The Problem of Literalism Part 1: Introduction

For the purpose of illustration, let me state something confusing: Spinoza is a biblical literalist and so are Ryrie and Augustine.  It’s also true that Spinoza is not a literalist and neither are Ryrie and Augustine.

Let’s introduce ourselves to the cast of theologians. Augustine (354-430 AD) was a theologian in North Africa and perhaps the most influential of the Church Fathers. His theological reflections were the foundation of the Reformation. Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677 AD) was a Dutch philosopher who attacked both Jewish and Christian orthodoxy through a hermeneutical system. And Charles Ryrie is an elder statesman for Dispensationalism.  Dispensationalism is a view of the end times requiring almost absolute separation between Israel and the Church and is widely held by conservative Christians in the U.S.

These three men each held to a form of biblical literalism, and they illustrate for us what I am calling the problem of literalism. Literalism in our context is a belief policy about how to read the Bible. So Spinoza thought the Bible should be read literally as did Augustine and Ryrie, but each meant something quite different.

We then face a situation where there are three fairly distinct definitions of literalism: Spinoza’s literalism attacks the possibility of revelation. Augustine’s literalism supports the historical reality of the Bible. And Ryrie’s literalism supports a particular view of the end times.

Let’s spend a few moments establishing their definitions from their own writings.

Augustine’s understanding of literalism can be found in his commentary on the opening chapters of Genesis entitled The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesis ad Litteram). He states there:

But this is to give an allegorical and prophetical interpretation, a thing which I did not set out to do in this treatise. I have started here to discuss Sacred Scripture according to the plain meaning of the historical facts, not according to future events which they foreshadow. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 1, in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 41, trans. John Hammond Taylor (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1982) 39, 1.17.34.

In Augustine “literalism” is the historical reality of the text in comparison to the future and spiritual significance. Augustine would certainly not approve of the modern tendency of combining allegorical and mythological. Regardless, he is attempting in his commentary to work out the historical and factual framework communicated by the creation account.

Spinoza is a fascinating figure because his work is often seen as laying the foundation for biblical higher criticism by demanding that the Bible have only human authors.  His form of literalism became a weapon to deconstruct the Bible and savage Jewish and Christian orthodoxy as foolish and incoherent.  Here’s a quote that catches both the power of his rhetoric and his basic interpretive policy:

But we should depart as little as possible from the literal sense. . . . If we do not find it signifying anything else in normal linguistic usage, that is how we must interpret the expression, however much it may conflict with reason. . . . For, as we have already shown, we are not permitted to adjust meaning of Scripture to the dictates of our reason or our preconceived opinions; all explanations of the Bible must be sought from the Bible alone. Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 101.

The third usage is the interpretive policy of Christians who hold to Dispensationalism.  Ryrie puts it this way:

[Literalism] means interpretation that gives to every word the same meaning it would have in normal usage, whether employed in writing, speaking or thinking.” Dispensationalism: Revised and Updated (Chicago: Moody Press, 2007), 91.

And then he adds a longer quote from J. P. Lange:

The literalist (so called) is not one who denies that figurative language, that symbols, are used in prophecy, nor does he deny that great spiritual truths are set forth therein: his position is, simply, that the prophecies are to be normally interpreted (i.e., according to the received laws of language) as any other utterance are interpreted—that which is manifestly figurative being so regarded (Ibid.).

Here we are: three definitions and three ways of going about reading the Bible. Some overlap is identifiable, and yet there is considerable distinction between the three definitions, and hence the problem of literalism.

My intention, Lord willing, is to consider each of these “literalisms” separately along with their ramifications over the next several months. Next month, we will consider “Caustic Literalism” as held by Spinoza.

Wolfhart Pannenberg, An Introduction to Systematic Theology

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, 1991, pgs. 69

Summary: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-2014) was an Enlightenment theologian who worked to preserve much of the language of traditional theology while attempting to provide an academically acceptable explanation of Christian doctrine. 

An Introduction to Systematic Theology is a part of the M. Eugene Osterhaven Lectureship at Western Theological Seminary—a broadly evangelical school.  

Pannenberg establishes that Jesus is a historical person who is also in some sense the Son of God. And he defines the task of systematic theology as presenting a coherent explanation of the truth of Christianity:  “Whatever is true must finally be consistent with all other truth, so that truth is only one, but all-embracing, closely related to the concept of the one God” (6).

The issue is that while “the task [of systematic theology] is always the same, and the truth that systematic theology tries to reformulate should recognizably be the same truth that had been intended under different forms of language and thought in the great theological systems of the past and in the teaching of the church throughout the ages” (7). Yet, “the distinction has to be made between what is historically relative in the traditional teaching and what is the abiding core” (Ibid.).

One such “historically relative . . .traditional teaching” is the belief that the Bible is true in all that it affirms. Thus, the author of the text identified as 2 Peter 1:16 words, “we did not follow cleverly devised myths,” makes a historically relative statement that is strictly speaking not true. 

Pannenberg finds myths affirmed as true. And thus, “the classical doctrine as well as the biblical reports of creation of the world remained dependent on the mythical form of explaining the world: Everything was imagined as having been established in the origin of time” (41).

We, being moderns and Pannenberg’s readers, know that the Bible has mythological portions, because of two aspects of modernity. Modernity is “a complete program of purely secular interpretation of reality at large and of human life and history” (13-14) and “the modern criticism of all forms of arguing by recourse to authority” (14).

A bait and switch occurs here, because at least Enlightenment thought establishes science as an authority. Or perhaps better, the modern program is the authority (cf. review of Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution). 

Pannenberg submits to the modern program, but attempts to create the intellectual room for faith in portions of the Christian program. So much so that Pannenberg excitedly informs us:

When modern biochemist describe the phenomenon of life as autocatalytic exploitation of an energy gradient, such a description yields the same idea of life as an ecstatic phenomenon which is surprisingly close to the Christian idea of faith as described in the theology of the Reformation; an existence outside oneself, realized in the act of trust in God (45). 

He can produce such rubbish only by overhauling the doctrine of God and then stuffing the traditional term faith into his definition of God. “The concept of God which was developed by medieval and early modern theology in close contact with classical metaphysics is in need of rather radical revision” (23). 

