Reading Scripture in a Spiritual Way: New Testament Interpretation of the Old

Introduction

In this chapter1 we are going to look at some of the principles that will guide our interpretation of Scripture as a whole, especially how we can put together in a good way what the Scriptures are teaching.

In this chapter we will discuss a foundational principle in the New Testament approach to the Old Testament: typological interpretation. The use of typological interpretation is perhaps the main reason why the New Testament interpretation of the Old Testament is so distinctive. Some Christians in trying to understand how the New Testament writers use the Old Testament go so far as to say that the New Testament approach is from “a whole different world.” By that they mean that people in our culture would not read the Old Testament in such a way. In this they are mostly right. If, however, we can understand the typological principle, we can understand much of how the New Testament authors use the Old Testament writings – and why.

We will then look at the question of spiritual interpretation. We want to understand the gifts bestowed on us by God as Paul says to the Corinthians, by being taught by the Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 2:12–13). We will seek to understand how to read the Scriptures in a spiritual way.

This chapter provides a basic introduction to what this book calls theological exegesis. This will raise many technical questions of scholarly method. Those are addressed more fully in part II of the book.

The Spirit and God’s plan

The Apostle Paul had to defend his work as an apostle at various times, and we learn a great deal from the defenses we can read in several of his letters. In the second chapter of First Corinthians, he tells us some important things about his teaching:

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification.… But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him,”

God has revealed to us through the Spirit.… Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit. (1 Corinthians 2:6–13)

Before this passage, Paul had just finished explaining how he preached the Gospel to new people, and brought them to faith in Christ. Here he turns to how he teaches the mature, that is, people who have a basic Christian formation, including those who are hearing this letter read. He says that he imparts wisdom, that is, teaches new Christians a fuller understanding, an understanding of how God had decided to act before the ages, that is, before he began to create the world. God’s goal was our glorification, as we will see more clearly when we get to chapter 11. In other words, Paul taught the new Christians about what we are referring to as the stages of God’s plan.

God’s plan has turned out to be greater and better than anything human beings before Paul’s time had even conceived. Paul, and now his audience of new Christians, have found out about this by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God not only gives us the revelation of God’s plan, but also gives us the understanding of what is involved in the plan. We will return to this later in this chapter, but we need to begin by understanding the nature of the task we are engaged in. We are trying to acquire a wisdom that no human beings ever came up with solely by using their minds. We are trying to understand a revelation that has come to us by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Typology

The nature of typology

The technical term “typology” was invented by Scripture scholars about one hundred fifty years ago to speak about one way Christian writers read the Old Testament in the light of the New. It refers to a method of scriptural interpretation that sees many things in the Old Testament as corresponding to things in the New Testament. “Typology” is the most common way now to describe this approach. Since figura was the standard Latin word for “type,” we very often also describe things in the Old Testament as “prefiguring” those in the New, and this method of reading is sometimes termed “figural reading.”

The terms “type” and “anti-type” are anglicized forms of two Greek words used in the New Testament. “Type,” an important term in Greek thought, in Scripture, and in the Fathers, is also translated as “pattern” and sometimes as “form” or “figure.” A type is something with a certain form that shapes something else.

We used the term “type” for the letters on a typewriter because they are shaped in a certain way, and when we hit their key, they make an impression on the page that is of the same shape or form (and significance) as the type. A dress pattern could be described as a type, because it is used to make dresses of a certain shape or form.

A type comes before an anti-type. The anti-type corresponds to the type in its form, and the type had a role in shaping it. “Anti” here does not mean “against,” but “corresponding to.” The letter on the paper as an anti-type corresponds to the shape of the type, the key on the typewriter.

We find the word “type” in Romans 5:14, which says, Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. The one who was to come is Christ. This passage refers us to the texts in Genesis 1–5 that speak about Adam, and tells us that they teach us something about Christ. There is, in other words, a correspondence between Christ and Adam. They are like one another and have the same significance in one important respect. Christ fulfilled a similar role or function to the one Adam had: beginning humanity, in this case beginning a newhumanity, the new covenant people of God.

