Lux Lucet

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men.     – Westminster Confession of Faith I.6    

After a recent talk on the subject of the interpretation of Scripture, some one asked me a question about typology.  In essence her question was this:  how do we know a type is a type?  It was a good question.  For if I learned anything during my short stay at Knox Seminary it was that the study of typology can, when undertaken by unlearned and unstable hands, serve as a launching pad for the worst sort of theological nonsense.  Dr. Warren Gage, the current Dean of Faculty at the school, discerned types and antitypes by using what he called “poetic imagination” and “intuition.”  This was his academically respectable way of saying, “I’m making this stuff up as I go along.” “Logic,” he advised us in class one day, “is necessary, but we also need imagination.” This approach to Scripture is not the Biblical, neither is it confessional.  The Biblical and confessional method for determining types is the same method we use to settle all other questions of Christian doctrine:  the application of the laws of logic to Scripture.   

The laws of logic – contradiction, identity, excluded middle – are the principal tools for the interpretation of Scripture.  This was understood by the men who framed the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) and is the thought behind the famous quote at the top of this post.  Contrary to the opinion of many contemporary theologians, the laws logic are not something external to Scripture, not something to be curbed, but simply the description of how God thinks.  And man, because he is the image of God, thinks the same way.  The Gospel of John expresses this idea when it notes that Christ, “was the true light which gives light to every man coming into the world.” We think two plus two equals four because God thinks two plus two equals four and he has constructed our minds to be the image of his.          

The WCF recognizes two ways in which the whole counsel of God – and the whole counsel of God includes typology – is communicated in Scripture: 1) express statement, and 2) good and necessary consequence.  An example of an express statement in Scripture can be found in the first verse of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  This statement tells us several things explicitly.  Creation took place in the beginning, it was an act of God, and it included all things.  But there’s more to this verse that what is stated in explicit terms, there are several necessary consequences or implications in this statement as well.  For instance if creation took place in the beginning, it did not occur at some earlier or later point.  Furthermore this verse implies that the devil or the Big Bang did not perform the work of creation.  Also we can validly conclude that nothing was made that was not made by God. 

If the whole counsel of God is either expressly set down in or necessarily deduced from Scripture, and if typology is part of the whole counsel of God, by good and necessary consequence it follows that any claim that some one or something in the Old Testament is typical of some one or something in the New Testament must be proven by either an express statement or necessary inference from Scripture.  Herbert Marsh expressed this logical, confessional and Biblical approach to typology when he wrote,

Whatever persons or things, therefore, recorded in the Old Testament, were expressly declared by Christ, or by his Apostles, to have been designed as pre-figurations of persons or things relating to the New Testament, such persons or things, so recorded in the former, are types of the persons or things, with which they are compared in the latter.    

This principle, known as Marsh’s dictum, has been the bane of imaginative typologists for nearly 200 years, for it applies directly to typology the same laws of logic that govern all other areas of theology.  Now it’s true that Marsh states that types must be expressly declared, and some might argue that in doing so he has erred by excluding the possibility that types may be implied in Scripture as well as expressly stated.  Very well, I’m open to the argument that there’s such a thing as an implied type, but those who claim this must produce an example.  So far, I’ve yet to see one.  But even if they succeed in doing this, pace Warren Gage and the other addled folks at Knox Seminary, the confessional principle of Biblical interpretation still stands.