Biblical typology

These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

— Colossians 2:17 (ESV)

Typology is a method of biblical interpretation that reads certain persons, events, and institutions in the Old Testament, called types, as divinely patterned correspondences that anticipate and are fulfilled by later, greater realities in the New Testament, called antitypes, above all in Christ. A type is more than a resemblance noticed after the fact: the correspondence is prospective as well as retrospective, and the antitype characteristically escalates rather than merely repeats the pattern of the type. Manna, the Passover lamb, the Levitical priesthood, and Adam himself all function this way, each pointing forward to its fulfillment in Christ.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter of its own devoted to typology. Its nearest bearing principle is hermeneutical: “the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself,” so that the true sense of any text is settled by comparing it with other places of Scripture that speak more clearly.¹ That principle underwrites reading an earlier text in light of a later one without treating the connection as arbitrary.

The confession’s own chapter “Of God’s Covenant” is also markedly shorter than the Westminster Confession’s parallel chapter. Westminster states that the covenant of grace, under the law, “was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews, all foresignifying Christ to come.”² The 1689 LBCF’s own chapter 7 omits this clause entirely, stating only that the covenant of grace “is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament.”³ This reflects the Owen-Coxe covenant theology the Baptist framers held, on which the Mosaic economy typified the covenant of grace to come without itself being counted an administration of it.

Biblical Basis

Paul treats Israel’s wilderness history as pattern, not just backstory. Recounting the crossing of the sea, the manna, and the water from the rock, he writes that “these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:1-6, 11, ESV). Christ himself draws the same line to the manna specifically: “it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven” (John 6:32, ESV). Gill reads this as type language directly: “The manna was another type of Christ; that was typical bread, Christ is the true bread… the manna was only a shadow, Christ is the substance, the solid and substantial food, signified by it.”⁴

The Levitical priesthood and its sacrifices point to Christ’s own priestly work. Of the Day of Atonement ritual, Charles Hodge argues the ceremonial details “admit of no other explanation” than “the correspondence between the type and the antitype which the New Testament declares was intended.”⁵ Drawing on Fairbairn’s Typology of Scripture, A. A. Hodge catalogs how the requirements of a priest, being taken from among men, chosen by God, holy, and having the right to draw near and offer sacrifice, were “all typical of Christ and his work as priest,” a connection he says “Paul clearly proves in the Epistle to the Hebrews.”⁶

Paul names Adam himself a type of the one to come. “Death reigned from Adam to Moses… Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come” (Rom. 5:14, ESV). Bavinck reads the pattern as reaching back into creation itself: “creation itself must be conceived in infralapsarian fashion and Adam seen as a type of Christ.”⁷

Historical Development

Particular Baptist federal theology

Writing nearly a century after the confession, John Gill devoted several chapters of his Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769) to typology under the covenant of grace’s administration during the Mosaic dispensation. He reads the tabernacle’s sacrificial blood and the manna each as types abrogated once Christ, their antitype, had come.⁸

Nineteenth-century Reformed systematics

A. A. Hodge’s Outlines of Theology (1879) names Typology as one of four special departments of exegetical theology: “a scientific determination of the laws of Biblical symbols and types, and their interpretation, especially those of the Mosaic ritual as related to the person and work of Christ.”⁹ Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology (1872) applies the same category to the sin-offering ritual of the Day of Atonement, treating its ceremonial details as symbols whose meaning “the Scriptures themselves assign.”⁵

Opposing Views

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century evangelical scholarship has divided less over whether typology is a legitimate way of reading Scripture than over how it works. The retrospective view holds that a type is a pattern recognized only from the vantage point of its fulfillment, without requiring that God specifically designed the earlier person or event to predict the later one. David Baker argues in this vein that an antitype’s heightening of its type is not a necessary feature of typology but “simply an aspect of the progression from Old Testament to New Testament.”¹⁰ The prospective view holds instead that God intentionally built such patterns into redemptive history. Bruce Waltke writes: “The Bible’s unique [divine] Authorship and unity lays the basis for eschatological typology, that is to say, God intended earlier persons, acts, and institutions to present a type or shadow or pattern of future greater fulfillment.”¹¹ Leonard Goppelt ties the two views together around escalation as the defining test: “If the antitype does not represent a heightening of the type, if it is merely a repetition of the type, then it can be called typology only in certain instances and in a limited way.”¹² Darrell Bock likewise describes typology as expressing “a peculiar link of patterns with movement from the lesser OT person or event to the greater NT person or event.”¹³

Objections and Responses

Typology reads meaning into the Old Testament that was not really there, imposed after the fact rather than found in the text. Because a type can be identified only once its antitype has appeared, the method can look like retrofitting a connection onto material that never anticipated it. Martin answers that typology is not free association: the correspondences it traces are textual and historical, developed across the canon, and these “provide the hermeneutical controls for linking types with their anti-type(s).”¹⁴ Escalation functions as a further check, since a real type shows a heightening from shadow to substance rather than a mere echo; a resemblance that shows no such movement, on Goppelt’s own criterion, is not properly typology at all.¹²

Israel’s hope of a coming deliverer was borrowed from the surrounding ancient Near Eastern religions, not given by revelation. Bavinck grants that Israel’s temples, altars, priesthood, and sacrifices share forms with the peoples around it, and that “there is a ‘symbolism in creation,’ a typology in nature” evident even in Jesus’s own parables.⁷ But he argues the history-of- religions school “mistakes analogy for identity” and overlooks the real differences: Israel’s separation from the nations after Abraham’s election, a Savior who delivers from sin and death rather than merely grants political rescue, and a promise whose scope is universal from the start rather than confined to one people’s political fortunes.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 9. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 5. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant,” para. 3. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book IV, chap. 3. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter VII. Satisfaction of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 501-2. ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 396. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Gill, book IV, chap. 3; see also book IV, chap. 5, “Of the Abrogation of the Old Covenant.” ↩
Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 21-22. ↩
David L. Baker, Two Testaments, One Bible: A Study of the Theological Relationship Between the Old and New Testaments, 3rd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010), 183, quoted in Oren Rhea Martin, “Introduction,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 24. ↩
Bruce Waltke, An Old Testament Theology, 137, quoted in Martin, “Introduction,” 24. ↩
Leonard Goppelt, Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New, trans. Donald H. Madvig (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 18, quoted in Martin, “Introduction,” 24. ↩ ↩²
Darrell Bock, Proclamation from Prophecy and Pattern: Lucan Old Testament Christology (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1987), 49, quoted in Martin, “Introduction,” 23. ↩
Martin, “Introduction,” 23. ↩