The Hebrew midwives trouble the moralist. Pharaoh commands them to kill every newborn son, but they refuse to comply. When called to account, they lie. And God blesses them by giving them families of their own (Ex 1:21). The conscientious reader fumbles for an explanation. Perhaps the lie was a necessary evil. Perhaps the outcome justified the means. Perhaps God was merely rewarding their underlying intention rather than the deception itself. Every explanation has the same structure: something has to be explained away. The text, as it stands, cannot be right.
But what if the problem is not with the text but with the question we bring to it? The midwives are not a problem requiring explanation but a lesson requiring formation. The formation begins with learning to ask a different question: not, “was the lie justified?” but, “what does faithful action look like for the seed of the woman when the serpent has commandeered the throne?”
That is the question of what I want to call “typological ethics.” My argument in this essay is that the Bible itself provides the most direct statement of it in an architectural command in Ezekiel 43.
The failure of three frameworks
The standard ethical frameworks each fail in a characteristic way to account for the biblical texts.
Consequentialism asks what produces the best outcomes. It has some validity because Scripture cares about consequences. But Abraham does not calculate outcomes when he rises early to saddle his donkey for Moriah. He acts in faith toward a God whose ways are not his ways. The consequentialist who stands at the base of the mountain and watches Abraham go up would call him insane. He cannot see the ram. He has no category for the man who acts on a promise that has not yet been fulfilled, trusting that the God of the promise will make good through means that are not yet visible.
Deontology, in its Kantian form, fares no better, although Kant is worth examining carefully because his error illuminates the problem. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant rightly insists that theoretical knowledge requires both poles: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”[1] The a priori and the a posteriori must cooperate to yield genuine knowledge. But in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant is explicit that moral philosophy must be “completely cleansed of everything that can only be empirical.”[2] The categorical imperative is derived from pure practical reason alone, with no admixture of historical content, particular narrative, or redemptive-historical location. In Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant goes further as he characterizes “priest-craft” as the “oldest of all fictions” and the source of “ecclesiastical faith” that corrupts pure religion with dogma and ritual—as Peter Leithart notes in The Priesthood of the Plebs.[3] This is not incidental. Kant’s rejection of the priesthood and sacrament is the practical consequence of his rejection of the typological-historical dimension of Christian life. For him, the moral agent is placeless in the theologically decisive sense: it has no capacity to ask where it stands in the history of God’s dwelling among his people. The a posteriori it admits is an empirical description. The a posteriori it excludes is the position in the story. And in The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant makes this explicit with reference to Abraham: he should have refused the divine command because moral certainty outweighs any claimed revelation.[4] Reason judges God. This is not merely a wrong conclusion. It is the inversion of what the Akedah, the offering of Isaac, teaches.
Virtue ethics, descending from Aristotle, is closer to the Bible. It attends to character, to formation, to the specificity of situations. But the phronimos—Aristotle’s person of practical wisdom—is calibrated to the stable structures of a well-ordered community. He has no category for the typological moment, the moment when the trajectory of redemptive history is at stake and a specific action is required. When Rebekah needs to decide how to handle the issue of Isaac’s blessing in Genesis 27, she needs, not more courage, but clearer sight. No account of general virtue can tell her what to do.
The common failure of all three ethical frameworks is the same. They abstract the moral agent from the story. But there is no ethics apart from the story. The right question is always, “What does faithful action look like for someone in my typological position at this moment in redemptive history?”
The temple as the ground of typological ethics
The clearest statement in Scripture that the ethical is rooted in the typological is not a hermeneutical principle or a general exhortation. It is an architectural command found in Ezekiel: “Son of man, describe the temple to the house of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities; and let them measure the pattern. And if they are ashamed of all that they have done, make known to them the design of the temple” (43:10–11 NKJV).
God does not say to the prophet, “Command Israel to repent, and then show them the Temple.” He says the reverse: “Show them the Temple so that shame follows.” The typological vision is the instrument of ethical transformation. The measuring produces the ethics. The community sees the pattern of what the dwelling of God among men should be, evaluates itself against the measurements of that pattern, and the disparity produces contrition. This is how typological ethics works, and the mechanism is imperative, as a divine command.
