Written Allegorically

Written Allegorically September 26, 2014

In a recent article on Galatians 4:21-31, Ardel Caneday argues in part that Galatians 4:22 should govern 4:24. That is, Paul’s claim “it is written” should be extended to his statement that “which is allegorical,” yield “the natural sense, these things are written allegorically” (55). Allegory isn’t an apostolic imposition on a resistant text. Allegory is written into the text.

This has to be the case if Paul’s argument is going to have any legs. As Caneday points out, if Paul’s allegory is just a rhetorical tour de force, how can he expect his argument to convince the Galatians: “unless allegorical features are embedded within the Old Testament narrative itself and were there to be recognized all along to authorize Paul’s use of the story, then what warrants his argument in Gal 4:2131 other than “privileged apostolic insight” or interpretive adroitness to spin an allegory to controvert his opponents and to convince his converts to remain loyal to his gospel?” (51).

Caneday rightly draws the larger conclusion about Paul’s reading of the Abrahamic narrative and of Scripture as a whole: “Paul reads Scripture’s story of Abraham as historical narrative invested with symbolic representations embedded within the characters and the two contrasting births of two sons—one by natural order, the other by divine promise. Hence, the Genesis text itself, not Paul’s interpretation of the text, is allegorical while simultaneously upholding the historical authenticity of those characters and events” (51).

But what warrants this claim that Genesis is allegorical. Caneday focuses on Paul’s quotation of Isaiah 54, where the prophet exhorts the barren woman (Zion) to rejoice now that she has children (Galatians 4:27). In the near context in Isaiah (chapter 51), the prophet has explicitly mentioned Sarah – her only appearance in the Old Testament outside Genesis. The contrast of the fruitful barren woman with the woman who has a husband in Isaiah 54 is rooted in the contrast of Hagar and Sarah. In short, Paul is simply stating his agreement with the prophet concerning the allegorical character of the book of Genesis.

Caneday also gets the force of Paul’s claim to be birthing-mother of the Galatians. Paul associates himself with Sarah, but when he labors over them it is not for his own benefit: “even though he labors for his converts, that which he desires to be formed is not within himself. In fact, not even his children are to be formed. On the contrary, the birth for which Paul endures labor pains is the divine birth of Christ’s becoming incarnate within the Galatians. . . . As God’s Son became incarnate through the woman who bore him, so Paul is in anguish until Christ, the promised Seed, is formed within the Galatians . . . through the agency of his ministry” (59). This, I think, is how the Galatians can know that they are children of the Spirit: If Paul is there mother, then there is no way Christ can be formed among them “according to the flesh>’

I think Caneday is mistaken about how circumcision figures into the allegory. He says that the “child according to the flesh/according to the Spirit” is a contrast between those who have the sign only and those who have the thing. But the key to the allegory of Genesis is that Abraham is circumcised between the birth of Ishmael and the birth of Isaac. He puts off the flesh to become father of the son according to the Spirit.

(Caneday, Covenant Lineage Allegorically Prefigured: ‘Which Things Are Written Allegorically’ (Galatians 4:21-31), Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 14:3 [2010] 50-77.)


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