According to Pannenberg, the Bible with its mythological assertions about Jesus and creation, does not support the what Pannenberg perceives as the classical definition of God as mind. The person who brought the world’s attention to this problem was Spinoza (cf. The Problem of Literalism: Spinoza). “Spinoza rejected the image of God as mind which operates by interaction of intellect and will” (34). Mind as formulated by Spinoza and accepted by Pannenberg is “the distinction and interaction of intellect and will [as] bound to the finitude of the human situation.”

Pannenberg cures this problem by “admitting this criticism” yet, “the ideas of a divine will and of God as spirit need not be surrendered, but they have to be reconstructed on a new basis” (35).

The new basis that the author offers is God as spirit:

In the biblical story the spirit is simply the dynamic principle of life, and the soul is the creature which is alive and yet remains dependent on the spirit as the transcendent origin of life (43). 

He notes that this was rejected by the early church because of the Stoic articulation of spirit as matter. And adds, “Origen’s criticism was successful because of the apparent absurdities such a conception would cause in the concept of God. . .In fact, however the Stoic conception of pneuma as a most subtle element like air was much to the biblical language. . .” (43-45).  

Pannenberg then plops this into modern energy field theory: 

The Spirit of God can be understood as the supreme field of power that pervades all of creation. Each finite event or being is to be considered as a special manifestation of that field, and their movements are responsive to its forces (46). . .The field theories of science, then, can be considered as approximations to the metaphysical reality of the all-pervading spiritual field of God’s creative presence in the universe (47). 

The “spirit” as God allows the Son to distinguish “himself from the Father in order to subordinate himself to his kingdom. . . The eternal act of the Son’s self-differentiation from the Father would then contain the possibility of the separate existence of creatures. As the self-distinction of the Son from the Father is to be regarded as an act of freedom, so the contingency in the production of creatures would be in continuity with such freedom” (42). 

Pannenberg has accepted Spinoza’s deity but has trintitized it by making the Son freely contingent on the Father (cf. John Cooper, Panentheism, 259ff.). Jesus as freely dependent on the Father can with the Holy Spirit pass on his freedom to creation.

The freedom the Son passes on to man is essentially the self-consciousness of humanity (51). We, like the Son, can distinguish ourselves from God. Adam’s sin was not merely distinguishing himself from God; he “actually separated from God” (61). Yet “in the second Adam, the Son of God, human beings accept their differences from God and subordinate themselves to him as the Son does. Like the Son himself, in their voluntary subordination to God they will enjoy communion with God and consequently participate in his eternal life beyond their own finitude and death” (61).

Benefits/Detriments: The enthusiastic undergraduate within me cries, “Damn, that’s clever!” Libertarian free will, evolution, quantum physics, monotheism, a reasonably divine Jesus, and salvation. And the only cost is dropping the Bible as an authority and accepting the authority of the scientific program and Pannenberg’s cleverness. 

And please let’s be clear, Pannenberg’s system allows him to arbitrate which portions of the Bible are mythological and which true. He might argue that the Jesus Seminar is his authority, but it’s moot. Without the Bible, there is no revealed Jesus in history, without Jesus there is no Trinity, and without the Trinity, Pannenberg’s system collapses back into Spinoza’s simple panentheism. Pannenberg’s system depends on an authoritative revelation of the Son of God, and he rejects the possibility of that authority. 

Further, I am befuddled by Pannenberg’s insistence on developing theological positions based on at best theoretical descriptions of background physical phenomena like field theory and quantum events. The shelf-date on such positions is likely less than Twinkies or string theory. The scientific program cannot provide a stable foundation for theology because it changes.

Lastly, Pannenberg has not escaped the absurdities of making God an energy field any more than the Stoics by making God subtle matter. 

The curmudgeonly theologian within me mutters, “Clever, damnably clever.” It’s damnably clever because it was anticipated by Paul as the systematic theology “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5). The trouble with clever is that nobody saved by it. And there’s very little difference between clever and crafty (Gen. 3:1).

Recommended for folks pursuing academic degrees in theology.  

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, and The Provincial Letters

The Modern Library, New York, 1941, 620 pgs.

Summary: Pascal (1623-1662) was a savant who made contributions in mechanical calculators, vacuum research, geometry, probability, and apologetics. He was a younger contemporary and antagonist of Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes somewhat purposely contributed to the rising skepticism of his age through modification of his Jesuit training. 

Pascal’s family, early in his life, had attached themselves to Jansenism within the French Roman Catholic Church. Jansenism was the last gasp of the Augustinian understanding of total depravity after the Council of Trent (1545-1563). They were also extreme rigorist in exhaustive confession in preparation for the mass, personal ethics, and separation from worldliness. 

The Jansenist and Jesuits tended to compete among the wealthy and the nobles in France as personal confessors. The Jesuits practiced a lax discipline that came to be known as probabilism.

The Jesuit system can be defined as, “if the licitness or illicitness of an action is in doubt, it is lawful to follow a solidly probable opinion favouring liberty, even though the opposing opinion, favouring the law, be more probable” (s.v., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd Ed.). 

The outcome was that if a Jesuit confessor could find a single historical allowance for some behavior, say fornication or murder, then the penance prior to mass was either avoided or minimal. The two Catholic groups holding to probabilism, the Dominicans and Jesuits, had made a cottage industry of publishing casuistry manuals with precedence for greater and greater moral latitude.  

All of this is important because the behavior to a degree the policy of the political elite were seen as being dependent on the royalty’s confessors. So the dispute between the Jesuits and Jansenist was a struggle over controlling the court and the culture of the country. A king with a Jansenist confessor would necessarily have a different court and therefore regime than one with a Jesuit. 

The Jesuits with the backing of political leaders like Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) hounded and persecuted the Jansenist out of existence. With the Jansenist demise, Augustinism left the Roman Church and now resides among the Reformed.   

Pascal’s theological writings are pointed both towards Jesuit casuistry and the rising skepticism of the humanist of his day. 

Pensées—is a group of thoughts (pensées in French) that Pascal intending to develop into a defense of the faith. The fragments have been ordered in different ways throughout history, and while some of them are well developed others are obviously notes for further work.  The most developed argument is on the highest probability being on the side of trusting in God and living a holy life in the famous Pascal’s wager. 

Examples:

343: The beak of the parrot, which it wipes, although it is clean.

555:. . . . The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. . . .

627:….There is a great difference between a book which an individual writes, and publishes to a nation, and a book which itself creates a nation. We cannot doubt that the book is as old as the people. 

