I was not excited when I opened up the video of Dr. Iain Provan’s recent lecture defending a Protestant hermeneutic of the letter.  I expected another speech the privileged grammatical-historical exegesis and only allowed for an anemic use of typology.  Nevertheless, I wanted to give it a listen in the hope that I might grow in my understanding of hermeneutics.  I was not disappointed.

Dr. Provan’s Challenge

The first hints that Dr. Provan was not defending the literal readings of the academy was when he came to a discussion of typology.  He said quite simply, “typology is literal reading.” He explained the classic distinction between typology and allegory.  Allegory brought in outside reading and outside philosophy.  Allegory lost the original text and left you with a spiritual reading that had little to do with the original meaning of the text.   But his definition of typology was quite broad.  Typology described all the various inter-connections in the text, including inter-connections between the various books of the two testaments.  With this in mind, he noted that Paul’s allegory in Galatians 4 was a fully literal reading of scripture. Dr. Provan’s sensus literalis was fully literary and recognized the unity of scripture.

The end of his speech carried even more promise.  He argued that we needed to go beyond the reformers in our literary interaction with scripture.

The latter point was filled out by his dialogue with Alastair Roberts. Alastair asked him whether the Reformers had not become overly suspicious of typological readings because of the allegorical readings that had come before.  He also noted the way academia had moved toward an increasingly anemic reading of scripture, that separated the parts from the whole and he wondered how Dr. Provan responded to that.  To my delight Dr. Provan, while defending the usefulness of academia, was fully on board with Alastair’s comments.  He agreed that the reformers lacked in working out the typologies of scripture. He also agreed that though academia had been helpful in understanding the literal nature of scripture, it had done the church and itself a disservice in its suspicion of typologies.

A False Dichotomy

The speech gave me both correction and encouragement. I had looked at the way the apostles interpreted scripture.  I knew that they were doing more in interpreting the Old Testament than merely looking at the grammatical-historical understanding.  They were looking deeper.  They looked at the literary structure of the Old Testament and in bringing that out they saw that Christ truly was the fulfillment of the Old Testament. I saw the necessity of doing more with typology than the minimalism allowed in academia today.

However, during my time at seminary, I was working within a false framework. Either I held to a pure literal understanding of the scripture or in following the apostles I was also free to develop a sensus plenior of the scriptures.  I was allowing allegory into my framework in order to preserve apostolic reading. It was a false dichotomy.

I am grateful that I always sought to ground what I imagined to be a sensus plenior in the literal sense of scripture.  This helped me avoid fanciful exegesis.  This is where Dr. Provan’s speech became so encouraging.  Rather than hanging on the thin reed of spiritual exegesis, I could boldly hold to the fact that typological exegesis is literal exegesis. Dr. Provan even claimed what I have always held: if any reading of scripture is not based in the literal sense of scripture, it should be rejected. There was no need to defend a spiritual exegesis in order to read scripture like the apostles.

Moving Forward

I should have known better.  Some of my deepest influences had always claimed the high ground here.  James Jordan had always claimed the hermeneutic of Calvin.  Peter Leithart had always claimed a “Hermeneutics of the Letter.” However, I was influenced more than I understood by my other hermeneutics textbooks.  I should have completely ignored them and worked from the framework that Leithart and Jordan had given me.

As it turns out the problem at my seminary was not that they emphasized the literal sense too much, but that they did not emphasize it enough.  They ignored the layers of typology in scripture. 

This has not been completely ignored in the history of Protestantism.  Although the reformers of the 16th and 17th century were nervous about typologies, theologians of the 18th and 19th centuries developed highly typological readings of scripture.   Particularly, in my own tradition, that of the Dutch Reformed Churches. Unfortunately, it is somewhat forgotten in our own day.

All this suggests that theologians have a task before them.  We must seek to imitate the Apostles in their reading of scripture so that we too pay attention to the types, the motifs, and the symbolism of scripture.  So far we have been poor literalists. We must embrace deep literalism.