Typology In Creation

By Gerald R. McDermott

[Gerald R. McDermott is the Anglican Chair of Divinity, Samford University, Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the first article in the four-part series “A Typological View of Reality,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 7–10, 2017.]

The Problem

Modernity has not been kind to what we know as the world. What had been for millennia a source of wonder, an infinitely complex mystery with unsearchable beauties and tantalizing harmonies, was gradually reduced to, first, a predictable machine and, later, a cold universe originating in randomness and now hostile to personhood and love.

This disenchantment with the world started with the Copernican revolution that made humanity the center and measure, replacing the infinite God with finite man, broken in his relationships and partial in his vision. At once we turned our focus from what was beyond limit to what we could know within our own limits. Then Kant limited our knowledge even further by convincing us that we could never know things as they really are—neither God nor things closer to us—but only our own concepts at some distance from God and things. Kierkegaard, for all his profound insights into the subjectivity of faith, nevertheless persuaded generations that one must leap over reason and this world to get to ultimate truth. Protestants concluded that the world of nature is fundamentally different from the sphere of grace—that the beauties of this world have no fundamental relation to the beauty of God.

The great trinity of the nineteenth century—Darwin, Marx, and Freud—solidified these inchoate disenchantments. However hard some Christians labored to reconcile macro-evolution with God’s creative work, Darwin persuaded millions that the world’s creation and sustenance could be conceived without need for a divine Creator. Marx told moderns that God-talk is merely a narcotic enabling the weak to cope with their economic and social hardships. Freud pointed not at society but at inner desire, claiming that religion is wish fulfillment. Again, it was only the weak-minded who needed it. For all three of these modern prophets, the world was no longer a beautiful mystery created by a glorious God, but an arena for the survival of the fittest, or for the exploitation of the proletariat, or merely the location for the conflict between the superego and the id.

More recently, the New Atheists have claimed to lend the authority of science to this modern disenchantment with the world. Richard Dawkins is probably the most famous of this new tribe. In his book The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he tried to refute the argument for God from the apparent design of the universe. In 2006 he published The God Delusion, which claims that the more one uses reason to understand science, the more one sees that there is no God. When reason looks at the stars above, the earth beneath, and the soul within, one does not find God, he claims, just final randomness and meaninglessness. The world does not care, and love is something that we imagine but that is finally ephemeral.

Biblical Joy

Consider a great irony: moderns are proud of the fact that they now know that the world is not enchanted. Yet these same moderns—indoctrinated by Darwin, Marx, and Freud—have run to psychiatrists and counselors because of more per capita depression than perhaps in any period of history. The biblical authors, in telling contrast, wrote of joy to be found amidst suffering. At the heart of that joy was a vision of the world full of the glory of God. As John Calvin put it, the world is a theater of God’s glory.

Calvin wasn’t saying anything new. The whole Great Tradition—from Origen and Augustine to John of Damascus and Thomas and Bonaventure—saw the world as a thing of wonder studded with beautiful and mysterious signs pointing beyond themselves. They all agreed with what the fourth-century theologian Ephrem of Syria wrote: “In every place, if you look, his [Christ’s] symbol is there, and wherever you read, you will find his types. For in him all creatures were created, and he traces his symbols on his property.”[1] Ephrem was articulating what most Christians believed for most of the church’s first seventeen centuries—that the universe is an immense Trinitarian symbol, with every corner of the cosmos bursting with divinely given meaning. All the Christian thinkers drew on what the biblical authors thought obvious to any reasonable person: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 19:1). It is only “the fool” who looks at the heavens above or the moral law within and says, “There is no God” (14:1). It seemed absolutely obvious to anyone not prejudiced that, as Paul put it, “what can be known about God is plain to [human beings], because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made [in the heavens above and the world below]. So they are without excuse” (Rom 1:19–20, NRSV). Paul went on to suggest that those who are intellectually honest will look into their own hearts and realize that what is written there is what God’s law requires and is that to which their consciences bear witness (2:15).

Two modern Christian theologians teased out the implications of this biblical vision. They accepted the biblical suggestions that all the world is full of types and proceeded to lay out this vision with a clarity and fullness that have not been duplicated. The first was Jonathan Edwards, and the second was John Henry Newman. Let me outline the vision of each, for only with the two can we get a robust conception of what the historic church has meant by its typological vision of reality.

Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards believed that every square inch of the cosmos is a sign that speaks and shows. The message is as near infinite as the universe itself because it was made by the infinite God. But the message has a code that must be cracked—word by word, sentence by sentence—to tell the story inscribed within. The story is of the infinite-personal Being who decided to create a cosmos with a little speck called Earth and creatures called human beings. These little creatures were somehow made to be like God himself, at least like him insofar as they had a capacity to think and to love and to enjoy. But they abused those spectacular privileges and rejected him. Yet he won them back by becoming one of them, subjecting his infinite self to their finite capacities and permitting them to disrespect him, abuse him, and then torture and kill him. But he was lifted from the dead and in the same body came back to life. It was through that shocking series of events—the life and death and resurrection of the God-man—that God won those magnificent but perverse creatures back to himself.

According to Edwards, this is the surprising story that is told by every square inch of the cosmos. To be more precise, a tiny part of the story is told by each tiny part of the cosmos. And if a person does not have what Edwards called the “sense of the heart,” which is given by the Holy Spirit, then that person will probably never crack the code. He or she will not get that little bit of the story, and probably not the whole story at all. In other words, that person will not be able to read the signs, for they will be in a foreign language. Edwards used exactly those sorts of words for this story. He said it is a language one has to learn, just like learning a language of this world. But you have to go to the other world, as it were, to learn the language of the message, because the message comes from the other world about this world, even though every bit of this world is inscribed with a part of the story.

Here is Edwards on the extent of God’s messaging:

I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas . . . be full of images of divine things . . . [so much so] that there is room for persons to be learning more and more of this language and seeing more of that which is declared in it to the end of the world without discovering [it] all.[2]

God has a reason for his method, said Edwards. The reason is that he is “a communicating God,” who is ever speaking, ever imprinting his creation with messages, and ever revealing more and more of his beauty. But that characteristic—ever-communicating—is only penultimate, not ultimate. It is an end or purpose of his works, but not his last end. The last end of all he said and did in creating and then redeeming is to bring glory to himself. Eighteenth-century skeptics said that sounded selfish. Edwards replied that it was selfish only if bringing joy and beauty and love to his creatures is selfish.

So God’s purpose in imprinting the entire creation is for the sake of glorifying himself, but that happens only when his creatures find their greatest joy in seeing his beauty, and that beauty is, in a word, love. And all the beauties of this world—from the beauty of the intricate design of a simple cell in a simple leaf from a simple tree, to the phantasmagoria of a distant galaxy seen from the top of a mountain on a cloudless night, to the splendor of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” to the beauty of the most beautiful woman in recent history, Mother Teresa—all of these earthly beauties are but refractions of the beauty of the self-denying, servant love of the three Persons of the Trinity.[3] In Edwards’s language, all of these beauties are types or images for which the antitype (the referent or thing to which the type points) is the eternal beauty of the mutual love among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Now Edwards had plenty of critics in his day, even on typology. Liberals of his day—and eighteenth-century liberals denied the Trinity and the blood atonement and an eternal hell, just as they do today—also denied types. Others criticized him for going too far, finding a type under every bush, as it were. Edwards’s response was, in effect, “No, there are really two under every bush—both the insects under the bush and the roots that feed the bush.”

Edwards defended himself by going to the Bible. He argued the usual case that the Old Testament is full of types that point to New Testament antitypes, but then he went further. Not only is the Exodus a type of salvation, and kings David and Solomon are types of Messiah Jesus as King, but every stroke of the pen in the Old Testament was typical. How do we know that? Because after recounting certain events when the Israelites were wandering in the Sinai wilderness, Paul said that “all these things were written for our instruction” (1 Cor 10:11). Edwards explained,

Thus almost everything that was said or done that we have recorded in Scripture from Adam to Christ, was typical of Gospel things: persons were typical persons, their actions were typical actions, the cities were typical cities, the nation of the Jews and other nations were typical nations, the land was a typical land, God’s providences towards them were typical providences, their worship was typical worship, their houses were typical houses, their magistrates typical magistrates, their clothes typical clothes, and indeed the world was a typical world.[4]

Like much of the church for most of its last two thousand years, Edwards believed that “Mount Zion and Jerusalem are types of the church of saints.”[5] But unlike much of the church, he was not a supersessionist who believed that the church entirely replaced Israel. Unlike many evangelicals who insist in Enlightenment fashion that every text has only one meaning, and unlike many Christians who think like Occamite nominalists that the simplest explanation is always the best, Edwards followed the Great Tradition’s fourfold sense of Scripture and was able to see multiple layers of meaning in the same text. He was also able to do ontology in the way the Bible does it. In other words, he employed the Christological principle of co-inherence and the Trinitarian principle of perichoresis, both of which mean that God’s reality, and therefore creaturely realities, are able to have two or more things going on at the same time. Christ is both God and man. The Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father, and the two by the Spirit are in the believer, at the same time that the whole church is in Christ, and the whole world is in God in some mysterious sense—“in him we live and move and have our being,” as Paul told the Athenian philosophers on Mars Hill (Acts 17:28). Therefore a text of Scripture about Jerusalem or Mount Zion can refer as a type to the future Gentile church at the same time that it speaks in quite literal fashion about the future of Jewish Israel.