The Provincial Letters—a witty, sarcastic, carefully footnoted, mocking, evisceration of Jesuit casuistry and their unfair attack and persecution of the Jansenist. They were written ostensibly as letters by an urban Parisian to a friend living in the country attempting to explain the Jesuits and Sorbonne’s actions and statements against the Jansenist. The first half are dryly amusing to sublime, but the bitterness increases towards the end.

Benefits/Detriment: The Pensées are interesting; some are very thought provoking, almost all are wholesome for general orthodoxy. The secular popularity is likely due to the fragmentary nature which allows space to fill with the readers’ personal opinions rather than being confronted by an actual controversial system. 

While I enjoyed the letters and the pensées, both works strike me as inlets on larger and more important seas. Interesting as part of a wider reading on broader controversies, for historical background, and the appreciation of literature. 

Thomas Aquinas, Selected Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas: The Principles of Nature, On Being and Essence, On the Virtues in General, and On Free Choice, trans. Robert P. Goodwin

The Library of Liberal Arts Press, Inc, 1965, 162 pgs. 

Summary: Four basic, short, and fundamental works of Thomas of Aquinas (c. 1225-1274). Thomas in many ways developed the current Roman Catholic explanation of their practice and continues to frame conservative and moderate papal theologians’ thought. Thomas’ influence on Protestant and Reformed thought remains significant. 

Thomas’ main effort was to bring the defense of current religious practice within the forms of Aristotelian insight. Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a student of Plato, tutor of Alexander the Great, and a natural and speculative philosopher. His work influenced all subsequent academic theology and philosophy in the West. 

The translator and editor Robert P. Goodwin provides a competent introduction to Thomas’ life and thought. Further, he reduced the complexity of On the Virtues in General and On Free Choice by removing Thomas’ collection and discussion of past authorities, including I assume Scripture references. The Principles of Nature and On Being and Essence are monographs on the stated topic. 

Goodwin summarizes what he finds as the most fundamental aspect of Thomas’ thought on page xv. 

Under the influence of some earlier thinkers, especially the Arabian Avincenna (980-1037) and William of Auvergne (1180-1249), and under the suggestion of God’s “description” of Himself—“I am who am [sic]” (Exodus 3:14)—St. Thomas contended that the key factor of any reality as a reality was its existence. . . . For him every being possesses a real principle in virtue of which it is. By contrast to so many others, St. Thomas maintained that a being is not a being in virtue of its matter, or a being in virtue of what it is, that is its essence. The principle in virtue of which something is a being was called esse, the act of existing. 

He also notes that by moving the fundamental of existence to the act he modifies Aristotle who places it in form. 

The Principles of Nature

Thomas collates Aristotle’s different comments and work into a single monograph on the principles and causes. He notes the commentaries of Avverroes (1126-1198) and Avicenna (980-1037) on Aristotle. There are citations to On Animals, Metaphysics, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, and On the Soul. Thomas does not interact with Scripture. 

Thomas here argues that there are two kinds of being—being in potency and being in act. Being in act exists without qualification while potency’s existence is qualified. 

Things that are in potency can exist in two ways: accidentally as a subject of matter (the white in a man) called matter in which and substantially matter from which (sperm combined with an oocyte becomes a man). 

The type of matter that is only potency is prime matter, because it can become anything. Prime matter differentiated with a form is the substance of a thing. Those things which are not necessary to the thing as accidents are the subject. Without form the thing does not exist, but subject does not control the existence of the substance.

A form is defined as the action of particular existence; so that the form of the substance is the substantial form (ex. soul of man). While the form of the accident is accidental form (the man is white). 

Generation of thing is a movement of form. And so the potency of sperm and the oocyte generate a man. We may also speak of the generation of an accident, but in a qualified way as the man becomes white does not generate the man, but whiteness in the man.

Conversely corruption corresponds with generation: simple corruption is the destruction of the substance. Qualified corruption is the destruction of the accident. 

For generation to occur, matter with potency, privation, and form are needed. A lump of bronze has within it both the potential to be a statue and the privation of the statue form. By adding the form the bronze becomes the statue and the privation is removed. 

The bronze has the substantial form of bronzness, but it is generated into a statue by the additional form of statue which is an artificial form. “[F]or art works only on what is already constituted as existing by nature” (10). 

Nature then has three principles: “matter, form, and privation” (Ibid). Privation is an accident, because it does not belong to matter or form, but is rather a lack.

Accidents are then necessary and non-necessary: risibility [ability to laugh] is necessary to man while whiteness is not. Privation is a necessary accident, because all matter can exist in a different form, and thus privation is necessary for generation. 

Because negation can be attributed to anything even non-entities, negation is not a thing or principle; the principle is privation and privation is a lack of perfection in a thing intended to have it. So blindness is negation in rocks, but a privation in man. 

The only matter that exists without form but with privation is prime matter. 

Knowledge comes to humanity only through the form as attached to matter, and so our knowledge of prime matter then comes from extracting a universal from the observed composite. Properly speaking all differentiated things exist fundamentally as prime matter. Yet prime matter “does not exist in act, since existing in act occurs only in forms, but exists only in potency. Hence whatever exists in act cannot be called prime matter” (14).

The three principles—matter, privation, and form—cannot generate; the form of statue does not create an act of generation, nor can matter itself. The agent of generation is then a cause, specifically the efficient or moving cause. 

Aristotle argued then that the fourth principle must be what “was intended by the agent” (15) and this is the end. Agents are divided into two categories—determined and voluntary. Voluntary agents function as both determined agents (displacing air) and voluntary agents (clapping). The intention of natural agents is “their inclination toward something.”

A “cause is said to be that from whose existing another follows” (17). And there are four causes or elements—material, efficient, formal, and final. 

1. Material—[change in the material of the thing]

2. Efficient/moving—[things apart from the thing being changed or moved]

3. Formal—[change in the shape, arrangement, appearance of the thing]

4. Final—[the end towards which change is directed]

The cause effects the elements of the thing which is “an immanent, specifically irreducible entity of which a thing is primarily composed” (17). Elemental matter cannot be destroyed. So consuming bread does not put bread into the blood, but the elements are placed in the blood while the bread is destroyed. 

A single object or event may have multiple causes, and cause may also function as contraries. A pilot can both be the cause of the sinking and safety of his ship.

