Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

APPENDIX. 607
baskets full of the remaining fragments are explained of the twelve
apostles whom Christ left over, or left behind to the world, as
twelve bearers of that bread of life which he himself had not yet
distnbuted—this is an allegorical interpretation. Such interpretations
are certainly not found in the Pauline epistles, but as little are
they to be found in the Epistle to the Hebrews. We must distinguish
the objective type from the subjective arbitrary allegorical interpretation.
Types must arise from this, that preliminary and imperfect
fulfilments precede the final perfect fulfilment of the promises of
salvation . The deliverance from Egypt was really a fulfilment of
the promise given in Gen. xv., but it was not yet the true fulfilment
; the promise that all nations should be blessed in the seed
of Abraham was not yet fulfilled. The kingdom of David was
really a higher and more perfect step in the possession of Canaan
than the conquests of Joshua, but still not yet the last. Here,
then, the preliminary fulfilment is really in itself, and objectively,
a type of the perfect, just because both refer to one promise, and
correspond to one promise. Thus, the intercourse between God
revealing his presence in the Holiest of all, and the people represented
by the Levitical priests and sacrifices, was really a type of
the perfect reconciliation of God with the New Testament Israel,
that divine community into which all nations of the earth were to
be received, in order to be blessed in it ; but the one was a type of
the other, just because, in the former, there was only an imperfect
fulfilment of what was perfectly fulfilled in the latter. The supposed
" allegorical interpretation" of the Old Testament in the
Epistle to the Hebrews, or, more correctly, the typology in this
Epistle, consists simply in the author's showing, that the types were
only types, i. e., in other words, that no prophecy found a perfect
fulfilment in the old covenant, that all fulfilments rather pointed
always again to a further future.
the
It was, for example, no arbitrary
allegorizing, but pure objective truth to say, that the state of separation
between God and the people under the old covenant, the
existence of two compartments in the tabernacle, a Holy of Holies
and a first tabernacle (npojTr] GKrivq,) the necessity of ever-repeated
sacrifices, pointed to a relation of man to God which was not yet
established. Tliis typology, however, we find also in Paul's writings.
When Paul, Gal. iv., sees in the two wives of Abraham and
their sons—of .whom the one was by nature the elder, and yet was
rejected, while the other, as the possessor of the promise of grace,
was the heir—a typical foreshadowing of the relation between the
natural posterity of Abraham, the legal, righteous, natural Israel, and
the New Testament Israel holding fast the promise, this is just such
a typology as we find in the Epistle to the Hebrews, nay, a bolder
instance of it. But the fact that such typologies occur seldom,