For Part 1, click HERE.
Anyone who has read James B. Jordan’s Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World and appreciated it as a revelation of how God communicates in symbols and types—both in His Word and in the created order—understands what it is like to actually see through new eyes. Suddenly everything in the Bible and in the world is packed with meaning, and those locked down in the cautious modernist mindset of the historical-grammatical method now seem almost biblically illiterate. And they are. Expertise in the original languages is a necessary foundation, but without a fluency in the Bible’s “cinematic” language, the modern interpreter is little more than a cipher for the transmission of the raw data.
That said, while we now see everything in this wonderful new way, we are “reading” this visual communication with the comprehension level of children who are speaking their first words. Our renewed enthusiasm for the Word is a gift from God, but our scattershot practice is disturbingly hit-and-miss. It remains amateurish and undisciplined.
To rub salt into the wound, our naïve approach treats typology like a game of “Snap”—any two things that share a descriptor or bear even a passing similarity are hastily tagged and tacked together as type and antitype. Sometimes it is a successful match, but sometimes it is not, and even when it is correct, our keyhole methodology prevents us from making wider connections.
Our practice is more like clumsy transliteration than a translation that discerns and faithfully expresses the author’s intended meaning. The message is so often not only lost in translation but entirely replaced with bungling speculation. Such speculation might still illustrate a biblical principle, but it is not what the text was saying. It is, rather, being used as a springboard for the exegete’s own assumptions.1
This leaves biblical typology wide open to the attacks of the woodenheads who claim that all such drawing out of implicit meaning is mere eisegesis. Just because our French is bad does not mean that French is bad, but we really must do better.
If greater credibility for typological exegesis is to be gained, then superior, empirical, and repeatable results need to be demonstrated. We must maintain some of the caution of the historical-grammatical method if we are to avoid the whimsical free-for-all that characterized the interpretation of types in premodern times.
So it is not as though we have learned nothing from the desire for a standard of verification. The only way to achieve such a standard is to establish a better methodology. But since the biblical authors repeatedly confound all of our man-made rules, it must be one based instead upon the way in which they themselves used, interpreted, and reused biblical imagery. Like mastering a language, mastering biblical typology is more complex than we might like. Identifying references to earlier Scriptures is only the first step in transforming our experience of Isaiah from enduring to enjoying.
God does not speak in isolated words and neither does He use isolated symbols. Biblical symbols never travel without companions, so the entire entourage has to be entertained by the interpreter. We must not only discern the meaning of each “word” but also take into account the symbolic “grammar” that is employed by all of the biblical writers.
Grammar, when used properly, eliminates ambiguities and prevents misinterpretations. The Bible has an equivalent system that governs its use of symbols which are given to us in typological “sentences.” This symbolic “syntax” is good news for both camps because it means that we are freed from the constraints of a crude human system but constrained by the expert divine guidelines that are built into the text itself.
Arranged in literary chains and spatial networks, biblical symbols communicate much more than mere relationships between things in a “this-is-that” fashion. Like good jokes and the best literary references, they recapitulate a familiar progression that takes place within a previously-established and thus recognizable scenario or tableau.
This hybrid “liturgy-literature” technique is what makes the references so powerful and the jokes so amusing, especially when our expectations—based on the source material—are defied in some way. Jesus did this all the time. But we, in our ignorance, have few expectations to defy.
The renewed awareness of the importance of typology is an advance on the blinkered academics squabbling and tripping over each other on the lower slopes of the mountain of God, but our ignorance of the grammatical rules of biblical typology only makes us “illiterate” in a fresh way. If we are to be completely free of the two-dimensional minimalism that infected hermeneutics with an undiagnosed myopia we must use both of our “new eyes.”
Systematic theology helpfully recognizes, classifies, and gathers related items, but only a systematic typology explains where they came from. Structure is the track that guides the train of thought and guards us from fancy and false doctrine.
Structure
The Word of God, like the creation, is alive. It is not static but dynamic. We cannot understand a biblical symbol if it is isolated and inanimate, observed like a specimen preserved in a lab or a museum. This means that a “dictionary” of Bible symbols will only be of limited help. The only way to truly interpret a symbol is to observe its behavior over time in the wild. How does it relate to its environment? How does it relate to other symbols within that environment?
These are principles that biblical theologians agree upon, but like playing the violin, the gap between doing it and doing it well can be worlds apart. When it comes to our practice, instead of wooing hearers with “The Lark Ascending,” our playing too often sounds like a midnight catfight.
As mentioned, Bible symbolism is not a game of Snap. It is a safari, so the “game” is alive and kicking. Like the animals on Noah’s ark, even the type-and-antitype “pairs” that we successfully recognize do not exist in isolation but among other “pairs.” These symbols live, grow, and coexist within environments that function as literary ecosystems.
For example, not only must we identify what each item of furniture in the Tabernacle meant, we must also identify how they all relate to each other, both as one-to-one items and also as a complete architectural “sequence.”
In this way, the symbols appear and travel in “family groups.” These groups even have “dwellings,” whether wild (as Creation) or domesticated (as Temple). Again, like the animals on Noah’s ark, they are “housed” and arranged within suitable literary structures. These structures are given to us as sequences in the text, either in symmetrical chevrons like the overall structure of the book of Isaiah or in living temple pillars as sacred literary “trees.”