Another place we find this word is in 1 Corinthians 10:6, a passage that speaks about the events of the Exodus as corresponding to Christian initiation (Baptism and Eucharist). It goes on to speak about how the Israelites were punished for their disobedience to God, even though they had come into a relationship with him similar to that which Christians have through Christian initiation. Therefore, Christians should take care not to disobey.

In the course of describing the results of their disobedience, the passage says, Now these things are warnings for us, not to desire evil as they did. A more literal translation would be, “Now these things are types for us, not to desire evil as they did.” Though the RSV translation of the word as “warning” accurately conveys an important part of the meaning, it is an interpretive or idiomatic translation. The literal word here is “types,” and it indicates that the similarity of the old covenant events and the new covenant events means that the old covenant events can be used to instruct us in how God set up and now approaches the new covenant events.

“A copy of the true one”

Another example is found in Hebrews 9:24: For Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hands, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. The word “copy,” here, is an alternate translation of the Greek word for “anti-type.” The type in this case is heaven. The word “anti-type” signifies the thing that corresponds to the type. In this case, the earthly tent (tabernacle) or temple is an anti-type of heaven, because it is formed or laid out to be like the heavenly temple. This passage next refers to the Greek Septuagint translation of Exodus 25:40, And see that you make them [all the things in the tabernacle] after the pattern for them, which is being shown you on the mountain. “Pattern,” or in other versions “model,” is a translation of the word “type” in the Greek, which reads more literally “make them after the type which is being shown you on the mountain.”

The final example is 1 Peter 3:21. Here, Baptism is seen as an anti-type of the Flood in the time of Noah. The Flood is the type; Baptism is the anti-type. The translation in the RSV is Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you. But if we translate the passage more literally we get, “Baptism, which is an anti-type of this, now saves you.” This means that Baptism functions in a similar way to the Flood by destroying sin – as we will consider in chapter 4. From these passages we see that the word “type” along with the correlative word “anti-type” is used somewhat commonly in Scripture.

“A shadow of what is to come”

The Scriptures sometimes use the words “shadow” and “substance” as a way to understand typology. For instance, The Letter to the Colossians says,

“Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath. These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.”

Colossians 2:16–17

Hebrews 8:5 and 10:1 use the same image. While relating to the shadow of something is not directly relating to the thing itself, the shadow has a close connection to the thing. If we relate to a shadow that we see on a window shade in order to figure out who or what is in the room behind the shade, we are also relating to the things in the room. In relating to a type – the Passover lamb, for instance – old covenant people were already being oriented by God to what he would be doing in Christ, because Christ would fulfill the function of the Passover lamb in a fuller and more effective way (a more “substantial” way, to use the RSV term in the Colossians passage).

While the word “type” highlights the similarity between the two things being compared, the word “shadow” highlights the difference. The shadow has less reality than that which casts the shadow. It is merely a reflection of the real thing. This is easiest to see when the phrase “the shadow” is used to describe earthly realities as reflections of heavenly realities, as in the book of Hebrews. Sometimes, as in the Colossians passage above, the real thing is in the future, and casts its shadow into the past. In such a case the implication is that the new covenant reality is greater than the old covenant reality, which, in God’s intention, was shaped to prepare for and lead to the new covenant reality. The new covenant reality more fully contains and exemplifies what God is working toward.

There is yet another New Testament way of speaking that expresses the same idea, a way that can be surprising or misleading to contemporary English speakers. We can see it in Hebrews 9:24, where it says,

Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hands, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.

And we can see it in Hebrews 8:2, where it speaks of,

a minister in the sanctuary and the true tent which is set up not by man but by the Lord.

Hebrews uses the word true here in a way unusual to us. Surely, if either tent is a “true” tent, it is the earthly tent, not heaven itself. Heaven is not “truly” a tent at all. This unexpected way of using the word “true” in Hebrews, however, is an indication that “true” is being used in a special sense. In these passages, “true” means something like “having full spiritual reality” and is contrasted with “having partial or weaker spiritual reality.”

