The Biblical Text: What It Meant, and What It Means

I just read a very interesting article called “Allegory and the Interpretation of the Old Testament in the 21st Century” by Robert Louis Wilken. In it the author argues that an allegorical approach to the OT is necessary in order to free the text from the barren and clinical hermeneutic that cares only what the passage meant, and not what it means (the three examples he adduces of the NT interpreting the OT allegorically are found in I Cor. 10, Gal. 4, and Eph. 5).

Allegory resists the tyranny of historicism and invites us to see things as they are, not as we imagine them to have been centuries ago…. Allegory is about what has come to be, the accommodation that is inevitable because of what happened in Christ, in the Church, and what continues to unfold.

Christian interpreters [of the OT] did not impose an evanescent superstructure on the text without root in history or experience. They shunned a strictly literal or historical reading of the law and the prophets, not because they preferred spirit to history, but because they were themselves members of a community that had been transformed by a new series of events. Paradoxically, the spiritual sense was the historical sense.

On point that Wilken makes that is especially provocative is his insistence that the interpreter of Scripture must always read the text forward rather than backward. If the Bible is a canon and not merely a collection of books, then the context of a given OT passage is not just what appears in the other verses immediately surrounding it, but it also includes things that, from the standpoint of the OT writer, haven’t even happened yet.

There remains the book written in Hebrew and Aramaic, but the earliest Christians read it in Greek and in translations from the Greek. When read in conjunction with the apostolic writings, its words resounded with meanings they did not have before Christ. Words were singled out that had seemed commonplace, images that had lain dormant sprouted anew, persons and events once thought secondary became paradigmatic. It was this book that formed the Christian imagination. To understand the Christian Old Testament, the ancient Near East is the place to begin but hardly the goal toward which interpretation moves.

Some possible questions for discussion: (1) Is there a subtle defense of anachronism here? In other words, is Wilken’s method the hermeneutical equivalent of Newman’s development thesis, according to which we ought to read the early fathers through the lens of later ones, importing later dogmas back into earlier formulations? (2) Is there a similarity here between Wilken’s thesis and Fr. Kimel’s insistence that the Bible’s canonical nature (as one book with 73 chapters) leads to the conclusion that an inspired author like Paul is actually less equipped to tell us what Romans is about than the Church is after the canon is formed? (3) How much leeway does an apostle’s allegorical hermeneutic provide for a non-inspired apostle today?