The complexity of causation also includes the same thing being a cause and being caused: “Hence the end is the cause of the causality of the efficient cause. Similarly, it makes the matter be matter, and form be form, since matter receives a form only for some end, and a form prefects matter only for an end” (19)

Causes exist prior to the thing caused. And yet the priority of the cause takes two forms. “a thing can be called prior and posterior, and a cause can be called caused, with respect to the same thing. For thing can be called prior to another in generation and in time, or in substance and completeness” (20).

Necessity can be absolute or conditional. Necessity is linked to efficient and material causes in generation requiring the outcome. Thus, “death stems from matter—that is, from the disposition of composing contraries; therefore it is said to be absolute because there is no impediment to it” (21). The conception of a man is necessary for the birth of a man and yet this is conditional.

Ends are of two types—generation and “the end of the thing generated.” So the knife is generated and generation is an end, but the purpose of the knife is cutting. 

“Being is not a genus, however, since it is predicated, not univocally, but analogously” (26). To understand how this relates to the “unity and diversity within causes,” we must note that “something can be predicated of many things in three ways: univocally, equivocally, and analogously” (Ibid). 

When something has the same name and nature as in animal in reference to man and dog, it is univocal. It is equivocal in reference to two things of disparate nature: the dog (animal) and the Dog (constellation)

“An analogous predication occurs when something is predicated of several things which have diverse natures, but which are related to some one thing” (27). So we speak of a healthy diet, a healthy horse, healthy urine. “For healthy is predicated of urine as a sign of health; of a body, as of its subject; or medicine, as of its cause. Nevertheless, each of these is related to the one end, health” (Ibid). 

On Being and Essence 

Thomas brings together his modification to Aristotle’s understanding of being into a single monograph. He interacts again with Avicenna and Averroes, but also Boethius (cf. review) on universals. He comments on Aristotle’s, Posterior Analytics, Metaphysics, On the Heavens, Physics, Topics, On the Soul, History of Animals, and Parts of Animals.

The vocabulary is foreign enough to require some outside help:

Richard Muller shall assists us in defining our terms:

Genus: genus; viz., either a number of individuals things identified as a group by means of a common concept or universal, or the universal itself as predicated of a group of individual things. In the former view, the universal is merely an abstraction; in the latter, it exists either in the thing or prior to the thing. The ideas of genus must be further clarified as indicating a universal that does not exhaustively express or describe the essence, or quidditas [whatness of a thing] of the individuals in the group. Thus, human beings, horses, and snails all belong to the genus of animal. By way of contrast, species refers to individuals in a group or to the universal predicated of the group in such a way as to express the essence of those individuals fully or exhaustively. The “man” as a species indicates all humans beings as rational, intellectual animals and therefore distinct from horses and snails. (s.v. genus, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms). 

 Being can be spoken of in two senses according to Aristotle: those things divided up into the ten genera and the truth of a proposition. 

The truth of a proposition or that about which an “affirmative proposition can be formed, even if it posits nothing in reality.” In this sense we can speak of privations and negations as things—blindness, zero, darkness. These things have no positive essence. 

The ten genera [substance, quantity, quality, relatives, somewhere, sometime, being in a position, having, acting, and being acted upon] make up the essence of the thing. And “‘essence’ is used inasmuch as it designates that through which and in which a being has the act of existing” (36).

Accidents have essences in a qualified way, but particularly simple substances have the clearest essence. Composite substances are less noble and have essences but they are divisible. “For simple substances are the cause of composite ones—at least the first substance, God, is” (36). 

Matter and form as separate things cannot be the essence, because “a thing is so determined by that by which it is in act.” 

He then notes as an aside that “the definition of natural substances contains not only form, but also matter; otherwise there would be no difference between definitions in physics and mathematics” (37).  

Thomas then goes on to explain the relationship between matter and genus; this is related to abstracting to or from an individual to the universal with precision: when we think of Obama as a human being we are thinking of him with precision, but when we think him as a skinny, tall, African-American, we are thinking of him in less and less precise abstraction. 

The basic issue, as I understand it is: if we think of Obama as he is different from all other men, he has a specific Obama essence different than other men; yet if we think of him as similar to all other men he has an essence that is universally shared. 

Thus we can think of form as human—shared by all men, and form as differentiated Obama as Obama. And it’s the same with essence and differentiated matter (differentiated in genus and species). 

Thus there appears to be an animal form, an animal-donkey form, and an animal-donkey-owned by Balaam form. A precise essence has the greatest abstraction and the least abstract is therefore the most unique essence—animal-man-Obama. 

Thomas then moves on to consider if genus, species, etc. exits in individuals. And this he rejects. He also rejects that these ideas exist independently apart from the individual as Plato held. And instead argues that the categories exist within the mind but have references to real things abstracted from individual examples.   

Thomas’ view comes to be called the conceptualist; because the thing conceptualized—form, genus, species—is real but it does not exist independently of the observed in the individual example.  

Or as he writes, “Predication is something which is accomplished by the action of the intellect composing and dividing and has for its foundation in the real thing itself the unity of those things one of which is said of the other” (50). 

He now moves on to consider how “essence is found in separated substances, namely, the soul, the intelligences [angels], and the First Cause” (51). 

“Hence, [the soul’s] possible intellect is related to intelligible form as prime matter, which holds the lowest grade among sensible things, is related to sensible forms, as the Commentator say in his commentary on the third book of the  De Animia. Accordingly, the Philosopher compares it to a writing tablet on which nothing is written, because it has a greater degree of potency than other intelligible substances. The human soul, then, is so near to material things that the material things is drawn to participate in its act of existing; thus from the body and soul there results one act of existing in one composite, although the act of existing, insofar as it is the soul’s    does not depend upon the body” (57).

There are three modes of existence which have been discussed—in things without life, things with life, and things with intelligence (men corporeal, angels incorporeal). Thomas now turns to God and suggests that God is “Whose essence is its very act of existing” (59). . . . “The act of existing which God is is such that no addition can be made to it. Hence, by its purity, His act of existing is distinct from every other of existing” (Ibid). . . . “Indeed, God possesses the perfections which are in all genera, because of which He is said to be perfect without qualification, as the Philosopher and the Commentator state in the fifth book of the  Metaphysics  [v. 16, 1021b30].