Edwards went further than most of the tradition on typology. For he insisted that the New Testament is full of types too. The dove on Jesus’s head at his baptism was a type of the Holy Spirit; so were the tongues of fire on the heads of the 120 and the rushing of wind at Pentecost.[6]

Not only that, but the New Testament itself teaches us to look outside the Bible for types. When Jesus proclaimed that he was the true light and true vine and true bread, he implied that all lights and vines and breads in this world are pointers to, or types of, their antitypes in Jesus. Paul did the same for seed and sowing in springtime when he used them in 1 Corinthians 15 to argue for the resurrection of bodies. Unless God intended seed and planting to be types of spiritual realities, Paul’s argument would not have made sense: “If the sowing of seed and its springing were not designedly ordered to have an agreeableness to the resurrection, there could be no sort of argument in that which the Apostle alleges; either to argue the resurrection itself or the manner of it, either its certainty, or probability or possibility.”[7]

If types are in nature, they can also be found in nonbiblical history. Edwards wrote in his enormous “Types of the Messiah”[8] miscellany that “many things in the state of the ancient Greeks and Romans” were typical of gospel things. For example, his “Images” notebook contains a long entry comparing the celebration of a military triumph in the Roman empire to Christ’s ascension. Just as the Roman emperor’s triumphal chariot was followed by senators and ransomed citizens, Christ was accompanied on his return to glory by principalities and powers and ransomed citizens of heaven. The Roman procession was closed by the sacrifice of a great white ox; so too Christ at the ascension entered the holy of holies with his own blood. The Roman emperor treated the people in the capital with gifts, and Christ did the same for his church.[9]

Edwards went further still—to the history of religions. He proposed that God has planted types of true religion even in religious systems that are finally false. This is hard for most Christians today to fathom, but Edwards was nothing if not a daring thinker, yet always within the bounds of the Great Tradition of orthodoxy. His adventurous step was to say that the nearly universal practice of sacrifice in world religions was planted by God as a type of the perfect sacrifice of God’s Son. Even the ghastly practice of human sacrifice, inspired by the devil, was used by God to prepare peoples for the sacrifice made by the God-man. Edwards also taught that pagan idolatry, in which deities were believed to inhabit material forms, was a type of the true Incarnation. Furthermore, he believed pagan sacrifices showed the heathen that sin “must be suffered for,” and therefore that they need God’s mercy.[10]

Yet Edwards warned that typology can go off the rails. It is not a problem to see types everywhere, because they are everywhere. But it is a problem to interpret them wrongly, as sometimes happens. Origenist speculation, as it has been called, can flee from history (the proper domain of orthodox typology) to allegorical generalizations about human existence. Edwards said the guardrails on orthodox typology are twofold. First, it must stay within the orthodox story of redemption, which is rooted in historical events. They compose the great antitype. The story is a huge story with a near-infinite number of types, but it is a different story from the myriads of heretical stories and the myriads of human speculations that are not heretical but merely imaginary.

Second, typological interpretation takes practice learning to read this story, just as it takes practice to learn any language. Here are Edwards’s words, which are worth quoting at length.

Types are a certain sort of language, as it were, in which God is wont to speak to us. And there is, as it were, a certain idiom in that language which is to be learnt the same that the idiom of any language is, viz. by good acquaintance with the language, either by being naturally trained up in it, learning it by education (but that is not the way in which corrupt mankind learned divine language), or by much use and acquaintance together with a good taste or judgment, by comparing one thing with another and having our senses as it were exercised to discern it (which is the way that adult persons must come to speak any language, and in its true idiom, that is not their native tongue).

