Typology and history

In his classic essay on the “Reasonableness of Typology,” GWH Lampe argued that critical scholarship reintroduced history into biblical interpretation: “In place of the unhistorical attitude which saw the Bible as a vast harmonious complex of prophecy and fulfillment, type and antitype, allegorical picture and spiritual reality, fused together by the unfirm inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Biblical criticism sought to recover the true and original meaning of the literal sense, and to set the various documents comprising the Bible in their proper context in history instead of seeing them as pieces fixed unalterable in a divinely planned mosaic pattern of Holy Scripture.”

This is remarkably incoherent: An interpretative method that rests on prophecy and fulfillment is un historical? Obviously, what Lampe identifies as a shift from ahistorical to historical interpretation is really a difference in the understanding of history. Critical scholarship does not introduce history, but interprets history as an immanent process (rather than ordered by God) and then tries to stuff Scripture into this alternative account of history.

Lampe also notes that the triumph of critical scholarship over typology meant the virtual elimination of the OT from the practical lives of Christians: “the most definitive and conclusive result of all this critical investigation was the breaking down of the old conception of the unity of Scripture and the consequence discrediting of the typological and prophetical exegesis familiar to so many generations of Christians.”

The choice, he suggests, is between typology or Marcion: “Either follow such rules of exegesis as will allow the Gospel to be read out of the Hebrew Scriptures, or throw away the Old Testament as irrelevant to those who live under the New Covenant. Since at the same time the modern reader was convinced by the historical method that thhe Old testament could not be read as a directly Christian book, there can be little doubt that one of the most far-reaching effects of the growth of the critical attitude has been the impression gained by the general reader and the ordinary Christian that the Old Testament is of no great significance to him and is of little real interest except to the student of religions. This, Lampe says, is “not too large a price to pay for the recovery of a proper appreciation of what the Old Testament writers said in and for their own day and generation.”

He notes that the displacement of typology, the emphasis on the diversity of Scripture and “original independence of its several parts” was “perhaps the most important, as well as the most profoundly revolutionary, effect of ‘higher criticis.’” I’m not sure the higher critics are altogether to blame: Conservatives had already conceded the ground when they turned away from typology. The great opponents are typology and higher criticism, and much grammatical-historical interpretation shares the assumptions of the latter rather than the former.