On the Virtues in General 

Thomas defines virtue: “The name ‘virtue’ indicates the perfection of a power, and hence the Philosopher [Aristotle] states in the first book of On Heaven and Earth that virtue is the ultimate perfection of potency” (75)

Virtue then is the use of an active potency within a human being for some perfection. It is not a passive capacity in the sense that paper has the capacity to take ink, but it is an active use of an existing potency.

Potency “are passive only which act only when moved by others” (76). So the eye is a passive potency because it cannot operate for its end without light and an object. The reasonable potencies must cooperate actively in their perfection or they are not reasonable (77). 

Further, these potencies to be perfected must reach three aspects described by Aristotle: “uniformity in operation,” “preformed readily,” and “operation must be completed pleasurably” (77-78). Thus completed action is a virtuous habit. 

This leads to difficulty of contradicting a portion of Augustine’s definition of virtue: “virtue is a good quality of the mind by which one lives rightly, which no one uses badly, and God produces in us without us” (78).

Augustine has essentially defined all virtue as passive in that they are caused by the work of God within us making us the secondary cause of our action. 

Thomas handles this by carving out distinctions among the virtues--moral, intellectual, theological, and acquired—are all active virtues, but there is “infused virtue” which is passive as described by Augustine. 

Infused virtues are necessary because humanity has two ends: “man’s good is twofold: one good is proportioned to his nature, and another exceeds the faculty of his nature” (100).

Thus, we have virtues which are perfected to make us more natural, and then we have supernatural good or end that requires God’s activity: “the rational soul, which is caused immediately by God, so exceeds the capacity of matter that corporal matter is not totally capable of confining it” (Ibid). “This occurs with none of the other forms, which are caused by natural agents” (101).

Thomas later must turn and explain why Augustine is wrong and he has two essential disagreements with him: the first, on the issue of anthropology.

They hold that forms are capable of change just as substances are. [Note to Augustine, De Genesis ad Litteram, 6.6]. Wherefore, not finding that whence forms are generated, they posit them either as created or as pre-existing in matter.

If I grasp this correctly, Augustine thought that a radical shift had occurred at the Fall changing what Thomas refers to as the form of humanity. Thomas doesn’t think the form can change because it springs from the soul. Augustine sees a change to the actual potency of man as he is then Thomas does. (The citation to Genesis ad Litteram is to an extremely obscure section of Augustine on a staggered creation of humanity and is provided by the editor. But it does point to Augustine seeing humanity as participating in multiple creations and not a single creational act.)

For Augustine, a sinner can love himself and to some degree his neighbor but hate God. For him to love God requires that God add love to him or provide him the potency to love. And to this Thomas responds:

The Philosopher disproves this, however, in Book Four of the Physics. For when something becomes more curved, something does not become curved which was previously not curved. Rather, the whole thing becomes more curved. It is impossible to suppose this in regard to spiritual qualities whose subject is the soul, or part of the soul. (104).

A man loves God and in loving God increases his activity of love, so that the whole is more “curved.” So man must not merely have the internal structures necessary for loving—will, memory, appetites, intellect—but he must have the actual power.  

Thomas steps further away from the historical position of the church by removing the necessity of the indwelling Spirit of God for Godward love to exist:

This position would indeed have some merit, if charity were a certain substance having an act of existing apart from substance. Hence, the author of Sentence, [Peter Lombard, cf. review] thinking charity to be a certain substance, namely, the Holy Spirit Himself, seems, not unreasonably, to have held this type of increase” (Ibid). 

Humanity then has a natural love for God. This love is insufficient for salvation, and so God comes and infuses those who are naturally loving him with greater charity:

For a man doing what he can prepares himself to receive charity from God. Our later acts can be meritorious with respect to the growth of charity because they presuppose charity, which is the principle of merit. But no one can merit without obtaining charity from the beginning, because merit cannot exist without charity. Therefore we say that charity grows with intensity (107).    

On Free Choice

Thomas holds to a conditional libertarian free. By libertarian is meant choosing between good and evil without prior influence. The condition is the current state of “goodness” caused by embodiment. (See below) 

The Reformed understanding is that the will can always make choices between perceived goods, but these goods may or may not be good according to God. Regeneration and cooperation with the Spirit of God are necessary elements of the potency to choose between good and evil after the fall. 

Thomas clearly rejects the doctrine of total depravity by his doctrine of natural goods and supernatural goods:

Nevertheless, because some attempts [toward goodness] do occur, these can be a way of preparing for grace.

The reason why a man in this state of life is incapable of being so obstinate in evil that he cannot cooperate in his liberation is evident from these facts: passion dissipates and is repressible; habit does not totally corrupt the soul; and reason does not adhere so pertinaciously to falsity that it is incapable of being changed by contrary reason.

But after this state of life the separated soul will not understand by receiving from the senses, nor will its appetitive powers of sense be in act. Thus the separated soul is similar to an angel with respect to the mode of understanding, and with the respect to the indivisibility of its appetite, which were the causes of obstinacy in a fallen angel. Hence, for the same reason, the separated soul will be obstinate.

Finally, in the resurrection the body will follow the condition of the soul. The soul, therefore, will not return to the state in which it presently is, wherein it must learn through the body, although it will use bodily instruments. Hence, the same cause for obstinacy will remain (144). 

Essentially, Thomas believes and teaches that human beings must be able to do some good in their current—pre-mortem and pre-resurrection—state. The good exists because the physical body and the soul interacting require goodness so that the senses can accept and interpret data.

When the soul is separated from the body without grace, then the soul will be obstinate and lack the power to choose good. At the resurrection the body will be converted by the soul to total depravity. 

Benefits/Detriments: The collection is an extremely helpful introduction to Thomas’ thought.

Thomas’ understanding of the Fall and its effects is essentially that supernatural good was removed from man leaving him only with natural good. Nature remains fundamentally the same and remains open to its supernatural end through cooperative elevation. Thomas’ insights are fundamental to the current Roman system which I anathematize in the strongest terms. 

Such a view allows someone like Aristotle to make authoritative statements on what can only be revealed truths. Thus his work is sprinkled with statements like:

Accordingly, the Philosopher compares [the soul] to a writing tablet on which nothing is written. . . . (57)

Angels are incapable of a sin of passion because, according to the Philosopher in Book Seven of the Ethics, a passion is found only in a soul’s sensible part, which angels do not possess (142). 