Great care should be used, and we should endeavor to be well and thoroughly acquainted, or we shall never understand [or] have a right notion of the idiom of the language. If we go to interpret divine types without this, we shall be just like one that pretends to speak any language that han’t thoroughly learnt it. We shall use many barbarous expressions that fail entirely of the proper beauty of the language, that are very harsh in the ears of those that are well versed in the language. God han’t expressly explained all the types of Scriptures, but has done so much as is sufficient to teach us the language.[11]

John Henry Newman

Like Edwards, John Henry Newman (1801–90) believed the Old Testament is chock-full of types pointing to New Testament realities. Eve is a type of Mary, Rahab of Mary Magdalene, Moses of Christ, Pharaoh of the devil, just as Israel in the wilderness is a type of the church in the world. But for Newman, the Anglo-Catholic theologian who shocked all England by swimming the Tiber in 1845, the Old Testament’s types pointed especially to high church and sacramental realities. The tree of life in the creation story, Melchizedek’s bread and wine, and the milk and honey in the wilderness all were types of Christian Eucharist inaugurated by Jesus. As if to rebut what he thought to be evangelical antinomianism, Newman taught that Joshua’s work was a type of the works that faith must produce if it is saving faith: Joshua showed that once given an inheritance by God, we must seize it and fight the battles necessary to hold it. He said that the three Jewish orders of ministry—high priest, priest, and Levite—were types of the Christian orders of ministry—bishop, priest, and deacon.[12]

Similarly to Edwards, Newman saw a continuity of substance between type and antitype, but substance raised to a higher order. Church buildings continue to show that God maintains a special presence in a building consecrated to his worship, as in Jerusalem’s temple. The New Testament explains in Colossians 2 that baptism is the New Covenant antitype to the Old Testament type of circumcision; each sacrament brings the child into God’s covenant with Abraham’s family. The Jewish Passover is raised to its completion in Jesus’s passion as the sacrificial lamb, and then in the church in daily and weekly Eucharists. In each transition from type to antitype, there is a kind of correction but then restoration. For example, the Passover enabled a special annual communion with the God of Israel, but Eucharist enables it every day. Yet Passover’s essential elements—atonement and communion—are restored.[13]

Newman wrote less about the world of nature “out there” than Edwards did. For example, he said that the blessings of rain and fruitful seasons and regular food and ordinary gladness in life are all types that show every human being that God is good. But he did not write in profuse Edwardsean detail about the hundreds of other ways in the natural world that we learn about God. Yet Newman did surpass Edwards in his commentary on the types in human nature. In particular, Newman wrote often about conscience. He said that we humans hear God speak to us the most in our conscience. What we learn there, more than anything else, is that God is our Judge and that justice is an eternal principle. Sinners must be punished for their sins.[14]

There is another kind of type in the world “out there” that teaches Christians and non-Christians alike, according to Newman. He called it the “government of the world” by God. This is close to what Edwards called “moral government.” By this they both meant things that happen in the world that teach observers that there is genuine moral retribution in the cosmos. For Newman, among the things taught by “government of the world” is that evil is punished eventually, even if after a long time. Good is returned for good, not always but often, and sometimes after a long time. Newman saw this pattern happening through earthquakes and plagues, the rise and fall of states, the migrations of peoples, scientific and technological inventions and discoveries, and even the progress of philosophy and other realms of knowledge.[15]

Again like Edwards, Newman believed that the world religions contain types of truth, even though these religions are finally false. They teach lessons such as the following: “that punishment is sure, though slow, that murder will out, that treason never prospers, that pride will have a fall, that honesty is the best policy, and that curses fall on the heads of those who utter them.”[16] But it is not only moral truth they teach; there are also truthful religious lessons. The most important is the “vicarious principle,” which is the idea that “we appropriate to ourselves what others do for us.” For example, parents work and endure pain so that their children may prosper, and children in turn suffer because of the sins of their parents. The punishment earned by the husband often falls on the wife, and benefits come to all from the dangerous or unhealthy toil of the few. Soldiers endure wounds or death for the sake of those who sit at home.[17] This is a truth that other religions recognize in varying degrees but that Christian faith sees most clearly in Christ’s vicarious satisfaction for our sins.

