Introduction
Philosophically, typology is a form of reasoning by analogy.Footnote 1 It is grounded in realism, the understanding that reality is coherent and meaningful. That recognition is implicit in the earliest revelation recorded in the Torah and it has remained basic to orthodox Jewish and Christian theology and religious experience. Realism is not an exclusively religious belief: A scientist acts on the presumption that reality is coherent and that therefore, for instance, a cause of cancer and its cure can be found.Footnote 2 The most significant instance of realism, however, is religious: the Incarnation, in which God really became man. Because each human person is created in the image of God, for each person the most dynamic, holy experience of realism is to live one's life so as to restore within oneself that real and holy likeness. Unfortunately the world of the past few centuries has rendered realism unpopular and unfamiliar, a point addressed by Pope Leo XIII and more recently by the late Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Fides et Ratio.
The ancient Jews recognized that, in addition to giving prophecies in words, God also gave indications of the future through certain persons, events, and images. These persons, etc., are called ‘types’, and the study of them is called ‘typology’. Literally, a typos is the impression made by a seal when it is struck in wax or metal. In just the way that a typos corresponds to the seal which made it, so a type of the Messiah corresponded to what he would be like.Footnote 3 Moses foretold that there would be another prophet like himself (Deut. 2:18), and in the centuries before Christ Jewish exegetes understood Moses as a type of the Messiah. Numerous types are within the Old Testament.
Historically, Jesus and his followers continued the Jewish tradition of typological interpretation. As Maurice Casey has observed, ‘The earliest Christians were Jews, and they inherited and used these same hermeneutics’.Footnote 4 Moreover, Jesus expanded typology, and this led swiftly to the positive use of types by Christians in ways that emphasized the spiritual equality of men and women, of Gentiles and Jews.Footnote 5 Women's capacity to become holy was emphasized by the recognition of new types of Christ: Susanna's biblical history served as the narrative template for Matthew's account of the Passion, and she was one of at least eight biblical women to be interpreted as types of Christ.Footnote 6 As long as typology flourished, so did this powerful pastoral means of demonstrating the Church's doctrine of the spiritual equality of the sexes.
However, four centuries ago Martin Luther made the first moves toward the abandonment of typology, with the unintended result of downplaying a tradition consistently affirmative of women. Due to Protestant Iconoclasm, familiarity with typology swiftly decreased.Footnote 7 Women lost visibility in the role of types of Christ. The last vestiges of modern awareness of women as types of Christ was inadvertently killed fifty‐five years ago when Rudolf Bultmann discredited typology itself. In recent decades it has been neglected or attacked as absurd, old‐fashioned, anti‐Jewish, or pro‐violence.Footnote 8 Now it is rare for a Christian to have heard of typology, and women's status as christological types has been voided from popular memory.
Because typology remains valid and because it is a powerful means of teaching so many central Christian truths– the identity of Jesus as Messiah, the spiritual equality of the sexes, the unity of the Bible, the universality of the Church – it is well worth reviving typological understanding in the third millennium. This should include the restoration of preaching on women as types of Christ.Footnote 9 To facilitate the revival of typology, the present essay reviews the tradition of typological exegesis and refutes criticisms of it.
Christian Expansion of Typology — Jesus and Typology
The basic and compelling argument for using typology is that Jesus used it. During his ministry and after his Resurrection, Jesus was explicit that the Scriptures gave testimony to him and that Moses wrote of him.Footnote 10 Moreover, again and again he related himself to the Old Testament typologically: He compared Jonah's ordeal to His forthcoming death and Resurrection, and he indicated His Incarnation and Ascension by referring to Jacob's vision.Footnote 11 In other typological statements he compared himself to David and indicated that he was greater than Jonah and Solomon.Footnote 12 The image of the brazen serpent lifted up by Moses in the wilderness Jesus also recalled typologically, referring to his own elevation on the Cross.Footnote 13 Pope John Paul II called Jesus' statement about the brazen serpent ‘a clear announcement of the passion’.Footnote 14
In every typological reference Jesus made, the context of the Old Testament reference is meaningful for the typology: The Exodus account of the brazen serpent recorded that the people had recognized that they had sinned and were dying as a result of sin; it also recounted that, by God's direction, they were invited to look at the brazen serpent lifted up by Moses and be healed. Jesus' use of this event as a type for his Passion entailed presenting the physical death of the Israelites in the desert as a type of the spiritual death of sin and presenting their physical healing as a type of spiritual healing, bestowing eternal life (John 3:15).