Aristotle then provides the most fundamental tools for interpreting the Bible, and the Bible it seems plays a very secondary role in correcting Aristotle.

Recommended for philosophy students and academically minded pastors. Please note Goodwin’s editing when reading. 

Setting the Stage

Allow me to share with you three passages of Scripture which I find astounding: The Creation account in Genesis 1-2, the “I AM” statement in Exodus 3, and John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

These three passages of Scripture fascinate me because they seem misplaced. They shouldn’t be there. A fisherman with simplistic Greek, attempting to maintain a religion among slaves and Jewish exiles, should not have spoken of the Logos. And an itinerant Jewish rabbi by the name of Jesus, shouldn’t have said anything like, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

Exodus 3 is shocking as well. “I AM the I AM” is perhaps the most philosophically sublime statement in history, and it comes to us in a narrative about an exiled member of the Egyptian royal family working as a shepherd for the priest of Midan talking to a burning bush in the desert. Plato refers to God as “the Being,” which is a more than responsible translation of the Hebrew and identical to the Septuagint’s translation and Revelation 1:8. And if you don’t find it shocking, read a bit of Heidegger as he tries to work around Being-in-itself.

And then we have the creation account; it’s orderly and grounded on this planet and in history. Our current science agrees with the creation account that all life on this planet came from this planet. Human beings and apes and bacteria were all made out of the same stuff. And when it is compared to the Babylon creation myth, where rain is the spit of a god and the earth is the carcass of a god, the Genesis account is an elegant and rational narrative, even to a degree scientific.

None of these passages of Scripture ought to be there. The creation story is too elegant and too reasonable. Plato and the Hebrews should not agree on the existence of a God who is the foundation of being. And John and Jesus should never have taught about the Logos and a human being who called himself the “I Am.” But there they are. Oddly anachronistic statements about this God that Christians worship.

When human beings make up a god, he, she, or it is rather like us. And so Muhammad’s god informed his followers not to bug the prophet during supper (33:53). The Greek gods bickered, raped, battled, and got drunk just like the Greeks. And Spinoza and Einstein’s god wasn’t demanding, yet provided sufficient explanatory power for the order of the universe. But the God of the Bible isn’t like us. He is the Other, the foundation of being He is God.

And this is part of the reason why I have entitled my blog “Faith seeking understanding.” The knowledge of God unfolds; it is not a cultural accretion. His necessity can be discovered by the philosophers, but his person is only revealed through his word. The Christian experience does not begin with an exhaustive understanding, but with a belief in the God who creates the universe from nothing, who is the foundation of being, and who speaks to humanity through His Son Jesus Christ.

John Owen has put it well: “Imagination creates its own object; faith finds it prepared beforehand.” The Christian thinker is not attempting to make stuff up, but to understand what has been revealed. And we must attempt this with fallen, finite, free, and fallible minds. Our finitude before an infinite Being requires the use of the imagination as a tool of analysis—testing, probing, and thinking together in the community of faith with abject humility. Because our minds our fallen, we must seek illumination from this great God and his revelation. Because we are fallible, we must come to conclusions with modesty, worship, and wonder, and because we are fallen and free, we must struggle against sin.

When a Christian begins the theological task with the posture of “I will believe what I understand,” they have begun the descent into non-Christian thought, because they have become the standard of judgment rather than God and his revelation of himself. As the author of Hebrews reminds us, “whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6). The faith begins with believing in the God who has spoken and who is good. Understanding is the way that we deepen our appreciation and worship of our God.

The purpose of this blog is to think together by stepping out of the bedlam of the moment and to reason about texts and nature carefully. Our partners are the Lord who speaks through his word and world, the church of all ages, and the critics. And my hope is that by thinking carefully, assisted by God, the godly, the ungodly, and the cosmos, that we will be better able to worship the God who is as he is.

And so, I extend the invitation of a friend, “Come now, let us reason together.” Unlike the person who first made that offer, I will be mistaken, even sometimes stupid, often prideful, but let’s speak of the important things and make a bold attempt to understand the truth of things. And, as you read my attempts, remember the plea of Horace, “If you know something better than these precepts, pass it on, my good fellow. If not join me in following these.”

In Christ,

Pastor Shane Walker

A Fragment on Why Unbelievers Seem to Subdue Sin

And the reason why a natural man is not always perpetually in the pursuit of some one lust, night and day, is because he hath many to serve, every one crying to be satisfied; thence he is carried on with great variety, but still in general he lies towards the satisfaction of self. John Owen, Mortification of Sin in Believers, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1967), 24.

Those of us who have walked long in the church are often horrified at the eruptions of sin within the church both among the laity and clergy. We look across at the orderliness and often even kindness of the world with jealousy and frustration. 

Our generation is not alone in this experience. The Apostle Paul and the church throughout history cries out, “there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans” (1 Cor. 5:1). Too often we can say the same of greed, backbiting, gossiping, and pettiness.

Our friend and brother, John Owen (1616-1683) suggests a partial explanation of this blemish upon Christ’s bride. The world, the flesh, and the devil, do not focus their efforts against the unbeliever. The battle against his soul has been won. The non-believer flies the flag of the kingdom of Babylon. What need has she to strafe her allies with concupiscence and grotesque sensuality?   

Yet for the Christian the battle continues. Thus, our enemies must focus their combined efforts on particular weaknesses within us. In the same way that armies mass themselves at a weak point for conquest, so the enemies of our soul attack the least guarded or most vulnerable citadel. Having dominated one stronghold, sin then establishes a foreign base of operation, launching each new attack from the safety of our compromised soul.

Here lies the explanation of these consuming sins that implode within the church, but seem to trickle in the world. And our Lord gives us two instructions to overcome:

Matthew 26:14—Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Watch by discovering your besetting sins and the means by which they overpower; pray against your desire for the pleasure of sin and the habits and avenues of temptation. Pray to the Spirit to strengthen your spirit for the day and hour of temptation so that you have victory in Jesus. Pray against the agreeing parties of your sin—the world, your own flesh, and the devil. 

Our time of watching is until the return of Christ or we are called home. Indwelling sin, the world, and the devil will not rest until we are present with the Lord. 

Folded into the command to pray and watch is the discipline of confession: 

1 John 1:9—If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Sin is a complexity of desires, self-deception, pleasures, and comforts. Each attribute of sin when acted on is sin, and to “confess our sins” is not merely to confess theft, but rather we must confess the emotions, the desires, the lies, the machinations, the self-pity, disbelief, and on and on that leads to grotesque sin.

