When we talk about hermeneutics, we’re just talking about the right interpretation of scripture. We can use the word to talk about the interpretation of anything, but in biblical studies, we use it to talk about obviously the interpretation of the Bible.
The debate lies — and has always been this way since the early church — with the question of authorial intent and meaning. So obviously a huge question in hermeneutics is what are we after? What is the goal? What are we trying to attain as we read the Bible?
Right now there’s sort of an influx, a return to what we might call a quadriga. There are really three big opinions when it comes to something like authorial intent, or again, what we’re after — the meaning of the text.
Those who hold to the quadriga — and there’s a big return to this in the retrieval movements — the quadriga is just a fancy Latin word that means the fourfold sense. This got really popular in the Middle Ages and really began with Origen, at least with its application to the Bible, even before him. The fourfold sense is really codified in the Middle Ages, and the four senses are: the literal sense, which is the historical — what it meant to the original audience and the original author; the allegorical sense, which is also the spiritual sense, and typology would fall under this sense in the Middle Ages; the tropological sense — I didn’t pick these titles, I’m just giving them to you as they are — which is the moral sense of the text, what it should do to you; and then the anagogical, which is like the eschatological, the where it’s all going. Maybe our Puritan forefathers would have called it the scope of scripture — where it’s all going, where it’s all leading to.
There’s been a big return to this. Patrick Shriner is about to publish a book on the fourfold sense. He’s not the first one to kind of go back that direction. You might hear other authors who don’t call it the fourfold sense but are just advocating for allegory. One author I’m thinking of is Hans Boersma, who I think is Roman Catholic, but he’s published a book with Baker called Scripture as Real Presence. He’s a Christian Platonist, as he calls himself, and he’s arguing from the nature of God and scripture that we ought to pursue allegory in our interpretation — by which we mean the spiritual sense.
It’s also important to recognize that there are different opinions about the quadriga even in the Middle Ages. There are some who said the literal sense is really worth nothing and we need to progress past it into the spiritual, which are really what’s worth something. And then there are others like Thomas Aquinas who said the literal sense is the foundation of all things and we can build nothing except with the literal sense. This is what Patrick Shriner is going to argue for, I think, if I understand him rightly.
So that’s the quadriga that’s kind of coming back into vogue now. The Reformers and the Puritans — and it’s in our confession — do not have the fourfold sense in it. In fact, our confession, 1.6.9, says that the true and full sense of scripture is not manifold but one. That’s chapter one, paragraph nine.
That statement reflects this move in the Reformation towards the literal sense only. By literal sense we mean the meaning which the author himself put into the text. Now, of course, Reformed writers have always meant both divine and human together, so we are not going all the way to historical-critical studies. The Reformation said it’s a divine book — of course it’s God’s word — but the way that God revealed himself is through the words. And so we pursue the meaning which we can find given to us, written down on the page by the human author.
The third option is really an in-between, and we might call it sensus plenior, which means the fuller sense. I’m not sure if we should actually call sensus plenior a full hermeneutic. It really, at least in the discussions I’ve read, has more to do with how to read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament and the fulfillment of certain things — the divine author knows more than the human author does. Therefore, the human author, especially in the Old Testament, might not know the full meaning of what he’s writing, but the divine author does and ensures its fulfillment in the New. So there’s this fuller sense, unknown to the human author, that is sort of found out later through the divine author.
If we want to talk about that as its own hermeneutic we can, but I think it has more to do with the Old and the New and fulfillment and those types of things.
There are always more options out there. There are historical-critical German scholars who are essentially performing like atheists on the Bible, I think. There’s the dispensational crowd who is especially literal. But just in the Reformed world, there really are those three options: the fourfold sense, sensus plenior, and authorial intention.
On Allegory and Typology
We should start with definitions of what we mean by allegory, because I think we can use that same term and mean totally different things. Tolkien — you have Lord of the Rings sitting right next to you, Austin — in the preface, Tolkien says allegory is something like the overreach of the human author. In his mind, he has something like The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is an allegory as intended by the author. That’s not what we mean when we use this word in the realm of hermeneutics. An allegory intended by the author in the Bible is fine — we all agree that’s an allegory, like a parable. That’s an allegory intended by the human author.
What we mean by allegory is something like what Hans Frei said in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. He defined allegory as the attachment of a temporally free-floating meaning to any temporal occasion whatever, without any intrinsic connection between the sensuous, timebound picture and the meaning represented by it. So allegory, as we mean it, is just detached meaning from the actual text written by the human author.
One way to do allegory sometimes is a sort of “this is that” kind of thing. So in Matthew 20 — this is in the article Dewey mentioned — there are two blind men sitting along the road in Jericho. Jesus passes by them and they cry out, “Son of David, have mercy on us.” Augustine takes those two blind men and says those two blind men are actually the old and new covenants. The road they’re sitting alongside is the road of righteousness. Individuals in either of those covenants have their own ways of coming off the road of righteousness — whether through Pharisaical obedience in the Old Testament or presumptive justification in the New. So they sort of make this story not about historic blind men who really were healed, but a way of talking about the covenants now and our relationships in those ways. The hand Jesus reaches out is not his actual hand but the gospel being preached to sinners. Their eyes being opened is actually a representative of what happens to us in regeneration.
The allegory at this point becomes a sort of replacement of the historical picture with a new meaning. It’s a “this for that” idea.