Heaven is the true tent, but not because it is a tent and the earthly one is not. The contrast here is not between true and false, so that the earthly temple is a false temple the way an idol is a false god in contrast to the one true God because it is not a god at all. Rather, both the earthly and heavenly tents have the same reality, the reality of being the place of God’s indwelling presence. Heaven, however, has that reality more fully than the earthly tent that Hebrews is referring to, that is, the tent of meeting which went with the Israelites in the wilderness. Heaven is more truly where God dwells (see 2 Chronicles 6:18–20). “True” here, then, has much the same meaning as “in substance” in contrast with “in shadow” in Colossians 2:16–17.

In the Gospel and Epistles of John, the words “true” and “truth” are often used to speak of new covenant realities as related to old covenant realities. Christ is the true bread (John 6:32), not because he is more really bread than the manna was, but because he brings with fuller reality what God was aiming at in giving the manna – life. He is the true vine (John 15:1), not because he produces better grapes, but because his disciples are more fully God’s planting than the leaders of the old Israel were. Jesus is the “true light” (John 1:9; 1 John 2:8), not because he physically shone brighter than John the Baptist, but because, compared to Jesus, John was partial or weaker in the spiritual light he could give.

Christ, in fact, is in his own person truth itself (John 14:6), the full spiritual reality, the full presence of God, and the full life God ultimately intends for us. To belong to him is to receive the full gift God wishes to give the human race. He, in fact, brings “truth” in a way the Old Testament law did not (John 1:17). The law brought types, shadows – the reality in a less substantial form. Christ, the incarnate Word, brings the fullness of what God wants to give his people.

Typological thinking or typological interpretation is employed much more often than in the passages where these words are used. For instance, the Passover lamb is a type of Christ as a sacrificial victim. We cannot find any place in the New Testament that says that the lamb is a type of Christ, but from the way in which the Passover lamb is spoken about in relation to Christ in the New Testament, we can nevertheless see that it is. For instance, First Corinthians 5:7 simply says, For Christ, our Paschal Lamb, has been sacrificed, as if it were straightforward to see Christ as our Passover lamb.

Typology has to do with the correspondence between two existing things. A type is not just a symbol, although a type can function as a symbol. David, for instance, can function as a symbol of kingship in general or of effective kingship. We might say of Saint Wenceslas, the Medieval Bohemian king, “he was another David,” and mean that he was an instance of the kind of kingship that David represents. We might also say that “he was another Aragorn,” a king in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and mean that he was an instance of the kind of kingship that Aragorn represents. David, however, was more than a symbol, much less a literary figure like Aragorn. He was someone who existed historically. Nonetheless, he is a type, because in God’s plan he shows us something about what Christ would be, and is now, as king.

Typology is not the same thing as allegory, according to most modern definitions of allegory.2 In an allegory, as understood by many modern scholars, the correspondence is actually written into the text itself by the human author and an allegorical interpretation gives us the author’s own intention of the meaning of the text. Matthew 13:3–4, 18–19 is an allegorical interpretation of a parable in this sense.

John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is another example of allegory, in this case a whole book. In the episode of the pilgrim (the Christian) falling into a bog, we are given a description of the market fair the pilgrim is going to, called Vanity Fair, and a description of the bog the pilgrim falls into on the way, the Slough of Despond. The market and the bog are imaginative ways the author uses to present the concepts of vanity and despond (sadness, depression, discouragement). The whole book is an allegory, and the events are not intended to describe what happened, or even just to tell a story, but to represent abstract ideas in concrete form. If we understand the word “allegory” to refer to the way Pilgrim’s Progress is written, an allegory is a text written to describe ideas under the guise of a story.

Typology, on the other hand, is a correspondence of two actual events that are described by a text. To say that the Passover lamb is a type of Christ as sacrificial victim is to say that there was a Passover lamb, and there was also a man named Jesus Christ, and that there was a similarity between them. Christ, when he died on the Cross, accomplished something similar for the human race to what the Passover lamb accomplished for the Israelites in Egypt. To say that one is a type of the other is not primarily to interpret a text but to specify a relationship or a correspondence between the two realities spoken about in the text. That correspondence allows us to read the Old Testament text in reference to the new covenant reality, and vice versa, and so to understand both of them better.