We cannot confess our iniquities exhaustively. They are more than the hairs of our head (Psalm 40:12). Our plea is to the great physician of our souls who knows the movements and symptoms of our sin better than we do. Healing power is found in agreeing with the physician not in sharing his knowledge of our infection.  

The world experiences the peace of the defeated; the Christian is roiled by war and bears the scars and wounds of the skirmishes won and lost. We mortify sin not by an attack on an enemy but on the armed forces encamped against us—within and without. 

A Fragment of Sublime Simplicity from Luther

One has sinned, Another has made satisfaction. The sinner does not make satisfaction; the Satisfier does not sin. This is an astounding doctrine. 

Lectures on Isaiah Chapters 40-66 in Luther’s Works, vol. 17 (St. Louis, Concordia Publishing House, 1972), 99.

There is much to be said both for and against Luther (1483-1546), but he speaks to us of Jesus and he treasures the only gospel. 

We have sinned against an infinite God. Infinite in power. Eternal in wisdom. A burning fire of holiness; if the universe was sacrificed to appease the wrath of God (Isa. 40:14-18), it would be as nothing. The eternal duration of hell is merely the just approximation of our infinite debt. Eternal punishment in the scales of justice is merely just. It is the least possible and the only possible punishment.

And the Son infinite in power, holiness, and love comes and satisfies God as man for sinners. He stoops down and places himself under the law, he lives as man beneath the yoke of suffering without sin; he dies upon the cross without sin. He draws into time infinite satisfaction for sinners. 

We have sinned, Another has made satisfaction. We do not make satisfaction; the Satisfier does not sin. This is the gospel. It is astounding. 

A Fragment on Chesterton and Synergism

Oscar Wilde [1854-1900] said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (reprint, 2004; New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1908), 50. 

Above we have a clever quote; it sparkles with Chesterton’s wit and smashes with his blunt force; the statement is pregnant with great truth and some terrible lies. 

Oscar Wilde was an early public homosexual and defender of pedophilia on the Greek model (post-pubescent boys). He died young in part because of the punishment for his use of rent-boys, the notoriety of his crime, and in part through an artistic listlessness. He was also a brilliant writer and wit, but neither as clever nor wholesome as Chesterton. 

Rather than exposing the repugnant nature of Chesterton’s rhetoric and theology, I’d like to make the statement exhaustively true with some additions and changes:

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; Jesus Christ paid for sunsets. We can applaud for them by admitting we are Oscar Wilde in our sin and by striving to be like Christ. 

Oscar Wilde in all of his sin was a great admirer and experiencer of beauty. He rejoiced at the pretty and the sublime. Some of his writings are the laughter of Puck and some words edge near eternity. He valued sunsets, a silken ascot, and the brush of mink. And he is right exhaustively so, we do not value sunsets as we ought, because we do not understand what we will pay for them or what Christ paid for them. We do not pay for them now and cannot. 

In as much as Wilde valued things as good and experienced and rejoiced over them in their natural innocence, he accepted and traded in the gifts of heaven. Or as James tells us, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights (James 1:17).

The word of God, a book respected by Chesterton in an incomplete way, tells us that the “Wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). And so the thing that Oscar Wilde and we deserve for our sin is immediate death—spiritual (Eph. 2:1), physical, and eternal (Rev. 21:8). 

What Wilde experienced in his physical life was only spiritual death. And even that spiritual death contained within it some pleasures both of the senses and the heart. God forbore full punishment of Wilde’s sin while he was alive, allowing him a rich diversity of unearned gifts including sunsets. 

This legal space between Wilde’s birth, “dead in trespasses and sin” (Eph. 2:1), and his physical death and the judgment (Heb. 9:7) was purchased by Jesus Christ on the cross (Rom. 2:4, 3:25-26, cf. Acts 17:30). Jesus died in part so that Oscar Wilde could write The Picture of Dorian Grey and  The Importance of Being Earnest and so that he could enjoy sunsets and wearing what looks to my untrained eye like a bearskin coat with almost hysteric irony. 

On Wilde’s death he began to pay for sunsets. But the payment was for enjoying them without worshiping the God who both created him and paid for the privilege. Or as Abraham told one of his wayward children in hell, “Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish” (Luke 16:25). 

And now we come to the living; we cannot pay for sunsets in this life. We cannot purchase them because the price for them has been paid. The thing that we can do is recognize that we are Oscar Wilde in our sin. 

The thing that separates us from Oscar Wilde is not human nature. Paul describes both Wilde and us in identical language in Romans 3:10-12, “as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” 

There is no difference then between Wilde and us in our natures. The difference is only in the grace of God. I’ve never used the services of a rent-boy or defended pedophilia in a court room because of the grace of God. And if you haven’t indulged in those sins, it’s the same for you.  

Repenting of you sins is turning to God and recognizing that apart from the grace of God there is no good within us. We are Oscar Wilde in our sin. And Jesus has promised to save the Oscar Wildes of the world. 

The second thing to note is that once the Spirit of God is within us and has changed our hearts so that we can believe (Rom 8:7-10), we still cannot pay for sunsets. Or as Paul and then Augustine thunder out with such incredulity, “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Cor. 4:7) 

The thing that we can do is applaud. We can stand before the crimson, azure, purple, fuchsia, sunset and thank God for the death, resurrection, and accession of his Son, and we wonder at the good things God has given us in Christ and in this world, and thank him. He is good. 

It is only here after we have recognized ourselves as potential Oscar Wilde’s and observed the goodness of God in Christ that we then move to the next step which (Col. 3:5) is to strive to be less like Wilde in his sin. But again not as payment rather simply as worship. 

A Fragment on Scholasticism or a Plea of a Scholastic Believer

The active immutability of God, the ever-living and eternally unchanging interpenetration of the divine persons, translates into the divine willingness, without a shadow of turning, to make us partakers of that gloriously inalterable and living incorruptibility. We are most fortunate that in the incarnation God is not engaged in a work of self-realization but in the redemptive working-out of his eternal glory: incarnation is, in its immutable purpose, God with us and for us. Such doctrine, I would hope, will never be viewed as “subevangelical.” Our piety must not falter before the first paradox, the involvement of immutable God, because on the first rest the second, the transformation of death into life, of corruptibility into incorruptibility. 

