Typology as Apologetics: A review of Darek Barefoot's "Gospel Mysteries"
Before the rise of historical criticism, one of the most widely used arguments in support of Christianity was fulfilled prophecy. In the apostolic and patristic period this was not limited to direct predictions from the Hebrew Bible of the Messiah's origin and activities, but included typological foreshadowing of the life of Jesus in biblical narratives: the story of Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrificial fire, for example, anticipated the time when another 'beloved son' would carry his wooden crossbeam to the place of sacrifice. Before the so-called 'grammatical' or 'plain' meaning of the biblical text came to be privileged as a result of the Reformation, readers of the Bible had no problem believing that the texts carried additional, divinely inspired meanings that could be uncovered through careful (we would say imaginative) investigation. As James Kugel elegantly shows (see How to Read the Bible , pp. 1-46), this approach to the interpretation o