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Greek philosophy. Philo did not regard the literal meaning of Scripture to be useless, but
rather an immature level of understanding. He likened the literal sense of Scripture to its
"body", and the allegorical to its "soul", the literal being for the immature and the
allegorical for the mature. He had around twenty rules which indicated that a passage of
Scripture was to be treated allegorically. A few of these were sound, but most of them
led to interpretation that was fantastic and erroneous. Philo's conceptions are a good
example of what happens when the grammatico-historical method of interpretation is
abandoned. Spiritualizing becomes a slippery slope down which it is well nigh
impossible to stop.
The Allegorism of the Fathers.
This system, which sprang from the pagan Greeks and was copied by the Alexandrian
Jews, was then adopted by the professing church and largely dominated the interpretation
of the Scriptures until the Reformation, with the exception of the school at Antioch and
the Victorines of the Middle Ages. The apostolic Fathers had as their Bible the
Septuagint, i.e. the Greek translation of the Old Testament. They saw that the Old
Testament prefigured Christ in type and symbol, and that the New Testament was full of
direct and indirect references to the Old Testament. In other words, they perceived that
the Old Testament could never be fully understood apart from the New Testament. This
they sought to emphasize by allegory and spiritualization. The motive was right, but the
method wrong. What they apparently did not realize was that the New Testament is the
commentary par excellence on the Old Testament and does not need any propping up by
such methods, which only throw the door wide open to personal fancies and excesses.
There was a lack of historical sense in their method of exposition; they usually
ignored the setting and background of a passage of Scripture. They considered the
Scriptures to be full of enigmas and riddles which could only be satisfactorily explained
by allegorisation. They confused the allegorical with the typical and thus blurred the
correct interpretation of the Old Testament. They professed to see Greek philosophy in
the Old Testament, and claimed that it was the allegorical method that discovered it. The
pity of all this was that it obscured the true meaning of the Word of God. K. Fullerton
writes:
"When the historical sense of a passage is once abandoned there is wanting any sound
regulative principle to govern exegesis . . . . . The mystical (allegorical) method of
exegesis is an unscientific and arbitrary method, reduces the Bible to obscure enigmas,
undermines the authority of all interpretation, and therefore, when taken by itself, fails to
meet the apologetic necessities of the time" (Prophecy and Authority).
No wonder the Gnostics of the second century found this method so handy to
propagate their false doctrine!
Roman Catholic Allegorism.
It is true to say that, for the most part, Scriptural interpretation of the Middle Ages was
allegorical. The Roman Catholic Church has maintained the validity of the allegorical
method, though there is evidence that later on, some of their scholars saw the excesses