In actions as well as words, Jesus made clear that he is the fulfilment of the messianic types. Indeed, his dynamic, active fulfilment of what had been foreshadowed is what made the types real. Each of his own statements indicating that he fulfilled an Old Testament type served to call attention to his action which dynamically fulfilled that type: As the angels had descended from Heaven upon the ladder in Jacob's vision, so Jesus had, in reality, descended from Heaven by his Incarnation. As the brazen serpent had been lifted up in the wilderness, so Jesus would, in fact, be lifted up on the Cross. As Jonah had been in the belly of the whale, so Jesus would, in fact, give up his life and be entombed;Footnote 15 and as Jonah had come forth from the whale, so Jesus would, in truth, rise from death. As the angels had ascended to Heaven upon the ladder in Jacob's vision, so Jesus would actually ascend to Heaven in his Ascension.Footnote 16 Typology is important because it points to the crucial historical events of salvation.
Also, the original events of Passover and Pentecost were types. The first Passover was the typological preparation for Jesus' fulfilment of it as the new Passover, with his actual death and resurrection. Just as the first Passover had freed the people of God from death by the blood of a pure lamb, so the new and eternal Passover delivered the people of God from death by the blood of The Lamb. The very word Pascha and its adjectival form paschal are taken directly from the transliteration of the Hebrew word for Passover.Footnote 17 The original Jewish religious feast annually commemorating the first Passover was likewise the typological preparation for the annual religious feast of the Resurrection of the Lord.Footnote 18 The original event of Pentecost also prepared typological for the corresponding Christian feast: Fifty days after the original Passover, God had given the Law to Moses on the mountain in fire and awe, and this led to the annual Jewish celebration called Pentecost. God's action then in giving the Law amid fire was a type of his action later. In the new Pentecost God gave the Holy Spirit in tongues of fire fifty days after the new Passover of Christ.Footnote 19
Types in the New Testament
Following Jesus' example, the writers of the Gospels and Epistles used typology. Taught by Jesus to understand him as the one of whom the Law, the prophets, and the psalms spoke (e.g., Luke 24:44‐45), the writers of the New Testament expressed this understanding through their narratives and discourses. The Johannine Gospel concisely exemplifies the pertinence of this full range of law, prophets, and psalms in the account of the Passion.Footnote 20 Matthew and Mark juxtapose two statements that carry typological meaning: First they recount that Jesus predicted his death would occur during the Passover, and in the next sentence the Evangelists recounted that the Elders of the People planned to kill Jesus.Footnote 21 This is not merely historical reporting: It is accurate reporting, yes, but it is expressed so as to allude to the role of the lamb in Passover. The very fabric of the narrative demonstrates that Jesus is that Lamb. Similarly, both Matthew and John align the death of the paschal lamb with the death of Jesus by noting that the bones of neither were broken; this detail indicates that Jesus was the fulfilment of the saving sacrifice prefigured by the Paschal lamb.Footnote 22
The post‐Gospel New Testament adduces additional types. Abel, AdamFootnote 23, David, Elijah, Enoch, Isaac,Footnote 24 Joshua, Melchizedek,Footnote 25 and MosesFootnote 26 foreshadow in various ways Jesus' person, life, Passion, and Resurrection. The New Testament writers also used another mode of typology, for instance, when Sts. Peter and Paul write of Baptism typologically as the participation of the baptizand in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.Footnote 27 This new, experiential mode of typology may be called ‘sacramental’ or ‘dynamic’.
