written, then we would expect him to know the Word, written in the words of Jeremiah, Moses, David or Isaiah better than they knew even their own writings. This is really the way typology works, as you indicate. So... Jesus' read the passover narrative as a "type" of his own passion, but the original writers would not have seen clearly what was signified in the things they were writing about.