But to feel the full weight of this, we need to understand what the Temple is. James Jordan’s Through New Eyes provides the key: the Temple is simultaneously a symbol of the cosmos, of the community, and of the individual human person.[5] The Tabernacle is a microcosm of creation: the courtyard is earth and sea, the Holy Place is the firmament-heavens, the Holy of Holies is the heaven of heavens. G. K. Beale, in The Temple and the Church’s Mission, confirms and extends this reading: the outer court corresponds to the visible earth, the holy place to the visible sky (the seven lamps of the lampstand associated with the visible light-sources), and the holy of holies to the heaven of heavens where God is enthroned. Moreover, Beale demonstrates that the Garden of Eden was itself the first temple.[6] The two Hebrew verbs used to describe Adam’s task in Genesis 2:15—‘abad and samar, “to cultivate and to keep”—occur together elsewhere in the Old Testament exclusively in priestly contexts: Israelites “serving” God and “guarding” his Word, or priests who “keep the service of the tabernacle” (Num 3:7–8; 18:5–6). Adam was the archetypal priest who served in and guarded God’s first sanctuary. The Temple is not a later invention; it is the original form of the world, and Israel’s stone-and-cedar structures are scaled replications of the cosmic original.
But the Temple is not only a synchronic symbol. It is a typological sequence. Abraham builds altars in the promised land—Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, Moriah. These are proto-temples, places where heaven touches earth, where the covenant God marks his presence. The Tabernacle of Moses in the wilderness is the first formal dwelling. It is a mobile sanctuary with its proportions specified by God in exact detail. Solomon’s Temple is built on Moriah, the mountain of the binding of Isaac: what Abraham enacted in shadow, Solomon builds in stone. The glory fills the Temple at its dedication. But later, in Ezekiel’s devastating sequence, his glory departs—step by step, eastward through the gates (Ezek 10). Ezekiel’s visionary Temple is larger, and the river of life flows from its threshold (Ezek 47). The church is the next stage: Paul in Ephesians 2 says the church is being built into a holy temple in the Lord, a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. And the sequence reaches its resolution in the New Jerusalem where there is no temple because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple (Rev 21:22), and the heavenly original has at last descended to earth.
The stages in this sequence are not human architectural developments. The pattern for the Tabernacle was shown to Moses on the mountain (Ex 25:9, 40). The blueprint for the Temple was given to David by the hand of the Lord, by the Spirit (1 Chr 28:19). Hebrews 8:5, quoting Exodus 25:40, states the logic: the earthly priests “serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things.” Beale notes that “both the plan of the tabernacle and of the temple came from God,” pointing to the parallel between Exodus 25:9, 40, and 1 Chronicles 28:19 as evidence of a consistent divine authorship of the earthly design.[7]
The source of that heavenly original is identified by Meredith Kline in Images of the Spirit. The Glory-Spirit that hovered over the waters in Genesis 1:2 was not merely a creating power but, as Kline demonstrates, “a paradigm for creation.” The glory-cloud of God was the invisible realm of heaven brought into veiled visibility, the heavenly throne-environment itself appearing within the world. “At the top of Sinai,” Kline writes, this glory-cloud “hovers over the wilderness-tohu and reproduces its likeness in the world below. At the foot of Sinai the tabernacle appears, made according to the archetypal pattern seen on the mount, designed to be a replica of the Glory-Spirit-temple.”[8] The building of the Tabernacle in Exodus is structured, as Kline shows, as a deliberate recapitulation of Genesis 1: the divine fiat-commands of Exodus 25–31 parallel the creation fiats of Genesis 1; the Sabbath motif frames both accounts; the completion summaries echo each other. The earthly Temple corresponds to a heavenly original because it is a reproduction of the pattern that the Creator-Spirit brought with him when he hovered over the waters at the beginning.
Jordan adds the creation dimension beneath all three. In Through New Eyes, he argues that the seven days are the construction of the cosmic temple, culminating in God’s enthronement on the seventh day.[9] The Tabernacle and Temple are not inventions; they are recoveries of the original creation order, scaled-down visible revelations of what the entire cosmos is and is meant to become.
The Davidic covenant adds another layer. In Peter Leithart’s exposition of 2 Samuel 7 in A Son to Me, he observes, “Prior to David, adoption language was used primarily for Israel as a whole. With the Davidic covenant, however, the corporate identity of the ‘son’ of God was focused in the single person of the Davidic king.”[10] The son of David was a new Adam, a representative of the people, whose obedience or disobedience determined the fortunes of the whole nation. It was therefore fitting that the blueprint for the Temple—the dwelling of this son-of-God king—was given to David by the Spirit. The Temple, the Davidic covenant, and the son-of-God typology are three aspects of the same reality.