Dynamic typology in the life of the faithful
Just as Jesus dynamically fulfilled prophecy, being offered as the Eternal Paschal lamb during the actual celebration of Passover, so the follower of Christ is called to imitate this sacramentally, performing real acts that typologically imitate Christ's actions. Because he was and is God, Jesus could fulfil the types once and for all. By virtue of his divinity, He was also able to make himself a new type for his people to follow, so that he is the One Perfect Type for everyone to fulfil personally, sacramentally. This can be called ‘sacramental typology’. When a person being baptized is immersed three times, this ‘signifies the three days that Christ was in the tomb’, an early text explained.Footnote 28 As Cyril of Jerusalem expressed it, baptism is ‘the anti‐type of the sufferings of Christ’ (ton tou Christou pathematon antitypon).Footnote 29 The sacrament is a real imparting of grace, and it is effected through an act which imitates symbolically the sacrifice of Christ.
Moreover, living one's life seeking to be holy draws one in mystery into imitation of Christ in other ways that also dynamically fulfil The Holy Type, Jesus.Footnote 30 Jesus himself called for this when he explained that his followers must take up their cross daily and follow him (Luke 9:23).Footnote 31 St. Augustine preached on this, offering the events of Christ's Passion as models for Christian imitation. Speaking of Christ's agony in the garden, Augustine asserted:
Christ, bearing (gerens) man and setting a model for us, teaching us to live, and granting us life, shows (ostendit) in an exemplary way man's private will, in which he figured (figuravit) both his will and ours, because he is our head and to him, as you know, as limbs we are attached: ‘Father’, he said, ‘if it can be, let this cup pass from me.’)Footnote 32
In patristic sermons on typology, usually the one who is gerens or figurans or ostendens is a biblical person who prefigured Christ, yet here it is Christ himself who presents a model for the believer to fulfill.
In short, typology not only provides the intellectual means for understanding the coherence of revelation through all time, past, present and future. It is also a dynamic experience in which the individual Christian is to live day by day in union with Christ, seeking to be holy. Augustine made this point, drawing repeatedly on the Epistles of St. Paul:
Whatever was done on the cross of Christ, in burial, in Resurrection on the third day, in Ascension into heaven and sitting at the right hand of the Father was done in such a way that in these deeds– not only mystically in words, but also in deeds – the Christian life might be configured, for this life was enacted through them. For on account of his cross it is said, ‘Moreover, those who are Christ's have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires’. On account of his burial, ‘We have been buried with Christ through baptism into death’. On account of his Resurrection, ‘Just as Christ rose from the dead through the glory of the Father, so also we may walk in newness of life’. On account of his Ascension into heaven and his sitting at the right hand of the Father, ‘Moreover if you have been resurrected with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sits at the right hand of God; know those things which are above, not those on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God’.Footnote 33
Christian Anthropology and Typology
Basic to Christian anthropology is the doctrine expressed in the earliest revelation, i.e., the Torah, that everyone, male and female, is made in the image of God. This image of God (imago Dei) is what makes it possible for the individual believer to live so as to become a living type of Christ (typus Christi). As Athanasius, archbishop of Alexandria, put it, ‘God became man in order that man might become God’.Footnote 34 This potential is distinct from the capacity to be sacramentally a persona Christi as an ordained priest.Footnote 35 Although only men, and only certain men, are called to the sacrament of priestly ordination, every man, woman and child is called to be sanctified.
Jesus alluded to the Genesis metaphor of the image of God when he spoke of coins. In his parable of the widow who seeks a lost coin (Luke 5:1‐10), the drachma represents mankind, created in the image of God but lost through sin. So did Clement of Alexandria and John Chrystostom explain it; they also construed the woman seeking for the coin as a type of Christ becoming incarnate and undergoing the Passion in order to save mankind.Footnote 36 Jesus himself referred directly to the image on the coin when he was asked whether the people should pay tribute to Caesar. Jesus had asked in reply whose image was on the coin. When told ‘Caesar's’, he had answered, ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's’ (Mk. 12:15‐16). Jesus was clearly implying that we are to render unto God that which has God's image on it, and that is ourselves. And this is done through a life of sacramental mimesis.