Richard A. Muller, “Incarnation, Immutability, and the Case for Classical Theism, Westminster Theological Journal, 45 (1983), 40.

Richard Muller is here responding to an essay by Clark Pinnock, “The Need for a Scriptural, and therefore Neo-Classical Theism.” Pinnock’s argument is that the traditional conception of God as immutability, atemporal, and so forth are pagan philosophical imports.

For many Bible-believing Christians there is a ring of truth to Pinnock’s statements. The God of systematic theology can appear a cold and distance deity. He may, especially when the vocabulary is unfamiliar, poorly defined, and not applied to worship seem dead. 

Further, the proponents of the mutability of God almost always rely on first-sight readings and common sense arguments. 1 Samuel 15:35, “And the LORD regretted that He had made Saul king over Israel.” The Son of God was not Jesus of Nazareth in 5 BC and he became the Jesus in 3AD, therefore the Son of God changes. It certainly sounds like God changes. 

But the issue as Muller and to a lesser degree Pinnock points out is:

The issue concerns the logical and theological priority of one set of statements over another. Do we read statements concerning divine repentance as dependent for their meaning upon logically prior statements concerning the absence of change in God, or ought we to read statements concerning the absence of change in God, or ought we to read statements concerning the divine constancy as meaningful only when qualified by a doctrine of actual divine repentance? (31) 

To put it into terms of our life experience: the husband who says he loves his faithful wife as he is divorcing her to marry a younger woman is lying. And we know this because behind the statement “I love you,” are prior actions that define and explain the meaning and purpose of the words. 

In terms of theology, Christians must draw “ontological and essential conclusions from texts which speak of the ethical, moral, intentional, and volitional constancy of God.”  These “ontological and essential conclusions” require a vocabulary that relies on Scripture but is not found in Scripture. And they must be tested by their reasonableness within a scriptural framework. Theological construction and canonical interpretation (the word “became” in John 1:14 is defined by canon’s conception of God and not the immediate context alone) are necessary.

We must do this because for God to be the person he describes himself to be he must be immutable. Or as Muller summarizes, “A God who repents as human beings repent not only falls short of immutability, he also falls short of omniscience” (33). 

The entire point of the Muller’s closing paragraph, which begins this essay, is that the only God that can save us is an immutable, Trinitarian, incarnate Son, indwelling Spirit, and instigating Father. If God is not those things, then there is no salvation, and “our faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished” (1Co 15:17-18).

As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:20, “But in fact,” the God of the Bible is unchangeable, eternal, omnipresence, one, spiritual, self-existent, all knowing, invisible, wise, truthful, good, loving, timeless, beautiful, and blessed. And so we are saved. 

A Fragment on Two Types

Allegory, largely typological, pervades both the Old and the New Testaments. The events in the Old Testament are ‘types’ or ‘figures’ of events in the New Testament. In The Song of Solomon, for instance, Solomon is a ‘type’ of Christ and the Queen of Sheba represents the Church: later explained by Matthew (12:42). The Paschal Lamb was a ‘type’ of Christ.

Scriptural allegory was mostly based on a vision of the universe. There were two worlds: the spiritual and the physical. These corresponded because they had been made by God. The visible world was a revelation of the invisible, but the revelation could only be brought about by divine action. Thus, interpretation of this kind of allegory was theological. 

J. A. Cuddon, s.v. allegory, in Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin Group, 1998), 22.

The above quote has some flaws, but the source is not a biased ‘Christian’ but a rather an important writer and scholar. Considering the worldview of the writers of both the Old and New Testament, he concludes that typology is a necessary hermeneutical device for understanding the authors. 

Let’s see if we can prove portions of his definition from Scripture. 

Romans 5:14, “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.”

Adam was a type of Jesus Christ. The Greek word is tupos and from it we gain our English word type. All English translations that I have available to me as well as lexicons agree that it should be translated using topological language: type (ESV, NASB, NET, RSV), pattern (NIV), figure (KJV, NKJ), prefigured (NJB). 

Thus to understand Paul we must to move into literary vocabulary to talk about typology: if Adam was the type and then the Son of God was the antitype. The antitype, archetype, or prototype is the figure from which the type is drawn.

The clearest illustration of New Testament typology is found in Hebrews 8:5, speaking of the earthly tabernacle and Mosaic worship: “They serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, ‘See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.’” 

The idea is simply that earthly types are “a copy and shadow of the heavenly things.” In the same way we find the source of a shadow by starting at the edge and traveling towards the thing casting the shadow, so Christians are supposed to start at the edges of good things and trace them to their source in heaven. The shadow, the type, is always sustained by a thing casting the shadow or the archetype. 

In the Bible the antitype, the archetype, or the prototype of godly things reside in heaven. The ideal or archetype of marriage is found in Christ’s relationship to the Church: thus Paul writes, quoting from Genesis 2: “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church,’” in Ephesians 5:31-32. God the Father is the model of godly Fathers. The example of godly sons responding to godly fathers is found in the Son of God Jesus Christ our Lord, and so forth.

Yet the Bible presents a second type from a source outside heaven: We read about them in 2 Peter 2:4, “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment. . .” 

Jesus Christ established their leader as the model or type for unbelievers in John 8:44, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Two ultimate destines cast their shadow upon this world. Two eternal dwelling places glow with fire and the occupants, architecture, and ways of life cast their shadow into the temporary world of appearances. And both provide spiritual sustenance to their devotees:

The prophet Isaiah speaks this way, reading from the King James Version, at Isaiah 28:15, “Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves. . .” 

And we find the same in Moses’ writing in Deuteronomy 32:31-22, “For their rock is not as our Rock; our enemies are by themselves. For their vine comes from the vine of Sodom and from the fields of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of poison; their clusters are bitter; their wine is the poison of serpents and the cruel venom of asps.”

Perhaps, it would be helpful to remember at this point that Sodom and Gomorrah has been destroyed more 400 years before Moses wrote these words. Sodom and Gomorrah function as patterns of life that draw their inspiration from hell. Sodom and Gomorrah’s pattern provides comfort to those who will dwell there. 

We can then safely conclude that typology is not merely a hermeneutical strategy like literalism or the four-fold allegorical method of the medieval period, but is imbedded in the text and the worldview of the authors. Typology is the way writers and historical characters in the Bible think.