Still Letting My People Go - Jack R. Davidson

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of the Exodus passage to American slavery might be doubted by those who “don’t see how a demand made upon Pharaoh . . . more than four thousand years ago can have any bearing upon slaveholders at the present day.”127 He counters that if the passage was “recorded by the pen of inspiration” then it cannot be treated “merely as a historical fact.” In supporting this part of his argument, in addition to other passages, he cites Rom 15:4 and 1 Cor 10:11, passages that intimate an important connection between ancient Hebrews and Gentile Christians. The use of these particular texts indicate that Caruthers sees a typological origin for God’s demand upon American slaveholders. Because a continuing correspondence exists between the church and ancient Israel, God’s demand for the release of the Hebrews by Pharaoh must guide the evaluation of slavery for all time. Underneath Caruthers’s comprehension of the demand of the Exodus text for American slavery, there is a conviction about the coherence of Jewish and Gentile experience. God “never does anything in vain and the whole transaction in Egypt is fraught with the most important instruction.”128

      Typology is concerned with “ the fundamental analogy between different parts of the Bible” and “the consistent working of God” in the lives of people. It seeks to identify the correspondences and parallels in which the Old Testament illuminates the New Testament or vice-versa.129 Typology describes the correspondence between a type and its antitype as well as intensification or escalation in the latter.130 The type involves or exhibits certain aspects which can be found with heightened significance in the antitype. The exact nature of correspondence may be difficult to determine. It might be said that typology focuses on the metaphoric role or possibilities of an event, institution, or person, beyond the immediate historical setting to realms of correspondence or prefiguration.131

      Typology is distinguished from allegory by its reliance on factual or historical elements. Whereas it is permissible for allegory to derive spiritual truths from the slightest details or even the mere words of a text, typology must transmit, in some way, a similar meaning or structure of meaning. According to Leonard Goppelt allegory “goes its own way regardless of the literal interpretation” but typology “begins with the literal meaning.”132 Typology has a particular concern for understanding the Old Testament’s relationship to Christianity. Specifically, it is concerned with “an institution, historical event or person, ordained by God” which “effectively prefigures some truth connected with Christianity.”133 Most importantly perhaps, as Richard Hays has pointed out, typology “is before all else a trope, an act of imaginative correlation” and that “if one pole of the typological correlation annihilates the other, the metaphorical tension disappears, and the trope collapses.”134 Hays’s observation cautions against the minimizing or diminishing of the Old Testament that sometimes results from typology, the importance of which is especially seen below in the treatment of the Jubilee.

      As a central text for the typological relationship between ancient Israel and the Christian church, the passage cited by Caruthers from First Corinthians is especially significant. Paul calls the Gentile Corinthians “brothers” and refers to ancient Hebrews of Exodus as “our forefathers.” What is “a crucial rhetorical maneuver” for Paul, as he identifies his Corinthian readers as Israel’s descendants, is also further proof that he thinks of them not simply as Gentiles, but as now identified with Israel.135 The use of the terms “typoi” and “typikos” in 1 Cor 10:6 and 11, could be translated “examples” or “patterns” or “types.”136 The terms assert a correspondence between the nation of Israel along with their particular circumstances in the Old Testament, presumed the “literal” or “type,” and the Corinthians of the New Testament and their circumstances, the “spiritual” or “antitype.”137 The escape of the Hebrews through the Red Sea or Noah’s flood are also types that are fulfilled in the antitype of Christian baptism (1 Cor 10:1–2, 1 Pet 3:20–21). The relationship between the type and antitype may be by way of contrast, as in the case of Adam and Christ (Rom 5:12–21, 1 Cor 15:22), or a more exact comparison as in Christ on the cross and the “lifting up” of the bronze serpent in the wilderness (John 3:14).

      As mentioned above, it is difficult to determine the exact correspondence intended when passages indicate a typological relationship. The reader may only know that a typological connection exists because of the text’s claim. For example, John 3:14 does not tell the reader in what exact way Jesus is like the bronze serpent of Israel’s wilderness experience. Patrick Fairbairn speculates in The Typology of Scripture that the precise point of correspondence between the lifting up of the bronze serpent and Jesus on the cross is the deceptive appearance they share. A man suffering the death of a convicted criminal on the cross seems as unlikely a help to humanity in need of moral salvation as the image of a despised and poisonous snake to those bitten and in need of a cure.138

      Caruthers’s particular view of typology is not systematically set out as it was not his intention to write a theological treatise, but his comments on the use of Isa 61:1–2 in Luke’s Gospel provide an outline from which a reliable construction of his understanding is made possible. Because Caruthers’s application of the Exodus passage is guided by his typological understanding of the Old Testament, his explanation of Isa 61:1–2 (pp. 154–56) warrants special attention.

      In Luke 4:20 Jesus declares in the synagogue of Nazareth that Isa 61:1–2 is fulfilled by his appearance. The Isaiah text makes reference to Israel’s year of Jubilee, the fiftieth year of sabbatical cycles when land is returned to its original owner (Leviticus 25). The forgiveness of debt and the release of all enslaved is a necessary part of Jubilee’s program to equalize ownership of the land. In Luke’s gospel Jesus applies the words of the prophet to himself, proclaiming “liberty to the captives” thus magnifying the Jubilee beyond the limits of its historical meaning so that it encompasses his own life and work. Caruthers believes that like other “prophecies which related to the Christian age” the passage has “a progressive import and fulfillment.” The Jubilee’s “general release of all debts and obligations, of all bondmen and bondwomen and of all lands and possessions which had been alienated from the tribes and families to which they belonged,” had “ a much more important meaning.” Jesus’s application of the Jubilee year to his own coming “declared plainly enough that the Jubilee had a typical [typological] import.”139

      In contrast to his contemporaries and many modern commentators, Caruthers believes the Jubilee has meaning that continues to be both literal and spiritual. He calls these same categories “lower” and “higher.” Interestingly, he focuses attention on the continuing importance of the lower or literal level of the Jubilee’s meaning. Jesus’s application of the Isaiah text to himself indicates spiritual liberation from sin but also and equally important, a widening declaration of freedom for those in captivity. When Jesus “applied the prediction to himself he declared plainly enough that Jubilee had a typical import but that only gave it a much more important meaning without changing in any respect its literal significance.”140 For Caruthers, the Jubilee typologically foreshadows “spiritual” freedom for those who are captive to the power of sin, but not to the exclusion of its continuing literal meaning. Ongoing fulfillment requires an ongoing experience of liberty.

      To support his argument, Caruthers recalls the predictions that “the blind should see, that the deaf should speak and that the lame should walk” in the Messianic era, and that “during the personal ministry of Christ on earth, all the predictions . . . received both a literal and spiritual accomplishment.” The higher or spiritual sense continues to be fulfilled “every day and everywhere throughout Christendom, in the case of all who are brought out of the darkness of nature into the marvelous light of the gospel” but also “in the lower sense they are receiving a partial accomplishment by the skill of physicians and other friends of humanity.” For now, “by various contrivances the lame, the halt, the maimed are enabled to walk, the deaf, the dumb, and the blind are taught to read the Bible and to transact the usual business of life but,” Caruthers insists, “they are yet to receive a more literal and full accomplishment by higher attainments in medical skill and by the discovery of means which are yet unknown.”141 In the same manner, the literal implications of the Isaiah passage have already been fulfilled to a “very gratifying extent” but it “will yet have a universal fulfillment in its fullest extent of meaning.”142 A measure of contemporary corroboration of Caruthers’s view is found in Michael

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