Women as Types of Christ
Jesus imparted in his ministry a new emphasis upon the spiritual equality of the sexes.Footnote 37 Therefore, when the prophetic types of the Old Testament became also types of the sanctification of the individual, at once it became useful, even necessary, to recognize within the persons of the Old Testament Gentiles as well as Jews, women as well as men, who were types of Christ. Swiftly Christians extended typology to include women as types of Christ.
The synoptic Gospel accounts of the Passion of Christ so frequently quote and paraphrase Susanna's biblical history that it is clear that her history served as the narrative template for the passion narratives: She is a type of Christ within the Gospels themselves.Footnote 38 Matthew has the fullest set of parallels: seventeen passages comprising fifty‐two words drawn from Susanna's history. She was arrested in a garden and suffered two trials; two false witnesses accused her. The ‘Elders of the people’ secured her wrongful condemnation to death, and she then ‘cried out in a great voice, saying, “God … .”’ The judge of her second trial (Daniel) exclaimed publicly, ‘I am innocent of the blood of this [just] one’, and the judge of the Lord's second trial (Pilate) used these same words publicly. Ambrose, Maximus of Turin, Jerome, and Augustine called attention to these parallels.Footnote 39
Soon other women were also interpreted as types of Christ. Jephthah's daughter, like Isaac, was an only‐begotten, beloved child brought to sacrifice, and so each was a type of Christ, the only‐begotten beloved Son of the Father.Footnote 40 At least eight biblical women were interpreted as types of Christ, including Ruth, Esther, Judith, the widow of Zarephath, the woman in the parable who finds the lost coin, and Jairus' daughter.Footnote 41
Importantly, understanding women as types of Christ pertains to both areas of typology: In terms of prophetic typology, biblical women, equally with men, were recognized as types prefiguring Christ; and, in terms of sacramental typology, the fact that women could prefigure Christ affirmed women's innate ability, equal with men's, to imitate Christ in holiness as well.
The Church, the Lectionary
Because typology is essential for understanding the coherence of revelation, it was a staple of patristic and medieval exegesis, as the examples above show. A major pastoral and intellectual project of the Fathers was explaining how the types of the Old Testament pointed to Christ. Typology helped the faithful to recognize the truth and validity of Christian revelation. As the new Catechism of the Catholic Church observes:
The Church, as early as apostolic times, and then constantly in her Tradition, has illuminated the unity of the divine plan in the two Testaments through typology, which discerns in God's works of the Old Covenant prefigurations of what he accomplished in the fullness of time in the person of his incarnate Son.Footnote 42
Even the structure of the church building was typological, with the new sanctuary of the new covenant fulfilling the type provided by the Temple's sanctuary with the Ark of the Covenant. The earliest written description of a church, a sermon by Eusebius in 318, described the church as surpassing the Temple of Jerusalem. Explicitly he called the altar ‘the holy of holies’.Footnote 43 This is a deliberate and emphasized comparison of the new church building with the prior Temple and of the New Eucharistic Sacrifice with the repeated Temple sacrifices, which are compared in Hebrews 9.