At times scholars use the term “typology” more broadly than to speak about the correspondence between Old Testament and New Testament realities, and commonly hold that the New Testament writers derived their approach to typology from the Old Testament. For instance, they sometimes describe the correspondence between the exodus from Egypt and Israel’s return from exile in Assyria that we can see in Isaiah 43 as a typological understanding. These are both Old Testament events, and so a broader view of typology would include typology within the Old Testament, or even a typological relationship between biblical and extra-biblical realities. Most commonly, however, when we speak about types or typology, we are discussing the relationship between old covenant events, people, and institutions and new covenant ones.

The unity of God’s work in human history 

The fundamental truth behind typology is the unity of God’s work in human history. When God set out to create, he had in mind what he was trying to accomplish with the human race – ultimately to save it and bring it once again into a relationship with himself. He kept that purpose in mind all the way through the process of salvation. He was always working toward it, so everything he did was a step toward what he did later on and therefore something of what he was aiming at.

The fullness of what God is aiming at will be clear when Christ comes again. However, God was working toward the same sort of thing in Adam, Abraham, and David that he was working toward in Christ in his first coming, and that he will be bringing about when Christ comes again. There is a similarity in pattern or form between the earlier events and the later events, so that frequently we can understand the later events better by understanding the earlier events and vice versa.

There is, however, more to a typological relationship than simply a similarity in pattern. There is a connection between the two corresponding events or people involved. God worked in the earlier event to prepare for the later event. The later event brings about in a fuller or more effective way what God was aiming at. They are two steps in a process that God was and is moving forward. For this reason, the new covenant realities are often spoken about as the fulfillment of the old covenant realities (e.g., John 19:36 speaking about Christ’s death on the Cross as a fulfillment of the Passover sacrifice, even without an explicit prophetic indication of the connection).

This understanding does not imply that the earlier type no longer has a function. Many messianic Jews believe that various Old Testament institutions, practices, places, and times, even if they have a new covenant fulfillment, should still be followed by Jewish Christians, as we will consider in chapter 8. Nonetheless, here we simply need to understand the nature of typological fulfillment.

Two examples of typology

We will now look at a couple of passages about types to get a better sense for how typology works. In a passage to which we have already referred, Paul writes:

“I want you to know, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same supernatural food and all drank the same supernatural drink. For they drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ. Nevertheless with most of them God was not pleased; for they were overthrown in the wilderness.

“Now these things are warnings [types] for us, not to desire evil as they did.” 

1 Corinthians 10:1–6

Paul then goes on to list some of the examples of how the Israelites were judged by God for doing evil. This should warn Christians that just being baptized into Christ or fed with Eucharistic food is not enough to guarantee God will be pleased with them. They also have to obey him.

In the passage, Paul is saying that the children of Israel were baptized and given supernatural or, more literally, “spiritual” food and drink. The baptism happened when the Israelites went through the Red Sea with the pillar of cloud covering and protecting them, as described in Exodus 14. The supernatural food refers to the manna first given in Exodus 16 (also referred to in a similar way in John 6). The supernatural drink refers to the spring of water that flowed out when Moses struck the rock, as described in Exodus 17. Passing under the cloud or going through the Red Sea are types or foreshadowings of Christian baptism, and the manna and water from the rock are types or foreshadowings of the Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist.

Paul says that the rock was Christ. There was a Jewish tradition at the time of Paul that the rock actually followed the people of Israel in the wilderness. He is perhaps referring to that tradition and identifying that rock with Christ. He was more likely seeing the rock as a type of Christ, and probably also saying that Christ was the one at work in the rock to give the water. Either way, by saying the rock was Christ, he was saying that the rock was a type.