That kind of allegory I think is really dangerous for a lot of reasons. For one thing, advocates of that view say there are infinite meanings. To summarize and change a line from The Incredibles a little bit — if all meaning is valid, then no meaning is valid. And if meaning is infinite, I don’t know how we do any sort of confident preaching, how we get up in a pulpit and say “this is what it means, thus says the Lord,” because we never can really know what it means. In the article Dewey mentioned, Jerome just says it might be this, it might be a representative of this, it might be a representative of that — we don’t really know — and he kind of just moves on. That has incredible implications for the pulpit.
On the flip side, something like typology — in the Middle Ages, typology would have been considered an allegorical sense, so I’ll just acknowledge that. But in the Reformation, they are still doing typology but putting it in the literal sense. They’re saying this is something that was intended by the human authors to connect, and the human authors and the divine bring these texts together.
I think typology fits in the literal sense. I don’t think we should just go around connecting every text willy-nilly. I think we should look for repetition of events, key terms and phrases that are repeated between narratives or texts, and escalations in significance at each point. In this way, I think we can find throughout the biblical text typological patterns that are impressed on the whole narrative of scripture.
There’s debate here in the Reformation, because some people also say we can’t do any typology that’s not explicitly stated by the New Testament authors. I don’t agree with that. I think so long as we do it like they did it, we’re free — as long as we can put ourselves in the worldview, show it from the text itself, not make it up. We can notice these patterns even if they don’t call it a type, which they rarely do. They actually rarely use the word typos and antitypos in the Greek New Testament.
Those are key differences between allegory and typology — whether we’re talking about free-floating meaning, a “this for that,” or a typology as intended by the human author. Very different. I don’t think we should do allegory.
Now if I was listening to this, someone might say: what about Galatians 4:24, where Paul says “these things are allegorical”? Valid question. I think Jared Ford, who did his dissertation at Southern — published in 2022, and he recently published a summarized version of this in a journal article in New Testament Studies in 2024 — I think he has shut the case. This word allegoreo, which is only used one time in the New Testament, right there — allegoro in Galatians 4:24 — in the first century did not mean what we mean by allegory. He surveys all the literature within 200 years before and after Paul, and the way Paul uses it matches the way other authors use it when they’re speaking metaphorically or in an illustration for a sermon — that kind of idea. They’re not advocating in the use of this word a reading strategy. So he’s not saying “this is how I’m reading the book of Genesis.” He’s saying “take this as an illustration.”
Ishmael and Isaac were both circumcised in the family of Abraham, and yet one was like the seed of the serpent, one was like Mount Sinai who put you into bondage, and one was from the free woman. So he’s making his point, not saying “I’m reading Genesis allegorically.” As we read through the text, he clearly believes Isaac is a real person, Abraham is a real person. He’s treating the text historically and then drawing out this sort of extended illustration. Jared Ford has done all the work to demonstrate that this is what Paul is doing with that word — he does not mean “I’m reading this allegorically,” but rather “we can take this metaphorically as a sort of illustration for us.” He says it’s like the law is speaking to you. That’s what he says in the text: “Do you not want to hear the law speak?” And it’s like the law steps out and starts to preach to these troublemakers in Galatia about Ishmael and Isaac.
On Sensus Plenior and the Confession
One of the views expressed at the beginning was the sensus plenior view — the fuller sense view. Our confession, whenever it speaks about the true and full sense of any scripture being not manifold but one — my question is whether it’s accurate to characterize the sensus plenior view as a twofold literal sense, where the spiritual meaning or the more fully developed meaning is being further informed by the rest of scripture, but that is still the literal sense, the one sense of scripture, using scripture to interpret scripture.
A few concerns I still have about talking that way. One is: how do I know when the human author stops speaking and the divine does? How do I validate that kind of meaning? Rome’s way of validating that kind of meaning was to say you need the church, you need the magisterium over you to tell you what it means. And advocates of sensus plenior, like Vern Poythress and Matthew Barrett, are still advocating for infinite meanings in the divine author, which I really want to stay away from altogether.
So how do we validate meaning still? If I just jump to the divine author, that’s fine so long as you and I share theological presuppositions. But the minute we disagree and I just say, “Well, the divine author meant it, even though the human author didn’t say it,” we get into some hairy waters.
I think there’s a way to think about the Song of Solomon with the intention of the human author. Clearly God wants us to think about marriage as his covenant between himself and his people. When Paul pulls this out in Ephesians, he doesn’t point to the Song of Solomon — interestingly, he points to Genesis. And I think this was the intention the whole time. This is Paul’s point: this is about Christ and his church. Marriage was meant for you to think about God and his people. So in that sense, I think we can almost just think typologically. We don’t have to really make that separation between divine and human.
I think Solomon, if he’s steeped in the Bible — and I’m preaching Ecclesiastes right now, and there’s no doubt he’s read Genesis over and over again — if he’s read previous scripture and understood it well, he most likely understands that God is our husband and we are his wife, and the ideal marriage would reflect that relationship between him and his bride. So in this sense it is really more typological than it would be allegorical.
You can see some of the concerns with immediately detaching the human author and just trying to interpret the passage however you want and saying, “Well, this is really how the divine author would have understood it.” That becomes dangerous because then it’s a slippery slope into bending the text to mean whatever you want it to mean.
The difficulty would be places in the Old Testament that aren’t later interpreted for us — like the Song of Solomon, or Ecclesiastes. How do we interpret those with the New Testament when the New Testament never quotes them? That would be the place where I’d probably get nervous appealing to the divine author.