Typology was intrinsic to the ongoing life of the Church, in the symbolism of the Mass and the sacraments, as is well‐documented from the fourth‐century onwards.Footnote 44 Currently as well, in vernacular translations of liturgical texts, the Lectionary, and important prayers of the Catholic Church, typology is to be preserved, according to the Vatican instruction ‘Liturgiam authenticam’:
The effort should be made to ensure that the translations be conformed to the understanding of biblical passages which has been handed down by liturgical use and by the tradition of the Fathers of the Church … [to] express the traditional Christological, typological and spiritual sense.Footnote 45
In the Lectionary, typology underlies the Lenten pairings of 3 Kings 17 with Luke 7, Esther 13 with Matthew 20, and Daniel 13 with John 8, for instance. The latter two cases involve women as types of Christ, with Esther's prayerFootnote 46 prefiguring Christ's words, and Susanna's ordeal foreshadowing that of Jesus. Significantly, the Lectionary from its inception included women as types of Christ and through the centuries it sustained this positive role for women. Only in the post‐Vatican II Lectionary has their typology been muted or lost.Footnote 47
With so much to recommend typology, how did it lose currency and, for many, credibility? A full answer would include both the role of Nominalism, a twelfth‐century philosophy that rejected Realism, and also the pietistic focus on emotions which developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That emotionalism led to the mistaken idea that confession, for instance, was valid only if the believer had a strong affective response to the sacrament. A sacrament, that is, was real only if the individual felt it was real. Protestantism arose in precisely those regions where such emotionalism prevailed.Footnote 48 With Protestantism began the erosion of typology.
Restricting and Discrediting Typology, 16th‐20th Centuries. Luther
Martin Luther continued to believe in the fact of the Incarnation, but he and his followers had begun to doubt the purpose of it, namely, to sanctify God's people. A lesser purpose was substituted, namely, to justify God's people. This loss of faith had a direct effect on typology. Although Luther still interpreted Scripture typologically, he began the trend of reducing the number and role of types in exegesis and worship.Footnote 49 Types presented by Jesus himself had priority. Friedrich Ohly finds that Luther limited typology, using it ‘for his teaching on the Giving of the Law alone’.Footnote 50 Arrestingly, Luther's favored type for depiction became the brazen serpent.Footnote 51 It was not a human type, not Jacob or Jonah or David (or Susanna) that Luther favored, but a thing, a statue. While certainly the serpent in the wilderness is one of the types that Jesus himself referred to, it seems significant that Luther preferred a type that did not involve a human being. It appears that he was uncomfortable with the implication that a human being could be made holy by cooperation with grace. Whereas Catholics had depicted, and continued to depict, types of Christ on and near the altar, Lutherans frequently depicted the ten commandments.Footnote 52 This matches the switch from sanctification to legal justification. As Thomas McLaughlin recently observed, when typological interest in the Old Testament waned, the Law became focal: Without typology to clarify the unity of the Bible, a new justification was needed for retaining the Old Testament, and the focus on the Law provided such justification.Footnote 53
Far more than merely restricting the repertoire of images, Protestant iconoclasm ‘purged’ churches and even the countryside of images.Footnote 54 Because many artworks had portrayed types and their fulfilment by Christ, Protestant iconoclasm greatly and lastingly reduced the visibility of types of Christ, including female ones.
Secularism
Moreover, as secularism increased during the sixteenth century and the Enlightenment, the perception of spiritual dignity declined and with it the position of women deteriorated. Patricia Ranft has noted Luther's consistent references to the inferiority of women and the ambivalence of the reformers: Although none denied women's spiritual equality, none advanced it and most reformers ‘attacked institutions within Christianity that fostered women's visibility and high status, specifically monasticism, saints, and Mariology’. To this list may be added typology. Enlightenment attacks against religion hit at women by eroding the traditional recognition of their spirituality: As the philosophes reiterated their view that women were physically weak and incapable of rationality, ‘the position of women suffered accordingly’.Footnote 55
By the eighteenth century for some Protestants even the types recorded in the New Testament were regarded as outmoded, first‐century cultural accommodation. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, belief in the coherence of reality eroded and accordingly the perceived unity of the Bible was vitiated. Because typology is instrumental in recognizing that unity, it was also scorned. Johan S. Semler was one of ‘the leading forces in discrediting the validity of typological interpretation’, particularly through his Attempt at a Freer Theological Method (1777), a harbinger of the historical‐critical rejection of typology.Footnote 56 Even those who did not go so far as to reject all types restricted them further. The influential Protestant Bishop of Peterborough, Herbert Marsh, asserted in 1828 that only the types expressed in the New Testament are acceptable.Footnote 57 Only those types, that is, that have been ‘declared by divine authority’ by ‘Christ or by His apostles’ are ‘real’. Any other types are merely ‘pretended’.Footnote 58
Bultmann
A century later, a major change occurred. The ‘divine authority’ of Christ and His apostles that Marsh had admitted was itself doubted. The sixteenth‐century loss of faith in the purpose of the Incarnation, namely to sanctify God's people, had become a loss of faith in the reality of the Incarnation. Further, Jesus and the Holy Spirit were held, implicitly, to have been unable to maintain a reliable record of Jesus' thought, so that the Gospels were considered to be, in effect, merely documents, a mixture of the historical and literary. In contrast to the full faith expressed in the Nicene Creed and maintained by Catholics, Orthodox, and many other Christians, there came to be a modern reduced faith, a sort of ‘Christianity Lite’. Rarely was such reduced belief expressed overtly, but it was (and is) silently evident. An important case in point is the influential rejection of Christian typology in 1950 by a German Lutheran, Rudolf Bultmann.