Three dimensions are therefore operating in Ezekiel 43. The synchronic dimension: the Temple is a microcosm of cosmos, community, and person—to measure it is to be confronted with what all three should be. The diachronic dimension: the Temple develops through a sequence, and the ethical demand is calibrated to an individual’s place in that sequence. The vertical dimension: each earthly stage answers to a heavenly original, and the shame of failing to conform is the shame of failing to conform to what God has already determined reality to be.
In 1 Corinthians 3 and Ephesians 2, Paul extends this to the Church, inserting it into all three dimensions simultaneously. To be the temple is to be answerable to the pattern shown to Moses, given to David, and shown to Ezekiel. Leithart’s argument in The Priesthood of the Plebs is important here: baptism is the church’s ordination. Drawing on Hebrews 10:19–22 and the priestly ordination rites of Exodus and Leviticus, Leithart demonstrates that “the Church baptizes into priesthood” —the baptized are washed and invested as priests in the new temple.[11] This means that every baptized person is inserted into the typological sequence of the Temple. The measuring of Ezekiel 43 applies to each of them: “You have been washed and invested; the pattern has been set before you; measure your life against it.”
Four positions and the case studies
If history is typological, ethics is too. The ethical question is not, “What rule applies?” or, “What produces the best outcome?” It is, “What does faithful action look like for someone in my typological position at this moment in redemptive history?
Four positions recur through Scripture, each with its own grammar of action. The seed of the woman (Gen 3:15) is called to patient endurance and wise evasion of the serpent’s attacks. Deceiving the serpent is within the grammar; violent seizure of power is not. The tyrant has seized power God did not give, and his end is always the same: his plan becomes the instrument of his own defeat. The faithful remnant maintains the covenant in a context of widespread apostasy: serving civil authorities in ordinary things, but refusing them in matters that conflict with obligations to the first table of the Law. The subordinate servant, in a position of weakness relative to surrounding powers, uses the wisdom of the serpent combined with the harmlessness of the dove (Matt 10:16).
Leithart’s reading of Samuel is instructive here. Even Paul, Leithart notes in A Son to Me, draws “not only theological but ethical conclusions from an avowedly ‘allegorical’ reading of the story of Ishmael and Isaac (Gal 4:21–31) and from a typological summary of Israel’s wilderness experience (1 Cor 10:1–10).” Typology is not merely a hermeneutical option; it is, as Leithart says, “the only ground for understanding the theological contribution of the Old Testament.”[12] Once you acknowledge that the whole Old Testament is the essential ethical textbook of the Church, the case studies of Torah become intelligible in a new way.
The Hebrew midwives are not facing an ethical dilemma. They are the seed of the woman using the serpent’s own weapon against him. Pharaoh is the dragon attacking the seed of the covenant people. Their lie is not a necessary evil; it is the first act in the grammar of the subordinate servant facing the serpent in power. God rewards them with families (seed) because their actions participate in the pattern of Genesis 3:15.
Rahab is the same. A Canaanite prostitute with every social marker against her hides the spies, lies to the king’s messengers, and ties a scarlet thread in her window. James 2:25 says she was justified by works when she sent the spies out by another way. The lie is the work that demonstrates the faith. And Matthew 1:5 places her in the genealogy of Jesus Christ.
Abraham on Moriah is not, contra Kierkegaard, suspending ethics by a leap of faith into the absurd. He is reasoning from a theological premise. Hebrews 11:17–19 makes this explicit: he “considered” —the Greek is logizomai, to calculate, to reason—that God was able to raise the dead. His action was not extra-ethical; it was ethics at the highest level of theological precision, the ethics of someone who knows where he stands in the story and acts accordingly.
Filial loyalty is the defining feature
Beneath all four typological positions, the deepest grammar is given by a law so neglected that it seems trivial: the slave who refuses freedom.
Exodus 21:5–6 deals with the case of the Hebrew slave who, at the end of his six years of service, declines to go out free. He is brought before the judges at the Tabernacle, which was a public legal act protecting him from coercion, and has his ear bored through with an awl at the master’s doorpost. He serves permanently. The text gives only one reason: “I love my master, my wife, and my children.”
Jordan’s reading in The Law of the Covenant opens the depth of this law.[13] In the Bible, it carries three meanings.
First, death and resurrection: it symbolically enacts castration and rebirth. The slave passes through death—he surrenders his freedom—and is reborn as a son of the household. The doorpost, the place of Passover blood (Ex 12:7), is the place of this rebirth: to be bored at the doorpost is to pass through the place of death into the household of the living.