Two corollaries are (1) that sacrifices for sin must offer something that is ours and unblemished, and (2) the doctrine of meritorious intercession, whereby it is of the greatest merit for saintly people to intercede for sinners. There are strains of these two themes in many world religions, said Newman, and both are types fulfilled perfectly in Christ’s unique mediation by the offering of his unblemished self for undeserving sinners.[18]

Newman paid more attention to the fine arts than did Edwards. When we hear sublime and beautiful sounds emanating from “so little”—a mere “seven notes in the scale”—we cannot but conclude that the mysterious stirrings of heart that we feel have actually “escaped from some higher sphere.” These earthly harmonies suggest to our inner religious ear that there must be an eternal harmony shared by saints and angels in another world. They even whisper to us that just as good music obeys mathematical and harmonic laws, so too there must be divine law for us to obey in the moral and religious realms. Music has a peculiar ability to pierce the veil that separates the visible from the invisible worlds.[19]

Newman talked about two levels or kinds of types. There are natural types for this world, visible in nature and history, that operate by what he called the “mystical principle.” They are principally for unbelievers and show to them that there is another world beyond their sight. Then there are types of grace that operate by the “sacramental principle.” These are for the church. They show not that there is a God who governs the world according to justice over the long haul (those lessons come through the mystical principle) but that God redeems the world through the meritorious and vicarious intercession of his Son (these lessons are shown through the sacramental principle). Both kinds of types operate by analogy, which in its fullness means that everything is connected to everything else. Even the two kinds of types—the mystical for the world of nature and the sacramental for the world of grace—are connected. Hence grace does not oppose nature but perfects it.[20]

Is It Legitimate?

For both Edwards and Newman, as for most of the Christian tradition until the twentieth century, this typological view of reality was a great blessing to believers and unbelievers alike. For believers it helps makes sense of all of reality, showing that nature and grace are not opposed but complementary, one pointing to the other. It is also enjoyable, providing satisfaction and fulfillment intellectually and aesthetically. Furthermore, it provides a kind of ethical enjoyment, adding conviction and strength to moral lessons that otherwise are harder to accept. For unbelievers, it offers an intellectual coherence to reality that reinforces Christian theological proposals that God is the author of not just redemption but also creation, and that the two are concordant not disjunctive. For many, this is helpful apologetically. This typological vision of reality served the church in these ways for more than nineteen hundred years.

But in the twentieth century, after the massive bloodletting of World War I and then the rise of Nazism that appealed to nature for its validation, Christian typology has seemed to many theologians to be a kind of natural theology that liberals used to reject orthodoxy and that Nazis used to give philosophical support for their horrors. Karl Barth was the most powerful voice making this argument against a Christian typological view of reality. He argued that Luther made a similar case against natural theology. Barth won over most mainline Protestant theologians and is winning over many evangelical theologians today. Therefore the next installment in this series looks at Luther and Barth and attempts to answer these questions. Why were they opposed to a typological view of reality? Were they right to be so opposed?

Notes

1. Hymn on Virginity 20.12; quoted in Seely Joseph Beggiani, “Typological Approach of Syriac Sacramental Theology,” Theological Studies 64 (2003): 544–45.
2. Jonathan Edwards, Typological Writings, vol. 11 in The Works of Jonathan Edwards [WJE], ed. Wallace E. Anderson, Mason I. Lowance, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 152. Future references to the Yale edition are designated by volume and page number as follows: WJE 11:152.
3. To those who would object that the Father cannot be self-denying and a servant, I, not Edwards, would reply that the Father in giving his Son over to a humiliating incarnation and horrible death was denying himself for the service of his sinful human creatures. And the Spirit denied his own glory by pointing to the Son.
4. WJE 9:289; WJE 13:435; see also WJE 13:325, 363–64, 431–33, 434–35; WJE 18:335; WJE 23:500–1.
5. WJE 11:153.
6. WJE 11:151.
7. WJE 11:62–63, 53.
8. WJE 11:191–324.
9. WJE 11:191, 82–84.
10. WJE 13:405–6.
11. WJE 11:150–51.
12. Jaak Seynaeve, Cardinal Newman’s Doctrine on Holy Scripture: According to His Published Works and Previously Unedited Manuscripts (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1953), 258–62; see also John Henry Newman, “Joshua a Type of Christ and His Followers,” in Sermons Bearing on the Subjects of the Day (London: Longmans, Green, 1918), 159, 161, 165, 209–10.
13. Newman, “Joshua a Type,” 204–5, 206, 207–11.
14. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Garden City, NY: Image, 1955), 304–5, 312.
15. Ibid., 313.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 315.
18. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 315–17.
19. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain (London: Nelson, 1969), 19:415; quoted in John Cornwell, Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (London: Continuum, 2010), 22–23.
20. John Henry Newman, “Milman’s View of Christianity,” in Essays Critical and Historical (London: Basil Montague Pickering, 1871), 2:190, 192, 229; see also Newman, Sermons 1824–1843, 382.