In his essay, ‘Source and Meaning of Typology as a Hermeneutical Method’, Bultmann asserted that the New Testament writers did not understand time in the way that the Old Testament prophets did and that therefore New Testament types are unacceptable.Footnote 59 Bultmann's thesis that the Gospels mistakenly use typology requires one of two assumptions, both of which deny the Divinity of Jesus: Either Jesus did not understand time aright, or the Evangelists misrepresented Jesus' thought. If Jesus failed to understand time aright, then he was evidently not God. On the other hand, if the error was the Evangelists', then Jesus evidently failed to insure that an accurate record of his teachings would be provided. Such a failure would again inevitably imply that Jesus was not Divine. (It would also suggest that the Holy Spirit was similarly unable to preserve Jesus' teachings through the Gospels.) These implications are not acknowledged or addressed by Bultmann.
However, his thesis itself presents another problem. He contended that New Testament types require a Near Eastern mythological understanding of time as cyclical, rather than an Old Testament understanding of time as linear.Footnote 60 Yet appreciation of time as both cyclical and linear is evident in the Hebrew Bible. Beginning in the Book of Exodus the Jews recorded as divinely revealed the commandment for regular annual, weekly, and daily rituals and sacrifices.Footnote 61 This requires an understanding of time as cyclical. Awareness of time as cyclical is obviously compatible with the linear experience of it, shown in the general historical ordering of contents of each book and indeed of the Hebrew Bible as a whole. In short, the basis for Bultmann's rejection of New Testament typology is a false dichotomy which he imposed on the Old Testament.
Disconcertingly, Bultmann avoided both Jesus and the Gospels in his discussion, emphasizing the Epistles instead.Footnote 62 Only two paragraphs in the entire essay treat instances of Jesus' typological statements recorded in the Gospels, and even in these remarks Bultmann obscured the fact that Jesus was the speaker. The essay treats Jesus' self‐comparison to the serpent lifted up in the wilderness (John 3:14‐15). Bultmann, however, demanded that the typology correlate Jesus with Moses alone. This is odd, given that Bultmann's opening paragraph had given a standard definition of types that included events and institutions as well as persons.Footnote 63 He should have had no difficulty in interpreting the event of the raising of the brazen serpent as the type here. Instead, because Moses is not the sole focus of the typology, Bultmann acted as if he had proven that typology was not present: ‘With extreme freedom John 3:14ff takes as reference the Moses‐Christ‐typology: As Moses had “lifted up” the serpent in the wilderness, so will the “Son of Man”– not do any sort of analogous deed, but rather be himself “lifted up”’.Footnote 64
In a bit of slight‐of‐hand, by making ‘John 3:14f’ the grammatical subject Bultmann ascribed the prophecy, not to Jesus, but to John. Thus did Bultmann deprive the statement recorded in John 3:14‐16 of the Lord's authority. Bultmann next referred to the ‘Bread of Life’ sermon (John 6). Again he wrote so as to conceal that John identified Jesus as the author of that sermon. Bultmann concluded of this and of the brazen serpent speech, ‘These passages are no doubt based upon typology; however, the Evangelist pursues the typological thought, playing with it ad absurdum’.Footnote 65 Given that the words expressing the typology are not those of John, but of Jesus, if anyone committed absurdity, it was the Lord. Ironically, Bultmann's attack against typology proves instead, by what he needed to conceal, that typology is intrinsic to Jesus' thought.