Second, investiture: the circumcised one is clothed in a new identity and privilege. The homeborn slave is not born into bondage as an infant but reborn through the circumcision of the ear; if there are no physical sons, he can inherit the house (Gen 15:2–3). Jordan notes that John 15:14–15 indicates that the slave-sons of the Kingdom have a higher status than mere slaves; they can be called “the King’s friends” to whom the King confides everything.
Third, the removal of fleshly hindrance, so that the ear is opened to hear and obey the word of the master. Psalm 40:6 makes the Christological connection here: “My ears you have dug open.” The author of Hebrews, quoting the Septuagint’s rendering, cites this with reference to the Incarnation: “a body you have prepared for me” (Heb 10:5). Jordan notes that Hebrews thereby equates the opened ear with Christ’s taking on the form of a slave (Phil 2:7). Leithart’s argument in The Priesthood of the Plebs amplifies this: Christ was anointed as Davidic King and as Priest, and his anointing is shared with his people through baptism. The baptized person is inserted into the slave-son typology: washed, invested, and consecrated to serve in the house of the true Master. The Son comes into the world as the one whose ear is perfectly open to the Father, whose will is perfectly aligned with the Father’s will. “I have come to do your will, O God” (Heb 10:7). On the cross, the full circumcision is accomplished: his hands and feet are pierced (Ps 22:16), his ear is stopped up—he does not hear the comforting voice of the Father (Matt 27:46). He is cut off that we might be homeborn. He embraces servitude so that we might be adopted as sons. He does not come down from the cross. Not because he cannot, but because he will not. He loves his Father, his bride, and his children. He will not go out free.
This is the difference between the categorical imperative and typological ethics at the deepest level. For Kant, the moral agent submits to the law because it is rational, because universalizability is the structure of reason itself. The submission is to a form, not to a person. There is no love in it because love is always particular, always directed toward someone. The categorical imperative generates obligation without love.
Typological ethics generates love that produces its own obligation. Obedience flows from the relationship. The ear is the organ of that relationship—open, receptive, directed toward a person who speaks. Every case we have examined is animated by this logic. Abraham trusts the God who made the promise. The midwives fear the Lord, not a moral principle but the Maker of life itself. Rahab confesses that the Lord is God. The slave stays because he loves his master. The four typological positions are four modes of this filial obedience.
Conclusion
Let us return to Ezekiel 43. God shows Ezekiel a Temple larger than Solomon’s with the river of life flowing from its threshold. He says, “Describe this to Israel. Let them measure it. Let the measuring do its work.”
When Paul says the church is the Temple (1 Cor 3:16–17; Eph 2:21–22), he inserts the community into this logic. To be the Temple is to be answerable to the pattern shown to Moses on the mountain, given to David by the Spirit, and shown to Ezekiel in vision. The measuring confronts the church with what it is supposed to be—as the world made new, as the body of Christ, as the dwelling of the Spirit. And through baptism, as Leithart demonstrates, each member of that community is individually invested and consecrated: a priest in the new temple, answerable to the same pattern.
The goal of typological ethics is not a new theory. It is a new kind of person: one who knows where he is in the story, who has been formed by the whole biblical narrative and the Eucharistic communion of the saints, and whose obedience flows not from the universalizability of a maxim but from love directed toward the Father. The New Jerusalem is the resolution: the heavenly original descends, the measuring is complete, and there is no longer a temple because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple, and what Moses was shown on the mountain has at last arrived on earth in full.
Bogumil Jarmulak received his PhD from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.
[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Macmillan, 1929), A51/B75.
[2] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (Harper & Row, 1964), 57; 4:389.
[3] Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (Harper & Brothers, 1960), 15; 6:19.
[4] Immanuel Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 283; 7:63n.
[5] James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (Wipf & Stock, 1988), 144.
[6] G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, NSBT 17 (InterVarsity Press, 2004), 32–33, 66–80.
[7] Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission, 32.
[8] Meredith G. Kline, Images of the Spirit (Baker Book House, 1980), 37.
[9] Jordan, Through New Eyes, 143–148.
[10] Peter J. Leithart, A Son to Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel (Canon, 2003), 216–217.
[11] Peter J. Leithart, The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism (Wipf & Stock, 2003), 91–93.
[12] Leithart, A Son to Me, 16.
[13] James B. Jordan, The Law of the Covenant: An Exposition of Exodus 21–23 (Institute for Christian Economics, 1984).