The Spiritual Sense of a Text
As interpreters in the Early Church read the Bible, they did so from a conviction that the Old Testament pointed to Christ. And they were confident about this conviction because the New Testament justified it.
The stories about Adam and Noah, Abraham and Joseph, the exodus and the conquest, the temple and the exile, were all historical stories. But the literal/historical nature of these texts was not all there was to see. These stories pointed beyond themselves. The language of spiritual exegesis, or “figural reading,” explains what the interpreters were trying to do as they read the Old Testament in light of Christ.
Henri de Lubac is helpful here: “The Christian tradition understands that Scripture has two meanings. The most general name for these two meanings is the literal meaning and the spiritual (‘pneumatic’) meaning.”
To speak of Isaac as a “type” of Christ would be teasing out the spiritual sense of Genesis 22. Early interpreters did not make hard and fast distinctions between terms like “typology” and “allegory.” Their christological readings could be called figural readings. I think terms like “typology” and “allegory” are helpful from our vantage point, but those early interpreters were not as concerned with the labels.
Interpreters like Origen taught that Scripture had three senses (body, soul, and spirit), and Ambrose also taught a threefold sense (literal-historical, moral, and mystical). John Cassian spoke of a fourfold sense—famously known as the Quadriga: the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical sense. If we grant De Lubac’s point about Christian tradition seeing Scripture as having two meanings (a literal and spiritual), then the Quadriga divides the spiritual sense into three. In other words, what was initially a text’s spiritual sense could be subdivided into an allegorical, tropological, or anagogical sense. In the Quadriga, these three come after the literal sense—forming the fourfold sense.
I’ll talk more about the Quadriga in a later post. Suffice it to say, the allegorical sense focused on how the literal sense prefigured something else. So, back to my earlier example, if an interpreter wrote that Isaac was a type of Christ, that interpreter would be engaging not just the spiritual sense of the text but, even more specifically, the allegorical sense of the text.
Let’s be crystal clear: a text’s spiritual significance must be grounded in its literal sense. For example, according to Jerome and Gregory the Great, the literal sense was the foundation for right interpretation.
A text doesn’t simply mean whatever you’d like it to mean. Throughout the Middle Ages, there was a noticeable neglect of the literal sense. Some wild allegorical readings are available for the public record, and I’d part ways with them. However, there were medieval theologians who challenged the abuses of the spiritual sense. Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra argued that any spiritual reading of a passage must be firmly rooted in the historical/literal sense of the text.
Aquinas was more comfortable conceiving of the literal sense as what enveloped the conclusions previously attributed to the spiritual sense. In other words, with Aquinas and Nicholas, we see the spiritual sense being drawn back into the literal sense—sometimes called the “double-literal sense” or “extended literal sense.”
At this stage in interpretive history, we see a renewed emphasis on the literal sense and what it might encompass.Timothy George wrote that during the Reformation years, “the literal sense became more prominent, even if more complex as it absorbed more and more of the content of the spiritual meanings.”
Do you see what was happening? There were interpreters still reading christological/spiritual truths from the Scripture. But they were framing these interpretations as extensions of the literal sense. Martin Luther was eager and willing to see Christ in the Old Testament. But his typological readings were rightly rooted in the historical meaning of Old Testament passages. John Calvin believed typology was key to opening up the Old Testament for readers. While previous interpreters would have thought of types as belonging to the spiritual sense of the text, Calvin located them in the literal sense itself.Sometimes contemporary interpreters talk past one another. If someone says to me, “The Old Testament doesn’t have a spiritual sense, only a literal one,” then I’d respond, “Do you think Isaac is a type of Christ?” And if the answer is yes, then I know they’re doing spiritual interpretation but are thinking of it in terms of the literal or historical sense of the Old Testament. If someone calls a “spiritual reading” what you’d simply call a “literal interpretation,” then we’re listening to two ways of talking about the same thing. One way of talking is just more ancient.
If someone asked you, “Do you mow your lawn?” and you replied, “No, but I do cut my grass,” then you can understand why the questioner might raise an eyebrow in confusion.
The “spiritual sense” or “spiritual reading” of a text is not the boogeyman. It’s an ancient way of talking about how God intends the Old Testament to prefigure what was to come. So if you prefer the language of “extended literal sense” instead of “spiritual interpretation,” I understand what you mean by it, and I’ll be thrilled if you reach christological conclusions that would have earlier been dubbed the spiritual sense of a text.
Preferred phrases don’t have to be clubs used against other interpreters. Can we retain the phrase “spiritual sense”? Well, sure, as long as you know what that means and can defend the conclusions you draw.
We’re not the first people to read or talk about Scripture. The cloud of interpretive witnesses who have gone before us have much to teach us. A pressing issue, in fact, would be whether we share their Christian assumptions about the Bible.
For more about biblical interpretation and how it was conducted throughout church history, as well as focusing on the subjects of typology and allegory, see my book from Kregel Academic called 40 Questions About Typology and Allegory.
Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 225.
The Letters of Gregory the Great 5.53a, trans. John R. C. Martyn, Medieval Sources in Translation 40 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2004), 382.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.1.10, trans. Blackfriars (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964-1981).
Craig Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 101.
Timothy George, Reading Scripture with the Reformers (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 27.
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