The ‘Son of Man’
Often Jesus called himself the ‘Son of Man’ (a phrase derived from Daniel) when he was explaining that Old Testament types refer to him. Thus the recent dismissal of the ‘Son of Man’ speeches entails dismissal of typology as well.Footnote 66 It has been asserted that the ‘pure form’ of interpretation of Daniel, the ‘authentic interpretation’, is Jewish.Footnote 67 This implies that Jesus erred in using the phrase as a reference to himself and that Christian interpretation of the ‘Son of Man’ as a reference to Jesus is impure and inauthentic. The underlying assumptions of such critiques, however, are that Jesus was not able to prophesy and that he could not have had a theologically insightful and scripturally based awareness of his role in salvation. In short, these critiques arise from doubt that Jesus is God incarnate.Footnote 68 In salutary contrast, an excellent presentation of the role of the phrase ‘Son of Man’ in Jesus' ministry, with reference to Daniel, Ezekiel and contemporary Aramaic, was provided by Pope John Paul II of blessed memory.Footnote 69
Christian Typology and Judaism
A new charge against typology is that it is anti‐Judaic. In 1990 Gail Ramshaw asserted that, because typological readings of the Jewish Scripture claim to understand in them something that Jews themselves do not see, typology tends to promote anti‐Judaism.Footnote 70 To the contrary, typology affirms the validity of the Old Testament, the reality of the revelation to the Jews, and the real value of Jewish worship in the Old Testament. Furthermore, exegetical typology originated in Judaism.Footnote 71 To scorn it is to dismiss an important aspect of Old Testament religion and to deny a profound part of the religious heritage common to Jews and Christians.
This issue was addressed in a statement by The Pontifical Biblical Commission in 2001. It responded to the question of whether it was mandatory to read the Old Testament with an exclusively Jewish reading in order ‘to show proper respect for its Jewish origins’:
In answer to the last question, a negative response must be given for hermeneutical reasons. For to read the Bible as Judaism does necessarily involves an implied acceptance of all its presuppositions, that is, the full acceptance of what Judaism is, in particular, the authority of its writings and rabbinic traditions, which exclude faith in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.Footnote 72
Conclusion
Typology is a tool to draw one to consider the unity of revelation and of reality. Jesus took the venerable Jewish technique of typological exegesis and honored it, showing repeatedly that he is the fulfillment of numerous prophetic types. Further, he created a new, sacramental dimension to typology, pointing to the human vocation to holiness and providing help in seeking to fulfil that vocation. Christians expanded typology, innovatively identifying Gentile and female types of Christ. Typology is thus one of the Church's means of opening the understanding of reality and demonstrating that women and Gentiles are included in the universal call to salvation. Far from being anti‐Jewish, this is part of the fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham that through his seed all nations would be blessed. Through the Christian recognition of women as types of Christ, typology also provided a dynamic reminder that women are made in the image of God and called to fulfill that image in becoming holy. If only for the sake of fostering respect for the spiritual equality of the sexes, recovering typology would be pertinent today.
Yet the main purpose for reanimating preaching and catechesis using types is far more wide‐ranging. The focal issue is realist, and it has to do with the person of Jesus Christ. Rejection of typology stems from lack of faith in the reality of the Incarnation. In the sixteenth century came lack of faith in the purpose of the Incarnation, and in modernity this erosion of faith cut away belief in the fact of it. If Jesus was not God, he had no authority and his endorsement of typology carried no weight. But only Christianity Lite holds that Jesus was not God. The orthodox Christian belief is that Jesus really was and is God incarnate. As a result, he had authority, including the authority to use typology. The implication of his own use of types is that we do not fully understand reality unless we perceive it typologically.
