3.

Christian and Patristic Allegorism

The allegorical system that arose among the pagan Greeks,

copied by the Alexandrian Jews, was next adopted by the

Christian church and largely dominated exegesis until the

Reformation, with such notable exceptions as the Syrian

school of Antioch and the Victorines of the Middle Ages.

The allegorical method of interpretation sprang from, a proper motive, in spite of the fact that it

was usually .improper in practice.

!lJ~g..~r;lpx .mdive was the firm belief that the Old ,TestaC_

mL_e_n~t_ _,w_Ca-_s. __a^ l-.Chri_stia- n -.document. This ground the Church

can never surrender without retreating to Marcionism in

some revived form. Th_e_allegorical method was its primary

mcens of. making the O]d’T&tament a Christian document.

It must also be kept in mind that although these writers

used the allegorical method to excess, they did unconsciously

use the literal method. If we underscore everything they

interpret literally (even though they might not spend too

much time defending the literal sense of Scripture), we discover

how much the literal approach was used in actual

practice. In some cases the historical (approximating the

literal) is actually made part of their hermeneutical system.

Two things may be said for the allegorizing of the Fathers:

(i) They were seeking to make the Old Testament a Christian

document. With this judgment the Christian Church has

universally agreed. (ii) They did emphasize the truths of the

Gospel in their fancies. If they had not done this, they would

have become sectarian.

The difficulties with the method are many. (i) There was

a lack of a genuine historical sense in exegesis. The historical

connections of a passage of Scripture were usually completely

ignored. (ii) Their method of citing the Old Testament revealed

that they had a very infantile understanding of the

progress of revelation. They had the basic understanding

that a great shift had taken place from the Old to the New

Testament. But citing verses in the Old Testament, in themselves

frequently very obscure, as if superior to verses in the

New, revealed no understanding of the significance of historical

and progressive revelation for hermeneutics. (iii)

They considered the Old (especially) and the New Testaments

filled with parables, enigmas, and riddles. The allegorical

method alone sufficed to bring out the meaning of these

parables, enigmas, and riddles. (iv) They confused the allegorical

with the typical, and thus blurred the distinct between the letimate and the improper

interpretation of O. T. The “allegorical,” the “mystical,” the

“pneumatic,” and the “spiritual,” are practically synonymous.

(v) They believed that Greek philosophy was in the

Old Testament and it was the allegorical method which discovered

it. (vi) In that the method is highly arbitrary, it

eventually fostered dogmatic interpretation of the Scripture.

Fullerton’s judgment against the allegorical method at this

point is very sharp :

Instead of adopting a scientific principle of exegesis’, they introduce

Church authority under the guise of Tradition as the norm of interpretation.

The movement of thought which we have been following

now becomes associated with the great dogmatic consolidations of

the second and third centuries that led directly to ecclesiastical

absolutism.g

the real problem with the allegorical method is that it obscures the

true meaning of the Word-of God and had it not kept the

Gospel truth central it would have become cultic. The abandoning of the historical sesnse of a

passage will make the application of any regulative principle that govern exegesis difficult. This

is because the allegorical method is unscientific and therefore not open to any regulative

principle of exegesis.

To present a clearer picture of some of the patristic hermeneutical

theory we shall briefly study Clement, Origen,

Jerome, and Augustine.51

(1). Clement. Clement of Alexandria found five possible

meanings to a passage of Scripture.” (i) The historical sense

of Scripture, i.e., taking a story in the Old Testament as an

actual event in history; (ii) the doctrinal sense of Scripture,

i.e., the obvious moral, religious, and theological teachings

of the Bible; (iii) the prophetic sense of Scripture including

predictive prophecy and typology; (iv) the philosophical sense

which follows the Stoics with their cosmic and psychological

meaning (which sees meanings in natural objects and historical

persons); and (v) a mystical sense (deeper moral,

spiritual and religious truth symbolized by events or persons).

(2). Origen had an apologetic motivation to

be sure. He wanted to escape the crude and simplistic interpretation of lay people

who were literalists to the point of taking everything symbolic

or metaphorical or poetic literally. He was motivated

to show that the New Testament does have its roots in the

Old and so reply to the Jews. He wished to eliminate what

were absurdities or contradictions in Scripture and make

Scripture acceptable to the philosophically minded. His

approach can be summed up as follows:

(i). The literal meaning of the Scripture.is the preliminary

level of Scripture. It is the “body,” not the “soul” (moral

sense) nor the ‘%@it” (allegorical sense) of the Bible. The

literal sense is the meaning of Scripture for the layman. Actually

we perhaps should say “letterism” rather than literalism

for reasons we pointed out in the previous paragraph.

(ii). To understand the Bible we must have grace given to

us by Christ. Christ is the inner principle of Scripture and

only those with the Spirit of Christ can understand Scripture.

(iii). The true exegesis is the spiritual exegesis of the Bible.

“The Bible is one vast allegory, a tremendous sacrament in

which every detail is symbolic,”

(iii) Origen believed that the Old Testament is the preparation for the New

This implies two further assertions (a) the New Testament is in the Old in a concealed manner,

and it is the function of the Christian exegete

to bring it to the surface. This is typological exegesis and is

based on the fundamental harmony of the Old and New

Testaments. (b) If the New fulfills the Old, the Old is now

Superseded.

(3). Jerome. Jerome was a great Bible scholar in terms of

the scholarship of antiquity. He translated the Bible intoLatin (Latin Vulgate) which required him

to become proficient

in Greek and Hebrew. He noticed that the Hebrew

Bible did not contain the Apocrypha and suggested its secondary

nature and that it ought to be put between the

Testaments. This suggestion was not carried out until Luther.

In practice he was, an allegorist.

He started out as an extreme allegorist, but influenced

by the school of Antioch, he retreated from the

allegorical tradition in theory or principle and emphasized

the historical and literal.

He insisted that the literal is not contradictory to the

allegorical as the extremists in the Alexandrian school asserted.