Exhibit A – Typology
or Submissible Evidence According to Paul
“…it is instructive that when the issue was so decisively drawn with his legalist opponents, Paul, at the climax of his argument, appealed to an allegory to refute the gainsayers of grace…”
Warren Gage writes:
“The greatest crisis in the early life of the apostolic church was clearly the challenge to the gospel of free grace represented by the Judaisers, the controversy which necessitated the first ecumenical council at Jerusalem (Acts 15:1-3). Paul’s epistle to the Galatians represents the most urgent and passionate defense of the gospel of grace in all the New Testament. Indeed, the stakes could not have been higher for the infant church in that controversy. Paul is so sobered by the threat of the Judaised gospel, which he calls no gospel (Galatians 1:7), that he pronounces a curse (Galatians 1:8) and an imprecation upon his opponents (Galatians 5:12).
Now it is instructive that when the issue was so decisively drawn with his legalist opponents, Paul, at the climax of his argument, appealed to an allegory to refute the gainsayers of grace (Galatians 4:24). It seems a fair question to ask our fellow Protestants whether, without the sanction of Holy Scripture, we would ever find the claim that Sarah and Hagar “are two covenants” persuasive. Would it be self-evident to us, as it apparently was to Paul and the Galatians, that these two women appearing in early Genesis dispositively anticipated the covenants of promise and works?”
“…Modern critics often forget that allegory in modernity is a fancy that is not based on historical reality. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is a case in point of a modern allegory. Paul’s use of the term is clearly not the same. His reasoning about the two covenants is founded upon the history of the patriarchal narratives, specifically, upon the histories of Sarah and Hagar. But Paul understands that there was a redemptive significance to these historical accounts. Once again, until it is evident that Sarah and Hagar represent the two covenants of grace and works, a point so obvious to Paul, our typology cannot claim to be commensurate to the apostolic hermeneutic.”
Typology and Reformed Exegesis, pp.3-4.
Warren Gage, www.luke2427.com
Pic by Jen Page.
