On the one hand, Calvin thought it was frivolous and often unnecessary or unfruitful to look for allegories. He stressed the simple sense of Scripture, which allegories could too easily distort. He felt that allegories had often been used as a shortcut to Christ that didn’t take the original message seriously enough. Yet on the other hand, he did not entirely reject allegories when they could be used appropriately.

 
Preaching Christ in the Old Testament has become a topic of great interest among evangelical preachers today. While this is by no means a new issue, our desire to faithfully proclaim the whole counsel of God in a gospel-centered or Christ-centered way has led to a growing renewal in understanding how we can rightly “find” Christ in the Old Testament. Almost without exception, those who teach and write on preaching Christ from the Old Testament emphatically reject the use of allegory in preaching from the Old Testament (see for example, Edmund Clowney, Preaching Christ from All of Scripture, and Sidney Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament, Preaching Christ from Genesis, and Preaching Christ from Ecclesiastes).

The question needs to be raised, however, whether the stigma associated with allegory and the outright rejection of preaching allegorically from the Old Testament should be maintained. Clowney notes that many preachers warned about preaching allegorically have also shied away from identifying people, places, events, or themes in the Old Testament as types (Preaching Christ from All of Scripture, 31). The history of biblical interpretation sheds some helpful light on this question. In particular, because the Reformation had such a significant effect on how we read and preach the Bible today, it is worth considering whether John Calvin and his contemporaries would have share the same reluctance to preach allegory from the Old Testament.

Different Understanding

First, it is important to recognize that the most common understanding of “allegory” today differs from the way the reformers—and their predecessors—understood it. Most of us likely assume that allegory allows preachers to make the text say whatever they want. We understand allegory to be an arbitrary metaphor that finds a symbolic meaning of some spiritual truth in certain features of a biblical passage without any regard for the context or meaning of that passage.

To distinguish from symbolic meanings that are in the Old Testament, it has become common to use the term “typology” to refer to representations based on a historical reality that anticipate another future historical reality. The straightforward differentiation between these terms, however, originated in the 20th century as an aspect of the modern interest in the historical concerns of biblical interpretation. (See, for example, Aubrey Spears, “Preaching the Old Testament” in Hearing the Old Testament, 396. For a helpful summary and critique of the agenda behind these kinds of claims, see J. Todd Billings, The Word of God for the People of God, 149-194.) This simple distinction between allegory, which ignores history, and typology, which is based on history, is currently being challenged, particularly because interpreters throughout history did not refer to “allegories” or “types” in this way.

Until recently, it was widely accepted that in the fourth century two “schools of exegesis” established two different approaches to interpreting the Bible. The Alexandrians, such as Origen, Clement, and Cyril, favored the use of allegorical interpretation. The Antiochenes, such as Diodore, Theodore Mopsuestia, and Chrysostom, rejected allegory and favored literal and historical interpretation. The stated contrast between these two traditions then provided the basis for assessing the Reformation as characterized by “the widespread rejection of allegory . . . that represented a kind of return to the hermeneutical principles of the Antiochene school” (Al Wolters, “The History of Old Testament Interpretation: An Anecdotal Survey” in Hearing the Old Testament, 33.)

Blurry Boundaries

However, this portrayal is oversimplified. The boundaries between these two traditions are much blurrier. Both traditions had similar training for how to interpret the Bible. Both employed allegorical methods. And the later exegetical tradition incorporated elements and interpretations from interpreters of both these traditions. As a result, the reformers’ primary reaction against allegory, was its abuse—not its existence.

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