Paul at least is saying that the cloud, the sea, and the food and drink of the wilderness wandering are foreshadowings of what happened later with Christ and so can instruct us about them. According to some, Paul might, however, be saying something stronger. He might be saying that in some way the children of Israel in the wilderness participated in what Christ would later accomplish. In an incomplete shadow-form they were participating in the redemption that Christ won on the Cross and in his Resurrection.

These two views illustrate two different understandings of the nature of the typological relationship. The fact, however, that Paul explicitly says that the Israelites were baptized into Moses indicates that they were baptized into the old covenant, not into the new covenant. On the other hand, as we have seen, by relating to the shadow (the type), they were in fact relating to the new covenant reality by relating to something that gave them a relationship with God similar to that which the new covenant would bring, and probably some participation in advance in that reality. We will consider the relationship between the old covenant order and the new covenant order in chapter 10.

Adam as a type of Christ

Now we can take another look at what Paul says about Adam in the passage in Romans 5:12–17 and see a somewhat different kind of typological relationship:

“Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned—sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgressions of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.

But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the effect of that one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.” 

Romans 5:12–17

Paul states that Adam is a type of Christ, and he then goes on to develop the correspondence between the type and the anti-type. He focuses on how much of a change one man’s action makes for all those who come after him. The act of Adam, the father of the human race, changed the future in regard to sin. The obedience of Christ, the father of the new human race, changed the future in regard to the redemption from sin of those who follow him.

We have here a typological relationship that is partly the same and partly a reversal. Christ is like Adam in being the head of the human race, but not like Adam in that Adam’s disobedience led to the reign of sin and death while Christ’s obedience led to the reign of righteousness and life. There is a correspondence between Christ and Adam because they both have the same role as head of the human race. Both pass on their nature to their offspring. On the other hand, there is a difference between them because Christ is successful in bringing the human race to what God intended it to be, and Adam was not. Moreover, both in the similarity and the difference, there is a connection between them, since Christ was appointed to make up for what Adam did by starting humanity over again. Therefore, Adam was a type of Christ.

We can give similar interpretations for other types in the Old Testament. The point, however, should be clear. When we read the Old Testament, we need to see that much of it, all of it in a certain way,3 was fulfilled in the new covenant. We need, therefore, to read it typologically, that is, we need to see what it is moving toward. Such a perspective is one of the keys to deriving full Christian profit from the Old Testament.


This article © 2017 by Stephen B. Clark is adapted from The Old Testament in Light of the New, Chapter 3, published by Emmaus Road Publication, Steubenville, Ohio, USA.

  • See related article: The Need for Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture by Steve Clark

Top image credit: Jesus teaches Nicodemus with Moses in the background (from John 3:14-16), painting © by Harry Anderson, source from GoodSalt.com. Used with permission.


Notes

Chapter 3, The Old Testament in Light of the New, by Stephen B. Clark, 

2 In the ancient Greco-Roman world, “allegory” was used more broadly than it is commonly used now. It could refer to any example of speech where “one thing is spoken about, another thing is meant” (Quintilian, Institution, 8.6.44), including scriptural typology. For a discussion of allegory in patristic writings, see Robert Louis Wilken, “Allegory and the Interpretation of the Old Testament in the 21st Century” in Letter & Spirit, vol. 1 (2005). See also Mark Edwards’ discussion referred to in note 6. In Christian writings subsequent to the patristic period, “allegory” has been used more narrowly as a term for one of the three spiritual (typological) senses. For a description of the four senses of Scripture, a commonly used way of speaking about typology in Christian tradition, see the technical note “The Four Senses of Scripture” on p. 414. In later patristic writings it was common to use the term theoría instead of allegoría (see John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno, Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2005], 15).

3. For discussion of the fulfillment in Christ of the Old Testament as a whole, see the methodological discussion “10. Spiritual Transposition” (p. 543), The Old Testament in Light of the New, by Stephen B. Clark

6 See Mark Julian Edwards, Origen Against Plato (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 144 for a description of how patristic writers (in this case, Origen) use texts with similarity of subject matter as the primary way of interpreting a given text.

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