Reformation allegory

Did the Reformers approve of allegory?  That depends on whether you look at their hermeneutical theory or their actual exegetical practice.  In the former, they insist on a single sense; in practice, they recognize types, which are distinguished from allegories but which are certainly a species of “second sense.”  When the actual practice is theorized, difficulties arise.  In a 1974 article, George Scheper writes:

“there is a certain discrepancy between the purity of these theoretical statements, polemical in context, and the actual exegetic practice of the Reformers. Moreover, the rejection of allegory and the insistence on one undivided sense hinged for the early Reformers on maintaining a radical distinction between typology and allegory. But the more systematic Protestant hermeneutic treatises reveal . . . that any essential distinction was impossible to maintain . . . .

“For instance, Flacius Illyricus at first tried to fix the difference by defining types as a comparison between historical deeds and allegory as a matter of words having a secondary meaning -but this was no different from the old Catholic discrimination between figures of speech (part of the literal sense) and the spiritual sense (arising out of the significance of things). So Flacius shifts to a second distinction: that types are restricted to Christ and the Church, while allegories are accommodations to ourselves-but that is hardly an essential difference (being no more than the distinction between allegory proper and tropology in the fourfold scheme) and breaks down his initial distinction between the significances that arise from words and deeds.”

He concludes, “types remain as a significant instance of what the Catholics called the spiritual sense but what the Reformers insisted on calling the full literal sense, a purely semantic distinction.”  Further, “it seems to us that the overwhelmingly central tradition of medieval exegesis is in accord with the Reformers on most basic points. There is no question in either tradition of the verbal inspiration of Scripture, the harmony and even uniformity of biblical theology, the universal Christology of both Testaments, the wholeness of the sense of Scripture and its foundation in the letter, nor even of the fact that much biblical language is figurative.”

Protestant interpretation of the Song of Songs illustrates how Protestants maintained their insistence on “single sense” while simultaneously finding allegories and types: They denied the existence of a literal sense; or, more accurately, the literal sense was spiritua

l or allegorical.  James Durham wrote, ”I grant it hath a literal meaning, but I say, that literal meaning is not immediate . . . but that which is spiritually and especially meant by these Allegorical and Figurative speeches, is the Literal meaning of the Song: So that its Literal sense is mediate, representing the meaning, not immediately from the Words, but mediately from the Scope, that is, the intention of the Spirit, which is couched under the Figures and Allegories here made use of.”

What the Reformers objected to was more the excessive allegorization of late medieval commentary, not the mainstream of patristic and medieval interpretation.  Scheper illustrates by summarizing the Song commentary of Denys the Carthusian: “Dionysius the Carthusian became the first to present, in his commentary on the Song, an unvaryingly systematic threefold allegorization for every verse on the following pattern: of Christ and the Sponsa Universali (the Church), of Christ and the Sponsa Particulari (the soul), and of Christ and the Sponsa Singulari (Mary)-a method that allows him to draw lengthy doctrinal essays and devotional exercises out of any verse whatsoever.”