The Pentateuch is full of architecture, and while the long and tedious instructions for the Tabernacle come to mind, the original blueprint for all of the sacred houses in the Bible is the pattern of construction in Genesis 1. Indeed, the Creation Week is the heptamerous sequence that undergirds the sevenfold pattern of the Book of Isaiah. The prophecy spends its first three sections cutting up the old world, after which is given the microcosmic conflict between the era’s “ruling lights,” Sennacherib and Hezekiah. The remainder of the book takes a more positive note, filling the post-exilic world with “Edenic” promises. The most important of these is, of course, the Suffering Servant, our “new Adam,” in the Day 6 portion of the prophecy.
There are many smaller sevenfold sequences within the prophecy, but there are also many tenfold sequences, and these all allude to the Ten Commandments in some way. These structures are all populated with symbols whose locations, as much as their characters as individuals, are the key to interpreting them as a group.
Once we have a handle on the structural rubric that governs the prophecy, we will understand why Isaiah uses the images that he does and why he puts them where he does.
In most cases, the “placement” of an item within a particular literary architecture is what reveals its full meaning. But occasionally, the image that is placed is the total opposite of what we should expect, and this sort of ironic inversion is another device that the prophets used to make their point. But if we do not know what to expect, we do not “get the joke.”
Polemic
Symbols are objects that exist in places, but they also exist in time. So we must observe how the symbols and their environments change, develop, and mature. This means we must read cumulatively, keeping in mind what we have read as we continue to read. This is how we read any book of the Bible and indeed any book. But we must treat the Bible as a single work if we are to better understand it.
An obvious symbolic environment to “track” through the Bible is the Sanctuary of God. The fundamental blueprint of the Garden of Eden (as nature) became a man-made Tabernacle (as culture) which was then itself enlarged and augmented over time, from glory to glory, until the spiritual Jerusalem—a temple-city—was revealed at the Bible’s end.
But when we are reading the prophets, we are also dealing with polemic, a word derived from the Greek word for war. As the Bible continues, the symbols are modified, rearranged, and repurposed for new situations, including literary herem, that is, as rhetoric designed for spiritual war—not the circumcision of walled cities like Jericho but the hearts of rebellious men and women. The prophetic books were verbal “attacks” upon the status quo, and the prophet’s tongue was a two-edged sword, reminding the hearers of both the curses and the blessings of the covenant. This is why Isaiah bore both condemnation to the oppressor and comfort to the oppressed. It is also why Jesus proclaimed blessings upon those whose hearts were humbled by the Law of Moses (Matthew 5:2–12) and curses upon the religious hypocrites whose circumcision was only outward (Matthew 23). As legal “avengers,” the prophets weaponized images from the Torah to shoot as flaming arrows at those who had exalted themselves against God and misled and oppressed His people.
Such totalitarians are fragile because their stolen power is never grounded in reality. Like The Emperor’s New Clothes, the official narrative is as vulnerable to a single dissenting voice as a balloon is to a tiny pin. In this way, the words of the prophets were the political cartoons or “internet memes” of the ancient world, serving as an effective means of using pointed jester-jokes to bypass the gatekeepers of those in power.
The word “meme” derives from “mimetic” which means to copy or imitate. In a biological context, it refers to the copying of genes, so in some sense prophetic literature, like modern memes, was also intended to “go viral.”
The most concentrated example of prophetic “meme warfare” is the book of Revelation. All of the images have a long history. Every single detail is a hyperlink to previous Scriptures and thus is, in some sense, a joke.
The jibes from the prophets were not effective because they were straightforward pronouncements of judgment but because they were ridicule rooted in Israel’s history. By employing Scriptural allusions as Bible memes, the prophet’s barbs not only stuck in people’s minds, they also brought previous events to bear upon the crimes of the day.
A Bible history meme says, “And look how that turned out!” The weight of this history could be compressed into a typologically loaded shorthand and delivered with a few strokes of a pen. The allusions drew upon the collective cultural subconscious and thus, easily captured the imaginations of the people—especially their targets, whose minds would have been haunted by the application of famous conquests and catastrophes as threats to their own kingdoms.
Structured in the same way as jokes, these weaponized symbols are complex because one must be familiar with the entire canonical repertoire up to that point to understand each reprise. But for those who were “in the know,” this complexity did not dull their impact in any way. In fact, it magnified the collateral damage because it worked like a cluster bomb, hitting many related points at once, every location within whatever networked symbolic environment the prophet had chosen to employ.
Memes today work with the same nebulous precision, making a direct retort from the target impossible. Since the length of Isaiah’s prophecy was an extended act of meme warfare—a deliberate, relentless campaign of “truth bomblets” in a strategy of symbolic saturation—by the end of the lesson every mouth would be stopped. By this legal notice, soft hearts would be softened, and hard hearts hardened, so God could be fully and more obviously justified in both His goodness and His severity (Revelation 22:11–12).
This is the purpose of God speaking through any prophet and Isaiah is no exception. If we wish to make sense of the puzzling arrangement of the book, let alone its often baffling contents, we must take into account not only its legal purpose within the generation for whom it was written, but also their explicit and implicit uses of the structures and symbols of their source material. The works of the Prophets sit squarely upon the Law of Moses, drawing upon them with a divine authority, a profound artistry, and a biting irony that are unparalleled anywhere in uninspired literature.
Michael Bull is a graphic designer in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney in Australia, and author, most recently, of A Lodge for Owls: Raw Theological Twitter. He blogs at Bible Matrix. This piece is adapted from The Shape of Isaiah: A Covenant-Literary Analysis
NOTES
- For more discussion, see T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2009), 47–50. ↩︎