Typology

A pattern of the One to come

The word comes from the Greek tupos (τύπος), the mark left by a blow or a seal, and so a pattern or model. Paul uses it of Adam.

He is a pattern of the One to come.

Romans 5:14

As death came to all through one man's sin, life comes through one man's obedience. Paul says the same of Israel's wilderness years: "these things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come" (1 Corinthians 10:11). Jesus read the Scriptures this way himself: "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up" (John 3:14), and as Jonah was three days in the great fish, so he would be three days in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40). Christ is "our Passover lamb" (1 Corinthians 5:7), and the feasts of the law "are a shadow of the things to come, but the body that casts it belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:17). The New Testament also uses the related word antitype for the reality a type points to, as when Peter says the water of the flood "symbolizes the baptism that now saves you" (1 Peter 3:21).

Two marks set typology apart. It is rooted in things that really happened, and the fulfilment is greater than the shadow. Chrysostom says Jesus used the bronze serpent "to show that the old dispensation is akin to the new" Chrysostom, and Augustine notes the difference: "the one recovered from temporal death, the other from eternal" Augustine.

The church's confession

The Fathers saw Christ throughout the Old Testament. Chrysostom, on the road to Emmaus, says that when Abraham released Isaac and offered the ram, he "prefigured Christ’s sacrifice" Chrysostom. The Reformers distrusted unchecked allegory but kept typology. The Westminster Confession (1646) describes how the covenant of grace was administered before Christ:

under the law it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews, all fore-signifying Christ to come

Westminster Confession 7.5

Hebrews works the principle out at length: the law "is only a shadow of the good things to come, not the realities themselves" (Hebrews 10:1), fulfilled in Christ's one sacrifice.

How far does typology reach?

Christians differ over how widely to read types. Some hold, cautiously, that we should treat as types only what the New Testament itself names; others hold that, following the New Testament's own method, we may find Christ more widely in the Old. The medieval church, and the Catholic Church today, treat typology as part of the spiritual sense of Scripture Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Orthodox worship and icons draw richly on Old Testament types. Among evangelicals, covenant theology tends to see promises such as the land and the temple fulfilled in Christ and his church, while dispensationalism expects them also to be fulfilled literally for the nation of Israel. See also the lesson How the Fathers read Scripture and Has biblical prophecy been fulfilled?